Everything They Had

by David Halberstam

  It was becoming increasingly clear that their success was not a fluke. None of them was big: Gene White played center at five feet eleven, but he was smart and had the knack of making opposing centers do exactly what he wanted them to. In their junior year they were even better. In a typical small-town power struggle, Snort Grinstead had been fired. He had bought new uniforms without authorization; there was no money in the athletic budget for them. Snort offered to pay for the uniforms himself, but it was too late. He was let go, and Marvin Wood was hired.

  Wood was twenty-four, by his own description an Indiana farm boy who had grown up in a town of seven hundred, his background remarkably similar to that of his team. He had gone to Butler University and played there, and since high school he had known he wanted to teach and coach. Growing up in so small a town, he had few other role models. When he first came to Milan, he made $4,000 a year coaching and teaching; one summer he augmented that by $1,000, working as a night guard in the Seagram building in Lawrenceburg. He was a serious, religious man; if he suggested on occasion that his players go to church on Sunday, he meant it. The only time any of his players ever saw him lose his temper was when one of them cursed during a baseball game. That was the unpardonable sin. He had been told by his own high school coach that Milan had plenty of talent, and he was quickly impressed by his team’s ability. What struck him beyond their athletic skills, though, was their rare cohesiveness as a group. They were unusually close even for country boys. They seemed not so much teammates as brothers.

  Wood immediately installed the “Hinkle system,” developed by Tony Hinkle at Butler, a patterned, deliberate offense that suited the talents of these young, tough, disciplined players. The Hinkle system gave the team the ability to control the ball and thus the tempo of the game; it meant that a team of uniformly good shooters would always be able to get a good shot. This was critical, because playing against bigger, stronger players, they would almost surely be out-rebounded. In their junior year, wanting to slow down the pace of a game, Marvin Wood invented what he called his cat-and-mouse game (years later Dean Smith would name it the four-corner offense). Wood used it to bring other teams out of a zone; it fit his team perfectly.

  Wood thought he was lucky to be coaching in an environment like this. He had almost no disciplinary problems. He set curfews during the season, 10:00 P.M. during the week, midnight on the weekends. On New Year’s Eve he told them they could stay out until 1:00 A.M. He intended to check up on them. They had better, he added, set their watches to his. That night Bobby Plump and a friend went out on a double date, and on the way back to Plump’s house the car broke down with a flat tire. Nevertheless, Plump and his girl made it back to his house by 12:55. They were sitting in the car, in front of the house, when a car pulled up. In it was Marvin Wood. Plump’s watch showed 1:00. Wood’s watch showed 1:05. Wood’s watch won, and Plump did not dress for the next game. It all seemed, Plump thought thirty-two years later, much simpler then.

  In their junior year, the dream began. When Milan went to the sectional tournament, a local GM dealer named Chris Volz had the entire team driven there in Chevrolets. He had them driven to the regionals in Pontiacs; to the semifinals in Buicks; and to the finals in Cadillacs. When they won the first game of the regional tournament, that was important, for a Milan team had never before won in the regionals. It made them the best Milan team of all time. That year they lost in the semifinal round of the final tournament to South Bend Central, 56–37. Bobby Plump had nineteen points. That evening South Bend won the state title. Wood was so depressed by the defeat that he thought of leaving coaching, going back to graduate school because he wasn’t adequately prepared to coach his team. Instead he decided to stay on. The dream was in motion.

  As their senior season unfolded, the whole state began to watch, then hope, then finally believe. The turnouts were so big that Milan’s home games were moved to neighboring Versailles, where the gym could seat two thousand, twice as many as in Milan. Milan lost two games in the regular season. Everyone was confident now. Once again Volz supplied them with ascendingly expensive cars to drive to the tournaments. The critical game of the play-offs came in the regional final in Butler Fieldhouse against Crispus Attucks, an all-black school that had a very good team built around a young sophomore named Oscar Robertson.

  Wood, watching the sheer power of Attucks and the innate grace and skill of Robertson, hoped that the experience of his own seniors would be enough. Robertson was simply so beautiful a player and so extraordinary an athlete that in a year it would be too late. Oscar as a junior would be too strong for these country boys. Yet Wood was intrigued by the confidence of his team; though other teams were reluctant to play Attucks—a certain apprehension about playing bigger, stronger blacks—his own squad had no such fears. If anything, he sensed, the Attucks players were a little nervous about playing these country boys about whom so much had been written. The Milan dressing room was right next to the drinking fountain in Butler Fieldhouse, and before the game, one by one, the Attucks players all came by for a drink of water, but mostly, Wood thought, to stare and try to figure out who these boys were and what the source of their magic was. Wood told his team to get ahead, try to get a ten-point lead in the second half and then sit on the ball. Milan was able to do exactly that, largely by some very good and very patient shooting. As the game progressed, his team remained absolutely confident, and in the second half Attucks began to make mistakes under the pressure. Milan beat Attucks 65–52. (In that sense, Wood knew they were lucky in their timing. If these same teams met a year later, he was sure, there would be no doubt about the outcome.) Then Milan beat Terre Haute Gerstmeyer 60–48.

  That brought them to the final against Muncie Central. Central was the traditional state basketball power in those days. Milan went ahead early and took a 15–7 lead. It was awesome, Wood thought, to be in a field house that held almost fifteen thousand people, all of them, it seemed, cheering for his team. At the first time-out, Gene White, giving away six inches at center but still the smartest high school player Wood had ever seen, came over to the huddle. He was sure he could handle Muncie’s John Casterlow. “Coach,” he asked, “what do you want me to do with him? I can move him anywhere you want. I can take him in, I can take him out, or I can put him in the bleachers.” Confidence, Wood decided, was not going to be a problem that night.

  Then Wood sent his team into his cat-and-mouse offense. Usually that was designed not so much to slow the game down as to control its tempo. This time it backfired. Muncie used the delay to creep back into the game and tie the score, but Milan still took a 23–17 half-time lead. In the second half, though, Milan went dry and did not score a field goal; at the end of the third quarter the score was tied at 26. Wood then decided to stop the flow of the game completely. He would hold the ball until the very end, and only then in the closing minutes would he put it back in play. In those closing minutes, he was sure Milan’s experience and smarts would pay off. So at the beginning of the fourth quarter, his team now two points behind, Bobby Plump just stood at half court, holding the ball under one arm. He held it there for four minutes thirteen seconds. At one point in the middle of the stall Plump looked over at Wood. Wood was just looking down at his shoes. Then Milan put it in play, quickly tied the game at 28, and then again at 30. Then, with eighteen seconds left, Milan had the ball and a chance for the last shot. Marvin Wood called time out.

  It became the most famous shot in the history of Indiana basketball. There was no doubt who Milan wanted to take the last shot. It was Plump. He was their best player and particularly good under pressure. Plump, knowing that defenses were keying on him, would spend the early part of a game making sure that the other players got the ball and got it where they wanted it. Late in the game it was different. His quickness—that marvelous first step—put extra pressure on the defense. Gene White suggested that the other players clear out an area for Plump to drive in. Everyone else would move to one side. The ball would go t
o Plump. He would hold it until there were five or six seconds left, and then he would drive for the basket. Depending on how tightly he was covered, he would either pull up and take a jumper or go all the way to the basket. In a one-on-one situation he was very good at driving around people. (He had, he later reminisced, been doing it all his life at Pierceville. Nobody was quick enough to stop him there, so nobody was quick enough to stop him here.) That meant a defensive man had to give him room.

  During the time out, Plump, sensing the crowd, and the noise and the tension, almost fifteen thousand people engulfed in their own madness, felt nervous for the first time. But the moment he stepped back on the court and the ball came to him, he felt oddly calm; all he had to do was play. Jimmy Barnes of Muncie Central was covering him, but Barnes had to play off him a bit because Plump was such a good foul shooter. With five seconds left, Plump started his drive, realized that Barnes was not going to let him go to the basket, pulled up, and with three seconds left took a fifteen-foot jumper. He knew instantly that the shot was true. The ball went in. Little Milan, with a total enrollment of 161, and only seventy-three boys in the entire school, had just lived the dream. People in Indiana had been waiting for it to happen for years, and they have been waiting for it to happen again ever since.

  With that, the madness erupted. No one, as Wilt Chamberlain once noted, roots for Goliath. This was David’s day. The parade route through Indianapolis was jammed. The crowd for the ceremonies back home in Milan was so great that the police and firemen from all the surrounding towns had to be summoned to help keep order. As many as thirty thousand people showed up. Some had to park nineteen miles away and walk to the town because the traffic jams were so great. For years to come, people would drive thirty, forty, and fifty miles out of their way to go through Milan, like pilgrims to Lourdes, to see if they could figure out what had occurred and why it had happened, and what had made this town different.

  For the players, the season changed all of their lives. Where before very few people from Milan went on to college, the entire team now had a chance, and almost all of them went. As going to college, once unthinkable, became possible for them, so it became a possibility for other Milan kids as well. The team became famous, particularly Plump, who received letters addressed simply “Plump, Indiana.” Plump went to Butler, where he had a very successful career, setting single-game and career scoring records before going on to play with the Phillips 66 Oilers of the National Industrial Basketball League.

  Bobby Plump is forty-eight years old now, and it is thirty-one years since he took the ball with five seconds left and drove to the basket. But that season and that shot still mark him. It is a basic part of his identity. People still think of it (and where they were when he made it) when they see him. When his children, who are grown now, are in distant cities, someone will on occasion recognize the name and ask if they are by chance related to the boy who made the shot that won the state title for that little school back in Indiana. Thrust into the limelight, Plump learned over a long, painful period how to deal with it, how to give a short speech at a banquet. This most rural of boys who had always been so quiet, in part because he felt a little poorer than everyone else, grew in confidence; there was nothing they had, he gradually learned, that he did not have, and indeed he had something they did not have. Eventually he became a very successful insurance agent.

  Over the years people have waited for it to happen again. It is harder now. The world has changed. The state has undergone a major reorganization and consolidation of its school districts (there was fierce opposition to the consolidation, not because it meant lesser education for the young people of Indiana but because it diluted precisely the kind of loyalties and identities that Milan represented). Some of the consolidated schools now have names like Southeast Central. The kids do not know one another as the kids in Milan once did; they are not as likely, in Marvin Wood’s phrase, to be like brothers. The game has changed as well. The next year Oscar Robertson took his Attucks team to the championship. His team beat an all-black team from Gary. “Watch our colored boys beat the hell out of those Gary niggers,” went the joke in white Indianapolis. Robertson’s team repeated in 1956. Gradually, with the coming of teams like Attucks, the nature of the game had changed. The players were bigger, stronger, and faster, and they played above the rim. In the past, when the Milans of the world had conjured up big city schools, they had thought of schools with larger enrollments but the same kinds of kids. Now they had to envision bigger schools with bigger, stronger players.

  It was harder now for the rural game to beat the city game. One moment brings it home: In the 1956 championship game, the second one for Robertson’s team, Attucks played Lafayette Jefferson. Lafayette was a very good team of the old order, not unlike Milan; it played intelligent, controlled, careful basketball. Its players were good shooters. They shot their free throws underhand. In the championship game they did everything right. But it made no difference. Attucks was playing in the air. Blacks, according to the myth then, were supposed to come apart under pressure, but Robertson played like a professional—cool, methodical, almost flawless. If he was double-teamed, he always found an open man. If he was played tightly on defense, he deftly faked and drove to the basket. All that raw talent at Attucks had suddenly been disciplined. It was like having an old man in a young body running a team. That night Robertson scored thirty-nine points. The old order had ended.

  For Attucks, the hardest thing at first had been getting games. Until 1943, when the black schools were allowed into the Indiana High School Athletic Association, Attucks’s teams could play only other black schools and had to go out of state to get enough games. Even when Attucks was finally a member of the association, the big powerhouse schools were wary of playing them, for there was nothing to be gained and a great deal to be lost. So in the beginning only smaller schools anxious to fill their gyms had been willing to schedule them. Nothing had been easy.

  If Attucks played on the road, the team had a hard time finding places to eat. Attucks was so poor a school that it did not have a real gym; in desperation, it played most of its home games at Butler Fieldhouse. In those early days, as the team traveled through rural Indiana, the crowds were often hostile. The opposing players themselves were fairly well behaved; an odd kind of basketball etiquette raised sport above native prejudice. If anything, the bias showed more in the referees. It may not have been deliberate, but it was there. Close calls always went the other way, particularly if Attucks was ahead, which it usually was. Coach Ray Crowe told his players that the referees were worth ten points for the other teams, therefore they had to be that much more disciplined and had to work to get a sizable lead. Otherwise, the game would go the other way in the last few minutes. “If you have a big enough lead,” he would tell them, “they’ll leave you alone. Otherwise they’ll referee the score and you won’t win.” He drilled them, as Branch Rickey had drilled Jackie Robinson, to be disciplined, not to respond to provocation, not to hear racial epithets, of which he thought there were surprisingly few. Talent was not a problem. All the Attucks players came from the “Dust Bowl,” the playground nearby, where black kids played day and night, staying on the court only if they won. Years later, Robertson said that playing against white teams had not been particularly hard; what had been hard was making the Attucks team. Basketball was already a focal point of black talent, the one thing that all black kids wanted to do, and the competition within the school to make the team was fierce.

  In a sense, Robertson thought, he was lucky in the way he grew up. His family was very stable. His father was a butcher. It was a disciplined life. The teachers at Attucks were first-rate. If anything, because there were so few outlets for educated middle-class blacks, they were overqualified. They were strong and sensitive men and women who in many ways could open doors for the children that the parents themselves could not. Crowe was shrewd and strong, Robertson thought. He emphasized to the players that in every game they would be on e
xhibit. At the same time he kept the dope dealers and the numbers men away from the school; his kids were going to have a chance to go to college if they could possibly make it. Some of them tended to slide away from classes; Crowe would have none of that. He was the homeroom teacher for most of them, and he posted their grades so that everyone could see who was not working. He also allowed Robertson to grow to stardom without feeling too much pressure. Robertson himself was beginning to realize that, in some way he had never understood before, he was special at this sport. He was growing taller, from six two to six four, and he could do things that other players could not. His game was never fancy. In fact, some people complained that it was almost machinelike, as free of mistakes as it was of excess. It was as if Oscar had taken the game and reduced it to its fundamentals. Slowly that came through to the fans.

  If any one player changed how basketball was perceived in Indiana, it was Oscar Robertson. Attucks’s winning a title might have meant a lot of talented but faceless black kids, but Oscar somehow stood out; he was doing what they had always done and admired, and doing it better. It was not possible to love basketball and not appreciate him. Where there might have been deep resentment, there was finally acceptance and admiration, and there was acceptance because there was not the possibility of denial. The Indiana fans were hip and they could understand, long before he went on to excel in both college and the pros, Oscar’s true greatness. When Attucks won their first championship, Robertson thought thirty years later, he had been too young to understand it. He had thought it was a game at first. Later he realized it was a piece of history. He remembered there was to be a parade through the downtown, and that thousands of people—black and white—turned out. The route was prescribed, and the officials had been very careful about seeing that it ended up in the northwest section of Indianapolis for the bonfire there; they did not want blacks getting out of control in other white sections of town.