As a former high school assistant football coach for 17 years, New Year's Day has always been associated with football. As an avid Oklahoma fan during the Switzer era I can fondly remember many a New Year's night glued to the TV watching my beloved Sooners in the Orange Bowl! I even saw OU win the national championship at the Orange Bowl down in Miami in 1986!
Perhaps feeling my mortality and reflecting on my Hoosier school days I made a New Year's Day pilgrimage to THE WOODEN CATHEDRAL down in Indianapolis at Butler University.
I attended a college basketball game at Butler University in Hinkle Fieldhouse, and it brought back all those memories of the halcyon years of the Indiana High School basketball tournament in the Hoosier state.
Hinkle Fieldhouse is a NATIONAL HISTORIC LANDMARK. It was built in 1928 with 880,000 bricks and as you enter the fieldhouse you feel the history of this grand dame of Indiana basketball. It hosted the storied Indiana High School basketball tournament from 1928 through 1971(except for three years during WW II when it was used as a barracks), and if you saw the movie, Hoosiers, you have seen Hinkle Fieldhouse!
As I watched Butler and Valparaiso warm up in Hinkle before the game the fieldhouse reminded me of Indiana's love affair with basketball. The New York Times and USA Today have written articles how Indiana has 14 of the 15 largest high school gyms in the world. Butler's Hinkle Fieldhouse had the largest seating capacity(15,000) of any gym in the U.S. through 1950. With revised seating(11,000+) Hinkle Fieldhouse is not much larger than Indiana's top five high school gyms which are the largest in the world:
NEW CASTLE 9,325
ANDERSON High 8,996
EAST CHICAGO Cental 8,296
SEYMOUR 8,110
RICHMOND 8,100
Loogootee is a tiny school in southern Indiana and has a high school enrollment of just over 300 students yet it's gym seats over 4,500 people! Hoosiers take their basketball seriously.
Over 41,000 people watched the final game of the Indiana high school state basketball tournament in 1990 in the Hoosier Dome.
Indiana changed its single class basketball tournament to class basketball fifteen years ago and things just aren't the same. Gone are the intense rivalries and local sectional games and all the excitement of the tournament. It was fun to see the Butler school spirit that so embodied the high tournament of the single class basketball of Indiana's past.
As I watched the game it brought back all those tournament memories of AVID fans, cheerleaders who CHEERED, and very few empty seats in the house. Butler showed why they were one shot away from being the NCAA champion last April in Indianapolis where Duke held on to win the title: relentless defense, disciplined passing and shot selection, and unselfish play.
The favorite part of my afternoon, surprisingly, was AFTER the game which the Butler Bulldogs had won. Why? LOOK AT THE PICTURE!
The Butler Athletic Department allowed kids, adults, would be Jimmy Chitwoods, in effect ANYONE, to come onto the fieldhouse floor and truly celebrate all that is Indiana basketball. I know for a fact that in just about any university in Indiana and most high schools the gym floor is sacrosanct and the parishoners are not allowed to worship on the hardwood of the wooden cathedrals before, during, or AFTER the game!
How wonderful to see boys and girls shooting hoops with their OWN basketballs after the game that the Butler officials generously allowed them to bring into Hinkle Fieldhouse. It was a celebration of basketball just like the tournament atmosphere I grew up in. Kids, Parents, Grandparents!
Not everyone in Indiana is a future basketball player. Can you guess what game the little girl (on the "U" in "BUTLER") was playing while her brother shot baskets? She was waiting patiently for about five minutes for three other sedentary children to vacate the space and she then proceeded to play a self improvised game of Hopscotch by herself! How creative and how wonderful for Butler University to allow the enthusiasm of youth! It was a joy to watch the spontaneity of play, picture taking by families of the Butler Bulldog in the center of the basketball court, and families enjoying the warm atmosphere of a steel, brick, and glass structure that many would view as an anachronism in the modern concrete jungle of new and bristling basketball arenas.
It was a fun and reflective day to celebrate a grand old house, a tournament atmosphere of childhood days gone by, and yet begin a new year recharged by the vitality of youth, the spirit of play, and the endless possibilities of what can be!
2011 is going to be a GREAT YEAR!
Life is good!
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