I have finally watched Hoosiers.

This was the movie, considering my love of the NCAA Tournament for so long (that fell off after COVID - I just stopped my obsessive bracket tracking cold turkey), that I was most embarrassed about not having seen all these years.

Not unlike Groundhog Day, it felt like Hoosiers was always on when I was growing up. Network television too. Or, at least, WPIX, whatever category that falls under.

And still I somehow managed not to see it.

I hinted at this in my Remember The Titans post - I was going to watch a basketball movie as the college basketball post-season was beginning to heat up - this was the movie I was alluding to.

I wrote that post a couple of weeks before it was posted, so you should also know I planned on doing this before Gene Hackman passed away. So that was a coincidence, but it served as a David Johansen-like tribute.

I was relieved to find Hoosiers available on our Amazon Prime - a lot of times I go searching for a movie I want to watch and with all of the subscriptions we have it’s still not available.

What can I say about Hoosiers that hasn’t been said for 40 years?

It was great.

I was surprised none of those players were recognizable actors or basketball players. Especially Jimmy Chitwood - I thought that guy would be played by someone who had basketball talent. (Turns out the actor didn’t even make his high school basketball team.)

I was also surprised, reading about the movie afterwards, that Hickory High isn’t even a real place. I guess I had heard the fact about Milan High School being the inspiration for the movie, but I didn’t know the actual place was fictional.

Here’s what else I didn’t know - I always hear about Gene Hackman in that movie, but I had no idea how good Dennis Hopper was in it! I was happy to read he got an Oscar nomination. I thought he was great.

I watched it last week - it was a nice way to kick off March Madness for me.

This is a great time of year for me - college basketball post-season tournaments lead into the NCAA Tournament and that takes us into baseball season. (I still get excited to watch the NCAA games…I just don’t fill out a bracket anymore.)

Perhaps in the future I’ll add Hoosiers into the March mix as a sign that baseball is right around the corner.