Flak Magazine: Kick Out the Sports! 02.16.04

Hearing that the 1954 Milan-Muncie Central championship game will be on TV is like finding out someone is going to air footage of fabled cowboy Pecos Bill riding a tornado. That's because the game known as the Milan Miracle has passed through the realm of mere sports and become American folklore.

Basketball fans around the country know the story of how a team of farm boys drawn from a school with only 73 males won Indiana's storied single-class high school basketball tourney, slaying bigger and better teams along the way. (One of those teams featured future NBA Hall of Famer Oscar Robertson.) And how hero Bobby Plump — now there's a great folklore name — hung onto the ball for as long as four minutes at a time, including just before he put up the last-second, game-winning shot.

Milan's story, like any great folktale, has been recounted by many but witnessed by few. It's safe to assume a good number of the 15,000 fans who watched the game at Butler University's fieldhouse — not to mention whatever fans who could pick up the game on TV in 1954 — have passed on by now.

The closest most fans have come to seeing that game is the movie Hoosiers, starring Gene Hackman as the coach of Hickory High, a fictional state champ loosely based on Milan. In fact, Saturday will be the first airing of the Milan-Muncie Central championship game since the day it was played. Thanks to ESPN Classic, viewers will actually get to see how things happened. The game, which will air at 6 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. Eastern time Saturday, might answer such questions as, "When Plump was standing there for four minutes at a time, how come no one from Muncie Central tried to take the ball out of his hands?"

Surely most people love a good underdog story, and Milan qualifies, even though that same team made the state semifinals the year before. But love for the little guy doesn't explain why Milan's story has endured for 50 years, growing in stature to become the Paul Bunyan of schoolboy sports. Sports Illustrated, for one, named Milan one of its 20 favorite teams of the 20th Century.

For a team to resonate at this level for this long, its triumph has to have a symbolic meaning beyond sport, like the US Olympic hockey team's 1980 gold medal, currently being celebrated in the movie Miracle. It could be said that Milan represents the triumph of the small-town way of life, and perhaps the pull-up-your-bootstraps ideal — that no matter where you're from and what disadvantages you have, if you work hard, you'll succeed.

That sounds corny, but the social context surrounding Milan's victory gives those feelings a meaning that may not be as readily apparent, or believable, today. For schools, 1954 was a tumultuous year. It was the year of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that struck down school segregation. For schools like Milan, the issue wasn't segregating themselves by race — even if, as Plump told the Indianapolis Star recently, some white fans slung racial epithets at black players during Milan's run — but segregating themselves from schools down the road.

The whole nation was in the middle of a period of massive school consolidation, driven by an industrial ideal that bigger was better. The number of school districts fell from 119,000 in 1939 to 16,000 in 1975 — a loss of 13 percent a year for 36 years.

Some rural areas saw the loss of their school as a death sentence for their town and their own identity. They took extreme steps to ensure consolidation didn't happen. From 1950 to 1952, the 150 people of Onward, Ind., kept a wildcat school alive, using the best students as teachers and keeping 24-hour sentry guard over the building, rather than give in to consolidation. Nonetheless, Indiana set state school standards in 1959 that effectively forced rapid consolidation.

There were 751 high schools when Milan won the state championship. There are 383 expected in this year's Indiana tournament. Milan still exists, but seven of the nine schools it beat in the tournament do not. Indiana doesn't even have a single-class tournament anymore. In 1998, at the urging of small-school principals tired of their schools getting pounded, Indiana split its basketball tournament into four classes. After Milan, the smallest school to have won the state title was Plymouth, featuring Chicago Bulls coach Scott Skiles, in 1982. Plymouth's enrollment at the time was more than five times greater than Milan's in 1954. The small-town ideal, it seemed, didn't meet reality, in basketball or in real life.

Hence the folktale aspect of Milan's victory. A small-town team, beating bigger and better schools to win a title? It seems as far-fetched as Pecos Bill riding a tornado. And now that Indiana no longer has a storied, single-class tournament, it's just as unlikely to happen again.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.