It seems like a silly thing to forget that life is not a movie — I mean, I'm in my early 30s. I had a friend commit suicide as a teenager. I should know better. I decided to track down the rest of the Hoosiers-turned-Hoosiers to find out more about their real lives, and to hear why they think Poole did what he did.

Making the calls

The first cast member I found was Wade Schenck, aka Ollie. Schenck, in a way, had the toughest acting role — he had to pretend he stunk at basketball. At the time of filming, Schenck had just come off his junior year at tiny L&M High (Schenck's graduating class had 22 students) in southern Indiana. He was the sixth man on a team that featured two Big Ten recruits — Tony Patterson of Purdue and Jeff Oliphant of Indiana. At one point during filming, Schenck skipped out to go back home to watch his team play. A crew member called his mother to track him down and get him back to the set — a set that included his sister Libbey, who played a Hickory cheerleader. "I wanted to leave," Schenck told me. "I didn't want to shoot the film…I was a little homesick."

I called Schenck at work. He's the manager of the Indianapolis location for Mittler, a company that sells industrial gases and welding supplies. Schenck, who divorced about four years ago, lives on his family's farm outside of Pittsboro, NASCAR hero Jeff Gordon's hometown, and has a 16-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter. Schenck doesn't mind talking about Hoosiers, but said he doesn't go out of his way to bring it up. It reflects the ambivalent feelings he has about the movie.

On the one hand, Schenck said if he knew the impact the movie would have, he probably wouldn't have tried out in the first place. "I thought it was just going to be put" in the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame, Schenck said. "I had no idea how big Gene Hackman was." On the other hand, Schenck said that when he plays around-the-world with his teenage son, the final shot has to be an Ollie-style, underhanded free throw. "Of course, I always win," Schenck said.

After the film's release, Schenck saw Poole and other castmates from time to time, especially in the first few years after the movie when they were in demand for commercials and public events. Schenck said he lost regular contact with Poole, who only lived 20 minutes away, but it was his impression over the years that "the film affected him more, coming down from that high, than the rest of us. I don't know why. I can't explain it." Poole took one more shot at acting, appearing as Molly Ringwald's boyfriend in the 1988 movie Fresh Horses, directed by Hoosiers director David Anspaugh.

Schenck stood in line for an hour at Poole's calling, which attracted hundreds of people. They weren't all Hoosiers fans. "It was more people in his community," Schenck said. "He coached a girls team there." He ran into fellow castmate Scott Summers, who played Strap Purl, the extremely religious team member. But Schenck didn't make it all the way up to the front of the line. When I talked to him last fall, he was still angry at Poole for what he had done.

"I have never approved of someone committing suicide — that's why I didn't feel bad about staying around," Schenck said. "It's not right. Everybody has problems. I've been divorced three years. I don't go for that [explanation of depression]. I've been through depression. There's a lot of people in worse situations. He's got three young kids. I'm upset with him.

"It's kind of weird. Even though we didn't keep in touch, it was like losing a family member."

A dentist's dreams

The next cast member I found was Steve Hollar, better known as Rade Butcher. He's the one who got benched, even though the team had only five members available, because he ignored Coach Dale's four-passes-before-you-shoot dictum. Later, he bonded with his coach by punching out an opponent who got in his coach's face. His line: "I got him good, didn't I, coach!"

These days, Hollar, 38, is drilling teeth, not jumpers. He's a dentist working with his father and another partner a few blocks from his old school in Warsaw, Ind. His hometown remembers him not for Hoosiers, but for sinking the game-clinching free throws in 1984 to give Warsaw Community High its lone state championship. "I would tell you with a grin on my face that I wouldn't have come back to my hometown to be a dentist if I had missed those free throws."

For a short time, Hollar said, most every Husker had fleeting dreams of movie stardom. Their acting confidence grew enough that the Huskers even improvised a scene. After the game in which Hollar's character is benched, the script called for Hackman to give a speech in the locker room, then leave. But the cameras were left rolling, and the players started barking at each other. The scene ends with Rade telling someone to "shut up," and Merle responding, "No, you shut up."

"We would all sit with Gene Hackman, all asking, should we go to Hollywood?" Hollar said. "Hackman looked us all in the eye and said, 'You did a great job, but there are only so many Michael Jordans.'"

Despite being disabused of any acting aspirations, Hollar had another chance to be in the movies — he had a part in John Sayles' adaptation of Eight Men Out, the Elliot Asinof novel about the 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal. It was being filmed in Indianapolis, but Hollar turned it down because he didn't want to take six months off from dental school. Hollar, like most of the cast, had signed on with an Indianapolis agency to do some commercial and appearance work, which he said "was a nice, supplemental way to pay for dental school." Even if they couldn't go Hollywood, the Huskers could at least go Indianapolis.

"Opening night [in Indianapolis], David Anspaugh pulled us aside that night — we hadn't seen the completely edited film — and said to us, 'I don't know if you know it yet, but this movie is going to change your life,'" Hollar said. "Boy, was he right."

Maybe it's because, even at 38, he still looks like Rade. Hollar said he "can't go on vacation anywhere without being recognized." He is still making public appearances as Rade, too. Last Labor Day, he appeared at a parade in Auburn, Ind., associated with the town's famed classic car auction and festival. Hollar said the last time he talked to Poole, about six months before his suicide, the conversation began with discussion of a publicity event in Warsaw that eventually fell through.

Hollar said he's not sure, as Schenck maintained, that Poole seemed any more star-struck than other cast members. But Hollar said he got the sense that Poole connected with his character on a deeper level than anyone else did. In 1982, Poole led his small school, Western Boone, to the semi-state round — the round before the final four — but his team lost 38-36 to eventual state runner-up Gary Roosevelt.

"He really connected with his character Merle in the sense that his line — 'Let's win this one for all the small schools that never had a chance to get here' — is the line people identify him with. He almost put Western Boone there in real life," Hollar said. "He grew up being that underdog. He really believed that role.

"Kent Poole more than anything would have wanted to win a state championship. I was lucky enough to sink the game-winning free throws to win a real state championship. You've got to ask yourself, it's a fictional movie, but was that Kent Poole's state championship?"

Hollar and his wife saw Poole and his wife on a semi-regular basis. "He had some struggles, and we did talk to that," Hollar said. "In some ways, I don't want to speculate, but you wonder, was he able to move on [from Hoosiers]? It would be easy to be stuck in those days."

The Hollars were on a business trip to Florida and couldn't make it back in time for Poole's calling. "If you want to think about, isn't it sometimes, busy is better? Think about when Kent died. Was it harvest? No. If depression is a factor, it's a time where he had time to think. Maybe more time than he should have.

"What do you say? It's a tough one. If he were here, I'd like to give him a swift punch in the arm. You want to be angry. The poor man is not here anymore, and I'm angry."

Poole's closest friend

Next I talked to Brad Long, who played Buddy Walker. He was the one who walked out, calling on his teammates to "blow this Popsicle stand," when Coach Dale upbraided him at the first practice. He also was noted for magically showing up on the team again without explanation. The scene where "I eat crow and say I'd like another chance" got cut, Long said. You would only know this if you knew 1950s basketball, but Buddy was the Huskers' captain — you can tell because he was the only one who talked to the ref, as was the custom then. In a way, Long is still the Huskers' captain. Any phone number or e-mail address I couldn't find for a Husker, Long was able to give me.

Everyone I talked to acknowledged that Long was the closest to Poole. They met at an audition featuring the final 14 Husker candidates, which was whittled to seven. Hundreds had tried out, and most were weeded out through dribbling, shooting and defensive drills. The final 14 met at a Ramada Inn on Indianapolis' west side to read lines and do improvisation work together. "We hit it off right away," Long said. "We had a lot in common because we were the old men." At the time, Poole was 22 and Long was 23. Long had completed his collegiate career at Southwestern College in Kansas and had taken a sales job with Jostens, a company that makes class rings, prints yearbooks and produces other high school memory-makers. Using his Jostens connections, Long had gotten "1951-52 Hickory state champion" rings for the cast.

Long and Poole ended up being roommates at the Ramada where the Huskers stayed. (Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey and Dennis Hopper got rooms at the swank Canterbury Hotel, later made infamous in the Mike Tyson rape case.) "It was all kind of a big dream," Long said. "We'd play cards with Dennis Hopper, and I had to watch because I don't play euchre. The guys teased me — 'How can you call yourself a Hoosier?'" Gene Hackman, Long said, was a bit more insistent at first at having the movie focus on the name stars, not the basketball action. "But Gene gave in." Eventually, Hackman became one of the crowd. "We did one prank on Gene Hackman. I had the guys tell him to ask me about my mom's dancing lessons. And then I said, 'That's not funny! My mom's legs got cut off in an accident!' And he got this sick look on his face."

Unlike the other players, who said Poole was a good guy but difficult to get to know, Long said Poole was a good guy and a people person. However, he does back up other Huskers in saying Poole was the most intense on the set. "He was always a perfectionist," Long said. "One time, he was sick filming a big scene. It was the scene where Jimmy says he's coming back to the team and we're all standing in the foyer of the church [where the town is meeting to vote on firing Coach Dale]. He had a big fever that night, and even the movie people were saying, 'You don't need to do it.' But he did. He wasn't too hard on himself, but he just wanted to do things the right way."

Long and Poole both got married in 1986, Poole in June and Long in December — "We had set the wedding for November 30, but the movie folks said we've got a problem on the 30th. That's the premiere." They kept in close touch over the years, even working together for a while in a home-based, multilevel marketing sales business called New Skin. But like a lot of guys, Long and Poole talked, but not necessarily about deep, personal issues.

"I never knew there were any problems," Long said. Shortly before Poole's suicide, "we probably talked for three minutes. He was in a hurry, he was leaving when I caught him. He mentioned divorce at the end of the conversation. I felt sick to my stomach.

"The thing that saddens me is I wish I would have known he was getting to this level of desperation. The way we left it, he was going to call me. He didn't, and I didn't [call him back]."

Long's minister at Greenwood Christian Church, south of Indianapolis and north of Long's home in Whiteland, called him to tell him about Poole's death the morning after it happened. Long, again in his role as captain, called his fellow players as well as Anspaugh.

Long went to Poole's calling and waited two hours in line to get up to the front. Near the casket was the Huskers team picture, a small copy of the one hanging in the Knightstown gym.

"I don't think it's fair to be angry with him because I don't know what his state of mind was," Long said. "I don't think anyone can judge the heart of man, except for God. I suppose there's some anger there because of the situation and the waste of a life. [The 1,300 people at his showing] was a tribute to all the people he knew and touched. Here's a guy that had so many things going for him."

Keeping their distance

At this point, I struggled trying to contact other old Huskers.

I traded e-mails with the wife of Maris Valainis, who played Jimmy Chitwood, the team's star player. Over the course of a few months in the fall, she relayed that he got my messages, but that her husband, a golf pro in southern California, was busy caddying for pro golfers. We never did get in touch.

Valainis was an all-state golfer for Indianapolis' Bishop Chatard High. Amazingly – given that the film required him to take shots and actually make them, rather than rely on cut-aways to balls going through hoops – Valainis did not play high school ball. After Hoosiers, he made a serious run at acting, taking a few roles, most notably opposite Ollie-sized Michael J. Fox in 1989's Casualties of War, before going back to golf.

The other player I couldn't hook up with was Summers, who played the ultra-religious Strap. He's living in Indianapolis, and Schenk said he's working as a contractor. Summers' wife told me he wasn't sure he wanted to talk, especially about Poole, "because he didn't know him all that well."

Brad Boyle, who played Whit Butcher, Rade's brother, also took a while to contact, but I finally reached him in February. Boyle, a physician's assistant, had been particularly busy with the 76th Brigade of the Indiana National Guard. As a medical officer in a support medical unit, he was involved in checking out soldiers before they were shipped overseas, including Iraq. In the last year, he moved with his wife and two small boys from Bloomington, Ind., to his native Decatur, Ind., near Fort Wayne. "I've got small kids here, but I'm committed to my unit," Boyle said. "If I'm called, I'll go."

Boyle was in the National Guard at the time he auditioned for Hoosiers. Like other cast members, Boyle describes trying out as something that sounded fun, though he didn't realize what it would lead to. In 1984, Boyle helped lead Decatur's Bellmont High to the state regionals, as far as they had gotten in years. But Boyle figures he got noticed more because he showed up the day after his final day of basic training. "I looked the part," Boyle said. "I already had the butch haircut."

Whit was one of the lesser-known characters in the movie. Boyle's big scene came early in the film, when his father forces him to apologize to Coach Dale for walking out of practice with Buddy. Unlike Hollar, Boyle is not recognized wherever he goes. In fact, he was barely recognized in Indiana after the movie came out. When Boyle was at Ball State after Hoosiers' release, a professor announced excitedly that a cast member from the movie would be addressing the class – and Brad Long entered the room.

"People called me a liar when I said was in the movie," Boyle said. "I never did get recognized. If someone said, 'I know you, you were in the movie,' a friend set them up to say that.

"It's fine. I'd prefer it. Acting is not something I ever tried to do or worked at. Once I was in it, it was kind of like given to me. When I got it, I didn't feel like I deserved to be recognized."

Boyle said he didn't know Poole that well, and couldn't say whether he was any more affected by his Hoosiers-related fame than anybody else. But Boyle, even though he said he's not one to court fame, understands the desire. "Once you've had a taste of it, you can't get it out of your mind."

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