Everything They Had (24 page)

Even by Pierceville standards Plump, whose mother had died when he was five, was painfully quiet. “Bobby's so shy,” Gene White's mother once said, “that he won't even ask for a second piece of cake when he wants one.” It was as if he could only express himself through playing basketball. They all had baskets in back of their houses. Plump's was somewhat under ten feet, and the court was limited by a concrete back porch that extended into the court and cut down the potential range of their shots. Schroder's was better, ten feet even, with a level court, albeit filled with gravel, which made ball handling hard (though by working on gravel, they were better ball handlers when they finally put the ball on wood). They played every afternoon, and then at night they strung a 300-watt bulb on an extension cord along the house above the basket, tied it to a shovel handle, and used tin sheets to reflect the light down on the court. That allowed them to play until 10:00 during the fall and winter, and until midnight during the summer.

They had grown up together, playing basketball every day. When they were in junior high school they had a good team, and in the eighth grade they lost only one game. After that, people in the Milan coffee shops began to pay attention to them, asking questions about how the team was doing. They had arrived. In their sophomore year in high school they began to sense just how good they were. That year Herman “Snort” (so named for his temper) Grinstead was still coach. There was a moment that season when, angry over their indifferent play and an embarrassing 85–40 loss to neighboring Osgood, Snort kicked seven players off the team and played his sophomores. Eventually he would allow two of the best players back. With the sophomores playing, Milan had beaten some of its toughest rivals. Because of that, there was a sense in the town that they had something. All the players were good, they could all shoot, they could all handle the ball, and they were all unselfish with it. Everyone, particularly Plump, had exceptional speed.

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 to 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.