One problem I have with this movie. Norman Dale was banned from coaching in the NCAA and New York State High Schools due to an incident when he coached at Ithaca College. Don't you think that once the Hickory Basketball team started to make headlines around the State of Indiana, someone in the media (even in the 1950's) would have brought that to light. Remember Myra was able to discover this secret with some simple research at a local library.
shareI think Myra was able to discover Norman's secret relatively easily because she was suspicious of him from the beginning, she sensed that he was hiding something, and she went looking for that information. The movie portrays her as being smarter and more resourceful than the average person.
Sports reporters across the state might not have seen any reason to dig into Norman's past. I'm not sure if it was very common in the 1950s for reporters to hunt down and write about background information, life stories, color commentary, and personal details of coaches and players. It's possible that high school basketball of that era just wasn't as much about information gathering as it is today. Without reading articles from that era, it's hard to guess how many personal details reporters used to write about. It's not necessarily completely believable that no reporter would have ever unearthed Norman's secret, but it's not necessarily completely unbelievable either.
A final possibility is that Hickory residents did at some point find out about Norman's past but decided to overlook it because he proved to be a winning coach. Or maybe some townspeople did pressure him to resign after the tournament. The movie never does say if Norman stayed in Hickory for more than one season.
In addition to being possibly the only resident of the town who had an advanced degree and presumably knew how to do research, Myra was the assistant principal of the school and, after Cletus got sick, the acting principal. She probably had access to Norman's resume and job application, which would have listed his employment history. So she had a head start on where to look for information about his background.
shareActually it's probably not too likely Norm would have had a complete resume on file the way people do today -- the fact he was a old college pal of Cletus, did have a teaching degree, and had an honorable discharge from the Navy would probably have been considered good enough for just about everybody.
But probably he did have a very simple resume which included the dates he had coached at Ithaca. He mentioned it at the season-opening meeting with all the townsfolk at the barber shop, he wasn't trying to keep it a secret.
And he knew many if not most of those guys were "out to get him," if he was really paranoid about the "secret" getting out, he would have said, "I coached service ball in the Navy during the war, and back east years ago before I joined the navy."
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4) You ever seen Superman $#$# his pants? Case closed.
I thought it was kind of suggested that the Coach would be moving on at the end of the year. He probably knew there was a good chance of his story being exposed with his team winning the championship.
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probably involved in rum smuggling.
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According to the timeline of the movie, Norman Dale slugged the player and got suspended in 1938 or 39.
College basketball was very minor stuff in 1938-39. It is possible newspapers in Indiana would not even have carried stories of college games (outside of Indiana) in the 1930s, and if they did it was probably on Page 4 of the sports section.
Today of course any coach who did anything like this would be splattered all over ESPN and YouTube within minutes, but in the 1930s it was simply not big stuff.
But yes, as soon as Hickory started winning (and certainly as soon as Norman Dale got a reputation as a hot-head getting thrown out of games), somebody somewhere would have looked it up, like Myra did.
The one ref said, "I'm putting you on file with the state association" -- that certainly would have set the alarm bells ringing.
I question whether he would have even gotten in much trouble for hitting a college player in the late 1930s. This was an era where corporal punishment was considered appropriate in public schools, regular college students had curfews and adults that chaperoned the dorms, and so on.
My guess if the coach had even a vaguely justifiable reason for slugging a player (any kind of insubordination with the vaguest hint of physically challenging the coach's authority), he would have gotten a complete pass on it. Even if it wasn't justifiable in any sense, authority figures had much more latitude back then and they might not have done anything with a successful coach unless he made hitting kids for no reason a regular part of his coaching.
The only reason I can see in 1938-9 for it costing him his job would have been if the kid he hit was from some kind of prominent and influential family who could influence the college administration.
But remember this sentence from the newspaper article Myra found regarding Coach Dale's firing: "This was the latest in a series of controversial incidents involving the successful though highly volatile coach."
shareWho's to say they didn't? And at that point in the story it would hardly be relevant to the plot anymore. They didn't show Coach Dale taking a dump either. Do you think he was constipated for 6 months?
sharemyra was a bit of a jerk about that.
His name...was Julio Iglesias!
myra was a bit of a jerk about that. []
she was a little bit loony.
The circulation of confidence is better than the circulation of money.-James Madison
Well it certainly would have been relevant to the plot if the Indiana High School Sports Association discovers Norman Dale has been banned from coaching and ordered him off the court.
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4) You ever seen Superman $#$# his pants? Case closed.
I think that in terms of the timeframe, a person wouldn't have had to go to great lengths to keep something like that hidden. The incident in Ithaca in 1939/40 would have made local news, but think about how isolated the towns and cities across the country still were in 1951/52, not to mention the technology available. (Or rather, the technology that was not available.) It would take some pretty serious digging to find that kind of dirt on someone more than a decade past, and you would have had to know some specific things about the person to even begin to know where to look. The fact that she found the newspaper article at all is in my opinion a small miracle.
I come from a small town in Nebraska, and even when I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, the town was pretty isolated - we had the Omaha World Herald newspaper and the evening news to keep us up to date on national and worldwide events, but otherwise the town kept to itself. As an example of this, one of my best friends moved away to another town after 4th grade and I lost touch with this kid almost entirely. He only moved to a neighboring town 19 miles away, but effectively he might just as well have moved to California for no more than I saw him after that.
My name is Gladiatorshare
The limited access to information in the '40's and '50's almost defies imagination by current standards. I don't even know if microfiche was around then, which is what I used in the '70's for research.
Basically, if you wanted to learn about other places, there were magazines like National Geographic. If you wanted information about a specific subject, hello librarian, where do you keep your Encyclopedia Britannica?
I agree with trickg1--Myra would have been a real Nancy Drew to dig that information up. : ) I doubt that was part of the "true story."
Some interesting responses to the original post. I didn't grow up in the US so I can't comment on how easy or difficult it would have been for people to uncover the "secret" and what they would have done had they known.
I think the key is that his ban was NY state-wide, which, of course, has no official application to him coaching in Indiana. The ban didn't apply so he was free to coach.
Would parents have been prepared to accept a coach with that background? It's my guess that, if they knew at the beginning, they would have stopped the principal from hiring him. If they had known at the town meeting it would have seen him sacked. In fact, when Myra got up to speak at the town meeting, and unfolded the piece of paper in front of her, I think Coach Dale thought that she was about to read to the meeting the same article she had read to him. He knew that would be the end if it.
And I think that had been her original intention. But she realised she believed in him, maybe because Jimmy did, maybe for other reasons. She decided to support him instead and keep the secret to herself.
Once the team were winning, I don't think the townspeople would have cared if they found out he was a convicted serial killer :-) They were winning!!
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Certainly after they win the state title in front of 'hundreds of reporters from all over the Midwest,' SOMEBODY is going to remember the details of Dale being suspended by the NCAA 12-13 years before and do a story on it.
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4) You ever seen Superman $#$# his pants? Case closed.
The NCAA wasn't the power in the 1930s that it is today. In the 1930s the NIT was the most prestigious college basketball tournament.
sharehis secret: he's allergic to the pick & roll. ξ
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Not sure a 15-year-old use of excessive force against a player in another state, with no video evidence (we can safely assume the attack in 1938 or 1939 wasn't taped/filmed) would have caused that much of a stir back then, especially if it's a winning coach like Dale proved to be. Bob Knight was treating his Indiana University players roughly as far back as the 1970s but his habits didn't bring him down until IU stopped being the consistent winner it had been ... and until video evidence from his practices became public.
shareIn 1938 or 1939 the assault might have been filmed, but it was definitely not taped.
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