I cant believe that basketball was so popular amongst the old generation in a white midwest farming town. Wouldnt baseball and especially football be more popular? How were these sports viewed compared to basketball back then? Im sure you would have never have seen a small Texan town that would follow basketball like this.
shareI was born in 1950 and grew up in central Illinois. For my family and friends, the weekend of the state basketball tournament was a festival far more important than the later Superbowl Sunday. Friday and Saturday were all about basketball until the mid-60s when the Chicago teams began to dominate and then the later division into classes.
It was always fantastic to see some little downstate team win, like Cobden (not much bigger than Milan) and Collinsville (small, but bigger than Cobden) fielding championship teams.
There was an NFL doc about Peyton Manning and the Colts. Manning himself said that when he came to the team in '99 football was definitely the #2 sport in Indiana, way behind basketball, and that most Indiana people could have cared less about the Colt. (Not completely true, but the Pacers had some good teams in the late '90s and most in-state sports fans were more aware of that than of the Colts being bad.) Even today it's more about the Indiana Hoosiers being #1 than about the states Big 10 football teams sucking.
Yah, basketball was probably a lot more important in the 50s-70s than football, and yes grown men were very much behind their local teams.
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I grieved I had no shirt until I met a woman who had no pants.
I've read that Illinois had a basketball story similar to Indiana's 1954 Milan Indians, who inspired Hoosiers. In 1952, Alden-Hebron High School, enrollment 98, defeated Quincy High School, enrollment 1,035, 64–59 in overtime to win Illinois' one-class state tournament.
shareYes, you read right. Hebron Green Giants, Led by the Judson brothers, Phil and Paul, and a kid named Wildebrandt. My dad's grade school team used to beat their grade school team. But my dad's team was divided by district borders when they went to high school so the team was split up. Kid who played hoops in the 50s had a sweet jump shot. When I used to play against my dad in the driveway he would still light the rim up when he was in his late 30s.
Phil Judson went on to coach high school at Zion-Benton and his son Rob played at Illinois and coached high school for about 10 years. He eventually worked his way up to head coach at NIU and currently is an asst coach at IL St. Great basketball family.
Love's turned to lust and blood's turned to dust in my heart.
it was indiana where basketball is life, yes even with the old folks.
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To the OP, you can't go by the NBA. NBA basketball has been hijacked by the "ballers". Ballin' is fine for the playground but it stinks as a professional sport. No fundamentals at all, just shoot, shoot, dunk. That said, one thing that is a constant when it comes to every school with a sports program. Not all have a football program but all have a basketball program. Also, as was said, in a lot of places the high school basketball team is all they have and they're rabid for it. It's really not that unusual and not only in rural America.
sharehoops is still big in indy. i know when my uncle recently retired & got a place in southern indiana & was rehabbing the place, they had people coming up & asking him about getting a new basketball hoop installed. 3-4 contractors! instead of you know, like a pool, or a new roof, etc. like you'd find in other parts of the country.
Aloha, Mr. Hand.
Sure, older people come out to the basketball games. I went to high school in Kentucky, and we had a huge gym that seated like 6000 people for a school that only had 1200 students, and we could fill that sucker up for our home games. Everybody and their mother and their grandmother and their great-grandmother went to the basketball games because there wasn't much else to do. We definitely got better attendance for basketball games then for football games though we had good attendance for football too. And I think alot of elderly people prefer watching basketball games as opposed to football games because it can get quite cold at the football games whereas the basketball games are indoors. Our high school band was also freakin' huge because again nothing to do so if your weren't in sports you were in band. Our band had well over 200 people in it and took all the best trips.
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