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Another shot at Hoosier glory for Milan
By Mike Lopresti, Special for USA TODAY
MILAN, Ind. — The water tower by the railroad tracks — remnant of a furniture factory that long ago closed — still announces the identity of a town with one blinking stoplight: "State champs. 1954."

The city of Milan, Ind. will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1954 state championship team that inspired the movie 'Hoosiers.'
via The Indianapolis Star

Fifty years later, needing a boost the way so many off-the-interstate places do, Milan (pronounced MI-len) hopes one more time to relive its moment as Cinderella in the fairy tale that led to the 1986 movie Hoosiers.

There is no pharmacy in Milan anymore. No theater. No dry cleaners. Most of the main-street businesses are gone. But there is the milk-and-cookies tale of its basketball team and the charm of the people here who cherish it. Time has not yet robbed Milan of that.

"We don't have much going for us in Milan, except basketball and the reputation of basketball," Daren Baker says, sitting behind a desk in the car dealership he owns. "We may not have a lot to talk about in the future. So we concentrate on the past."

This dot in southeastern Indiana — population then 1,150, now just under 2,000 — is arguably the most famous small town in high school sports history. Once upon a time, its bite-sized school of 161 students — 73 boys — won the celebrated Indiana basketball championship on a last-second shot.

In a hoops-happy state, that made Milan an Indiana landmark, even if one needed a good map to find it. More than 40,000 people came to town the next day.

The years went by, and the story faded. But then came the movie.

The script changed the town's name to Hickory, and most of the plot was fiction. But the essence of the story was the same.

So the mystique of Milan got a second wind and is drawing another one this year with the 50th anniversary. Included is a rematch Saturday of the two schools from the 1954 title game — Milan and Muncie Central — followed by a team reunion at the state finals in March and a celebration coinciding with Milan's sesquicentennial in July.

"People ask me if I ever get tired of talking about 1954," says Bobby Plump, an Indianapolis businessman and also the skinny, short-haired Milan guard who buried the winning jump shot. "I never have. I don't think I ever will."

Maybe that's because the echoes of 1954 go far beyond sports. The Milan players are men in their late 60s, and it is their lives that suggest the places one basketball game might lead.

Raising expectations

Milan was a typical rural town in the 1950s. Plump, raised in smaller Pierceville two miles west, did not even have a telephone.

But of the 12 varsity players that season, nine would graduate from college. Six went into coaching. The only one not still living — starting forward Ron Truitt, who died from cancer in 1988 — has a school named after him in Houston, following a long career in coaching and education.

"I think what 1954 did not just for myself but for all the players and all the students and the town is raise expectations a little bit," Plump says. "I think they assumed they could do things they assumed they couldn't do before."

By his count, 17 of his class of 30 went to college.

"It changed the direction of my life," says Ray Craft, Plump's running mate at guard and assistant commissioner of the Indiana High School Athletic Association.

"You couldn't find better representatives of the state of Indiana than those boys," says Roselyn McKittrick, 69, who operates an antique store in Milan, with part of it a museum dedicated to 1954.

If there is a battle to keep the memory of 1954 alive, and possibly useful in some sort of Milan economic rebirth, then McKittrick is General Patton.

She is rallying support to expand the museum, organizing ways to mark the occasion, marching to any class or council meeting to make the case to the young generation of Milan the importance of one moment in time.

"What we're trying to do is start from the elementary level on up," she says. "I tell them, 'Your town is known statewide. And we're responsible for that name. We have to live up to its reputation. If you could meet those 12 men, you'd love this story because they have never outgrown Milan.'

"It's always home here."

Home could use a little help. The population has grown, and the citizens talk of the quality of the community's schools and its heart — more than $6,000 was quickly raised last month to help a local cancer victim. But the jobs and the commerce are mostly somewhere else.

"People like to live here," Baker says. "But you wouldn't know it by looking at it."

The latest casualty? "Closed until doctor's release" the sign says on the door of Nichols' Barber Shop — a 1950s gathering spot — just down Carr Street from McKittrick's antique store. But the word is that the owner, Chet Nichols, might never be back.

Maybe, McKittrick and her allies hope, the 50th anniversary can be a kick-start for a town whose name still rings bells with strangers in Indiana, and beyond.

The curious still stop by on a regular basis. Milan High School athletics director Marty Layden says hardly a week passes that an intrigued out-of-towner does not ask to look around.

The former high school gym is long gone, but in the lobby of the current gym is the old scoreboard with the score 32-30 — the 1954 final — permanently in lights. The championship trophy, about three feet high with a wood base topped by a figure of a basketball player, is in its own case. And at center circle of the gym floor are the words, "Heart of Hoosier Hysteria."

Plump envisions a downtown given over to nostalgia. A soda fountain and old-time theater and restaurant. Plus the 1954 museum.

"That was such an easy time to grow up," Plump says. "Nobody had any money, but it didn't make any difference. There weren't many worries, and I think people long for that."

Catching up with players from Milan's title team

Bobby Plump, 67, hit the last-second jump shot to give Milan the 1954 Indiana state championship, just as the Jimmy Chitwood character did for Hickory in 1952 in the movie Hoosiers. Plump's still shooting, more than a decade after heart bypass surgery, even if it is in an over-50 league.

Still involved in insurance and financial planning and owner of an Indianapolis restaurant — Plump's Last Shot — he is the most visible and famous of all the 1954 Milan Indians.


The shot changed his life, and those of his teammates, who have a reunion every year.


The other men of Milan:


Ray Craft, starting guard — Assistant commissioner of the Indiana State High School Athletic Association, Shelbyville. Craft was the leading scorer in the state championship game. "I think all of us are amazed it's still what it is," Craft says.


Gene White, starting center at 5-11 — Retired educator, Franklin, Ind. His mother, who sold her chickens so she could go to the 1954 state finals, recently died.


Ron Truitt, starting forward — Died of cancer in 1988 in Texas. A longtime educator, he has a Houston area junior high school named after him.


Bob Engel, starting forward — Retired from General Motors, Kalamazoo, Mich.


Glen Butte — Retired educator/coach, Batesville, Ind., same county as Milan.


Rollin Cutter - Retired educator/coach, Noblesville, Ind., near Indianapolis.


Ken Delap — Retired from manufacturing, Sunman, Ind., not far from Milan.


Bill Jordan — Actor, Los Angeles.


Roger Schroder - Retired teacher/coach, Indianapolis.


Ken Wendelman — Retired from construction company, Versailles, Ind., same county as Milan.


Bob Wichman - Retired seed company executive, South Carolina.


Marvin Wood, coach — Died in 1999 from cancer. He left Milan in 1954.






'Defining moment' for many

Any visitor would find that the memory represents different things to different people.

•Jason Hughes is a 29-year-old bank manager and on the town board. He has been in Milan only four years.

"For the older generation, it means more," he says. "The newer generation is more worried about the future than the past ... the new sewer plant or attracting industry.

"But I am learning how big a deal it was. I'd have to say basketball is our theme, whether it should be or not."

•Jimmy Connely lives in a trailer next to the barnyard in Pierceville where Plump and several of his teammates played basketball as kids. The rim has long vanished. At the entrance of the driveway is a sign that says "Connely's small engine repair. Dressed rabbits."

"I can't read, so I've never read about that game," says Connely, 53, who has learned how to fix computers as well as engines for employment and has never seen a high school basketball game in his life.

"It doesn't mean much to me, but I know this means history to everybody else."

•Now in his 10th season, Randy Combs, 40, has been basketball coach at Milan High longer than anyone. Although the parents of many of his players were not even born in 1954, he has embraced history while rebuilding a program that dipped badly in the 1990s. Milan's enrollment is 354, and this year's team is 11-6.

"There are a group of people in town that hope this will be" a shot in the arm, he says. "I think there's a faction that doesn't understand what this really means. And there's a very small group saying, 'Why are we celebrating that? It happened 50 years ago?'

"All I've ever said to the kids is that we have people in this gym all the time from all over the nation and how it's important for us to represent what that means.

"My perception has always been, how you could make one of the greatest high school sporting events in history into a negative?"

•Rex Parker is the senior guard and leading scorer this year.

"When you put on the jersey, you represent them," he says of the 1954 team. "You go places in Indiana, everybody knows where you're from. It's nice to have something other schools don't have. They don't have people walking in during practice to see what their gym looks like."

Parker is bemused, though, when he hears the frequent stories of how other teams in other places watch Hoosiers for motivation. "It is," he says, "just a movie."

•Barter Dobson drove the team bus in 1954. His wife, Betty, worked at the high school. They understand the efforts of those such as McKittrick.

"As long as there is someone that was here or someone who knows something about it, they'll never let it die," Betty says.

"I hope, no I pray, this does things for Milan. I'm not leaving. I'll be buried here."

But will it? Does the 1954 team have one last victory left in it, turning the lights back on where so many have gone out?

"I don't think anybody knows," Hughes says.

"It's a nice idea. I wish it could happen," Baker says. "But after this is over, I think we might be back to square one."

Craft and Plump call the idea of a 50th anniversary-inspired boom in Milan a "long shot."

But then, if any place knows about long shots coming true, it's Milan, Ind.

"It's a defining moment in our lives, but it didn't dictate our lives," Plump says. "There's a difference between living in the past and enjoying the past."

Comparing Hoosiers, Milan '54 scripts
There's the movie Hoosiers. Then there's the real story of Milan. The two were often not the same.
The movie Real life
The team is the Hickory Huskers, a small school coming from nowhere to win the 1952 Indiana state championship. The team was the Milan Indians, a small school that won the 1954 state championship but was already well known after advancing to the Final Four in 1953.
Coach Norman Dale was a middle-age bachelor firebrand who had been in the Navy. Coach Marvin Wood was a soft-spoken, 26-year-old family man who had been coach at French Lick, a town that later gave the world Larry Bird.
Hickory beat a lot of other rural or small-town teams to advance in the tournament, then spent a week getting ready for the championship game against South Bend Central. Milan defeated Indianapolis Crispus Attucks, which had a sophomore named Oscar Robertson, by 13 points to get to the Final Four. The Indians then beat Terre Haute Gerstmeyer by 12 in the afternoon semifinals and had to come back the same night to win the championship game against Muncie Central.
Jimmy Chitwood, who quit the team after his junior year and did not rejoin until midseason, hardly missed a shot, including the one to win. Bobby Plump, who started more than two seasons, missed eight of his first 10 shots in the championship game before sinking the last-second jumper.





























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