Plump's memory, joy never fade

By Bob Kravitz
Indianapolis Star
http://www.indystar.com/
April 1, 2010

He sits in the perfect intersection of reality and celluloid fantasy, the real-life Hoosier, the architect of the Milan Miracle and one of the greatest players in Butler University basketball history. He is Bobby Plump, and with the Final Four in his town, with Butler doing something as unimaginable as a school of 161 students winning the 1954 Indiana high school basketball tournament, the gregarious 73-year-old is in his glory.

"Do you ever get tired of talking about it?" he was asked Tuesday as he sat behind his desk in a small office off Keystone Avenue and 56th Street.

He smiled. He was wearing a Butler T-shirt. And, of course, the ring from that 1954 championship.

"What year did you graduate high school?" Plump wondered. "How many people ask you about your high school career? I get asked all the time. It takes you back to a time when you were so alive. You think I get tired of that? No way."


Still a fan favorite: Bobby Plump signs an autograph for a fan Wednesday during a pep rally Downtown. - Charlie Nye / The Star

When the NCAA takes visiting reporters on a field trip today to Hinkle Fieldhouse, they should finish it off with a trip to see Plump at his restaurant/bar, Plump's Last Shot, in Broad Ripple. (They'll be opening early, at noon, if you're interested.)

A building like Hinkle can only tell so much of the history, but Plump is living history, a bottomless fount of stories about Milan and Marvin Wood, about Butler and the legendary Tony Hinkle. "Hoosiers" questions? Fire away:

How often has he seen the movie? (About 10 times.) What did he think the first time he saw it? (Loved it. Became so wrapped up in the semi-apocryphal story line, he quit looking for inaccuracies within five minutes.) Did they get the last shot right? (Absolutely. In fact, at the premiere, the movie's writer, Angelo Pizzo, asked Plump: "Did we get the last 18 seconds right?") Did he really say, "I'll make it," before taking the final shot against Muncie Central? (Heck no. He'd been 1-for-8 that game. "Worst game I'd played in two years." But it sounded good.) What did he like best about the movie? (The way it captured Indiana's love for the game.)

Plump always strikes you as the kind of guy who loves life every day he's breathing, but these days, he's really loving life. Are you kidding? Butler in the Final Four? Everybody talking about "Hoosiers?" A chance to have a barbecue lunch with Gov. Mitch Daniels before watching Saturday's games from the governor's suite?

Plump, of course, played for Hinkle, and when he looks at Bulldogs coach Brad Stevens now, he sees not only Hinkle but Wood, his Milan High School coach.

"Very, very similar in demeanor," Plump said. "I was watching the (Butler) game against Kansas State, Gordon Hayward pulled the string on a free throw and shot an air ball, and they showed Stevens on the sideline and he was laughing. That's how my coaches were. They didn't need to scream. If they raised their voices just a little bit, you knew they meant business.

"He's as good as anybody I've seen come down the pike in a long time. He proves you don't have to shout and stomp your feet. To me, he's in the mold of three of the greatest college coaches ever -- Mr. Hinkle, John Wooden and Dean Smith."

In an office filled with basketball mementos from a storied career, Plump has a two-page letter dated April 5, 1954. It's from then-coach Hinkle, who was recruiting the Milan star to come to Butler.

" . . . Bob, I want you to come to Butler. We have a swell school and I know you will be satisfied here. We have a bunch of good boys. Also I have a man who has taken an interest in you and wants to help you through school financially. . . . When can you come up?

Sincerely,

Tony Hinkle

P.S. If any of the other (Milan High) boys want to come with you, bring them up also."

At the time, Plump was getting scholarship offers from IU, Purdue and Michigan State, and Butler didn't offer scholarships. But coming from Pierceville, Plump wanted to go someplace smaller, and he wanted to play as a freshman, which wasn't allowed in the Big Ten.

It worked out pretty well for Plump, and it's working out well for a bunch of Indiana kids -- and five out-of-staters -- who have taken the school to the biggest stage.

Butler is doing this for its school, for Indiana, but more, it's in a position to do this for, as they said in the movie, "all the little schools." Even if Butler isn't exactly Hickory, this is the smallest school to make the Final Four in several decades.

"Just so you know, we didn't do it for the little schools. We did it for ourselves," Plump said. "But it was a good line."

It keeps coming back to the same place. Back to Indiana. Back to Wooden and Hinkle, Butler and Plump and "Hoosiers." Who wrote this? Angelo? Is that you again?


Bobby Plump, the real Jimmy Chitwood, enjoying his second moment in the spotlight

By Mike Wise
The Washington Post
Thursday, April 1, 2010; D01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/

So itty-bitty Butler is playing in the Final Four this weekend, just a 15-minute drive from campus. And the country has been flooded -- flat-out, nauseatingly inundated -- with Indiana basketball nostalgia. And you're going to tell me with a straight face that the movie "Hoosiers" was an extremely dramatized account of a real high school basketball team and its star player in the 1950s?

Yep.

You mean to say the coach wasn't a last-chance lifer with a shady past who looked like Gene Hackman?

No, sir. Marvin Wood was just 26 years old. He took over for Snort Grinstead, who was fired for ordering new uniforms against the superintendent's orders.

Did he at least court the hot teacher in homeroom by strolling beside cornfields?

Nope.

Tell me they at least had an alcoholic assistant coach who ran the picket fence -- you know, Shooter, whose portrayal earned Dennis Hopper an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor?

Not true, either. The assistants were very good family men.

Did this Coach Wood at least sound like current Butler Coach Brad Stevens, who looks 33 going on 16, about as young as Ollie, the team manager-turned-player from "Hoosiers"?

No again.

Did he at least say "pop the ball" and preach four passes before each shot?

Hate to say it, but almost all of it is dramatized -- even the part where they say the coach had a player measure the rim and distance from the free throw line at Hinkle Fieldhouse at Butler. Now there was a guy on the team who said, "Could put a lot of hay in this place, couldn't they?" and that broke the tension of playing in such a big building.

And how would you know all these things "Hoosiers"?

Because I played for the Hickory Huskers. I'm Jimmy Chitwood.

Huh?

I'm the guy at the end of the movie who made the last shot to beat the big school. I'm why Angelo Pizzo wrote the screenplay.

You're not Maris Valainis. He's a golf pro in Irvine, Calif.

No, I'm the real-life Jimmy Chitwood.

Bobby Plump is 73 today. His restaurant, Plump's Last Shot, is located in the Broad Ripple section of Indianapolis and features draft beer, lots of tender red meat and memorabilia from 1954, when Plump was a 6-foot-1 guard for the Milan (pronounced My-lin) High Indians, who defeated Goliath, a.k.a. Muncie Central, in the final of the Indiana high school state tournament.

You can actually still see the grainy footage of that shot at the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in New Castle. Nearly 25 years after the movie came out and more than five decades after he became as big a part of Hoosier lore as Oscar Robertson, Larry Bird or Bobby Knight, Bobby Plump is fine with the fictionalized account.

"Made sense," Plump said in an interview this week. "I mean, Angelo kept asking us for controversy and we had none. You can't have a movie just about hugs and kisses. You needed some controversy. I liked every minute of it. And the important thing is they got the last 18 seconds right."

Plump is in the national spotlight this week almost as much as his beloved Butler Bulldogs. But what really happened to the kid who said, "I'll make it," and swished that ball through the rim at the end of the movie?

He turned down the NBA after an all-American career at Butler, where his free throw record stood for nearly four decades. The industrial league, where he played for the Phillips 66 petroleum company, actually compensated him more than the nascent NBA in the late 1950s. After a few years, he hung up his Chuck Taylors, came back to Indiana and became an insurance salesman before parlaying that business into a financial-planning firm. He also wrote a book in 1997, appropriately titled "Last of the Small-Town Heroes."

He met a nice, pretty girl named Jenine at a sophomore dance in college. That night, both of them were dumped by somebody else. They fell in love and parented three children, including one boy who went on to star in high school and play junior college ball in Wyoming.

"All of us were born in April," said his daughter, Kelli. "Dad had June off when he played in the industrial league. Go figure that one."

His son now runs Plump's Last Shot. But it's his old man who's made a slew of appearances at the restaurant recently because, well, it's Butler and it's Bobby Plump. In Indiana this week, Mister, it don't get much bigger than that. Best thing of all? It never went to his head, which is now a thick thatch of white.

When you thank Bobby Plump for his time, he replies: "No, thank you for your time. It's just nice to be remembered after all these years." And he means it.

By the way, Bobby Plump likes Butler to win it all. What, you thought Jimmy Chitwood would take Duke? No chance. Never.

"Unless the university president and athletic director decided to change the name, they're not the Butler Underdogs," Plump said. "They're the Butler Bulldogs, and they might just bite."

Interestingly, Jack Nicholson was first asked to play the coach in "Hoosiers" but already had a filming commitment. And the real-life announcer in the 1954 championship game, Hillard Gates, is also the movie's announcer. The final scenes were all shot at Butler's Hinkle Fieldhouse. There was also no drama at the end as to who would take the last shot. Like Plump said, only the last 18 seconds were the absolute truth.

He said his movie consultancy only came in handy at that point, when he showed the director and the actor exactly where he began dribbling, how he rose, squared and fired -- shocking a state the moment that basketball pierced the cotton, making a Hoosier immortal out of a teenager in high tops.

"Every time I see the movie, I just thank heavens that that shot still goes in," Bobby Plump said.


50th Anniversary of the Milan Miracle

'Shot' Survives Test of Time

It's been 50 years since Milan stunned Muncie Central on Plump's last-second shot, but the legend has endured


By Mark Alesia
The Indianapolis Star
mark.alesia@indystar.com
February 15, 2004

On nice days when he coached the Indiana Pacers, Isiah Thomas sometimes went to Plump's Last Shot, a restaurant in Broad Ripple, sat outside and had a drink, often with a cell phone pressed to his ear.

His world was the NBA, the salary cap, saturation media coverage. In other words, modern sports. A waitress at Plump's said Thomas once joked that his job was "babysitting young millionaires."


Bobby Plump (left), with former teammate Glenn Butte, starred on the 1954 Milan team. -- Star file photo

In today's hoops world, stars are identified in junior high school or earlier, coaches compete for their favor and they play hundreds of games over their high school summers.

Now step inside the restaurant and into another world.

Pictures, newspapers and an old letter jacket evoke an earlier era, one of buzz cuts, postwar optimism and Hoosier history: Milan High School, with an enrollment of only 161, winning the state basketball championship on a last-second shot by Bobby Plump. The date was March 20, 1954.

Fifty years later, the legend endures, magnified by the mythology of the 1986 movie "Hoosiers."

"My sense is that the David and Goliath business that was tacked onto this game was stereotyped, but it prevailed because of the movie," said Phil Raisor, a starter for Milan's opponent in the championship game, Muncie Central, and now an English professor at Old Dominion University.

"Milan had been to the State Finals the year before. They had played together most of their lives. They ran a sophisticated system and came into the game as the more seasoned team."

So Raisor had to laugh at a scene from "Hoosiers" in which the fictional Hickory (Milan) players stand in awe of Hinkle Fieldhouse after seeing it for the first time.

"That's me walking into it at (age) 15," Raisor said of his reaction. "I'm the one who did that."

That might explain some of the shots Raisor took. All four of them, which missed, will soon be on display for everyone to see.

ESPN Classic will replay the game in its entirety Saturday and then show this season's Milan-Muncie Central game live. A VHS tape and DVD of the 1954 game is available from the Indiana High School Athletic Association.

USA Today and Sports Illustrated are expected to weigh in on Milan (pronounced MY-lun), as will a host of others. The Indiana General Assembly, the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame and the Pacers have plans to honor the team. MGM Studios is filming documentary material for a special edition release of the "Hoosiers" DVD.

It's the story of the tiny school beating a traditional power, 32-30. It's the story of Plump holding the ball interminably, stalling, while the crowd went wild.

On the 25th anniversary of the game, the late Bob Collins, former sports editor of The Star, wrote, "It was a preview of the world's first mass LSD freak-out. For four minutes and 14 seconds, absolutely nothing happened on the floor while some 15,000 citizens were helping themselves to every bit as much excitement as they could stand."

Ultimately, it's the story of Plump's jumper from the right wing to win the game. Until then, he was only 2-of-10 from the floor, with three turnovers and zero assists.

"In two years of tournament games, that was the worst game I played," said Plump, 67.

Misconceptions

Over the years, the occasional "next Milan" popped up in the hinterlands of Indiana hoops, sometimes with national media watching.

In 1985, Lyons & Marco, otherwise known as L & M, a school that has since consolidated, landed in Sports Illustrated. In 1988, Oregon-Davis showed up on "Nightline" and in The New York Times.

"Everything we did, Milan was always around, which is fine," said Scott Blum, a former Indianapolis Star Indiana All-Star and player for Oregon-Davis. "They earned it."

It turns out that the national media was on to Milan 50 years ago, too, but with a different result.

"Look magazine, which was big back then, wanted to do a special on Milan and the team," Plump said. "(Coach) Marvin Wood turned them down, because he didn't want that publicity to affect what was going on. He didn't tell us that until much later."

Every year since 1954, the team has gathered for a reunion. There was usually golf, dinner and something else.

"We refined our stories," Plump said.

He was joking, but real-life Milan and the considerable dramatic license used in "Hoosiers" do tend to blur.

When people find out that Hamilton Southeastern High School football coach Rob Cutter is the son of Milan's Rollin Cutter, he's pretty sure a question about the movie is coming next.

"The first thing they ask is, 'Which one was your dad?' and 'Who was the drunk?' " Cutter said.

The answers: nobody in particular and the drunk, played by Dennis Hopper, was fictional.

More fiction? The idea that Milan could only play coach Wood's "cat and mouse" offense that helped the team defeat Muncie Central.

"He brought the four-corner offense that Dean Smith invented at Carolina in 1970. . . . We just borrowed it in '53 and '54," Plump said with a wry smile.

Milan scored 60 points in the semifinals and 65 in the semistate against sophomore Oscar Robertson and Crispus Attucks.

"I hated to stand out there and hold the ball, boys, but that's the only way we could do it," Wood was quoted as telling Muncie Central players in The Indianapolis News.

The idea of an idyllic time for everyone is, of course, fictional, too. The law of the land was still "separate but equal" until the U.S. Supreme Court decided Brown vs. Board of Education a few months after the 1954 state championship.

When Milan defeated all-black Attucks, Plump recalls fans using racial slurs and being overwhelmingly in favor of Milan, although the Tigers were an Indianapolis team playing in Indianapolis.

Raisor, who writes extensively about race in his memoir, "Outside Shooter," and Plump say race did not influence the 1954 state title game or the movie "Hoosiers." Muncie Central had three blacks among its top six players.

Attucks went on to win state titles in 1955 and 1956. Plump was asked if he thought any of the nostalgia for Milan is because of race.

"The fans, did they hang on to it because of that?" he said. "I would certainly hope not. But it could be."

Never again

Inevitably, any discussion about Milan leads to class basketball, the split of the state tournament into four divisions in 1998.

"My older brother said, 'Think of what it would have been like if you had class basketball when you played,' " said Blum of Oregon-Davis. "We would have beaten schools by 60. But I wouldn't have changed a thing."

For people with any connection to Milan's story, that's the general consensus. Plump's restaurant, which has the slogan "Always time for one more," was the nerve center for opposition to a multi-class tournament. It's a remodeled two-story house opened by his son in 1995. Among the items on the wall is a hand-drawn bracket from the 1928 Indiana state tournament, in which John Wooden and Martinsville lost in the title game.

"There are too many champions," said Cutter, who played on a team at Noblesville High School that went into the state tournament undefeated.
"The value of winning a state championship isn't the same."

In 1959, the Indiana School Reorganization Act consolidated school districts in an effort to raise educational standards. That decreased the number of small schools.

Those that remained had a tough act to follow. Plump said he and his teammates felt no such pressure.

"We had already done something no other team from Milan had done," Plump said. "We had won a game in the regional. We were a success. Hell, we had fans, fully clothed, showering with us, for God's sake, after we won a game in the regional.

"I think (the pressure) builds up. Milan probably had something to do with that, because people compared the small schools to Milan. 'Can you be another Milan?' There wasn't anybody we were compared to. We didn't have to live up to anybody else. We didn't have to hear, 'Well, maybe you can be a Milan if you do this.' "

Saturday's game will put a glaring spotlight on the current players at Milan and Muncie Central. But it isn't the first time since 1954 that the teams have played on television. During the NBA lockout, in December 1998, they had a televised game. Plump did commentary. Muncie Central won.

"I told 'em it didn't count," Plump joked. "Wasn't a tournament."

Plymouth High School, with more than five times as many students as Milan, had the smallest enrollment of a tournament champion after the Indians. Plymouth did it in 1982 with current Chicago Bulls coach Scott Skiles.

Plump, who works in financial planning and insurance, is married with three children and six grandchildren. He still plays over-50 basketball on Thursday nights.

"They say they don't see daylight under my shoes when I know I'm jumping," Plump said. "My brain tells me I am (jumping). But I can still get around any player who's there."

Call Star reporter Mark Alesia at (317) 444-6039.

Related content
• 'Shot' survives test of time
• Milan's title vital part of its future
• Had he missed shot, Plump might have missed life lesson
• Where are they now?
• Play-by-play recap of 1954 championship

Photos
1954 championship game
Milan 50 years later
Bobby Plump on the court again