Competitive Intelligence

The Sad State of Indiana Basketball

While the Hoosiers suffer defeat after miserable defeat in the post-Knight era, is Indiana no longer the home of basketball?

Indiana University Coach Mike Davis was sitting at his breakfast table one morning last week when his 5-year-old son, Antoine, walked into the kitchen. "Daddy, I had a dream last night," Antoine told him. "I was playing for Purdue and dunked."

"A dream?" Davis asked his son. "That sounds like a nightmare."

Many Indiana residents would argue that playing for either the Hoosiers or Boilermakers would be a nightmare these days. The state that produced legendary figures such as coaches John Wooden and Bob Knight and whose passion for high school basketball was the backdrop for the movie "Hoosiers" is experiencing an unprecedented malaise in its favorite game.

"It's a damn mess," Purdue University Coach Gene Keady said. "We had the magic and we lost the magic."

With a widely anticipated college basketball season in full swing, Indiana's two traditional powers are on the outside looking in. Indiana and Purdue have losing records entering their game here today at Purdue's Mackey Arena, and interest in high school basketball, the state's other passion, also is waning considerably. While the colleges' struggles can be attributed at least in part to changes at the top, interest in the high school game began to dissipate when the state abandoned its one-class, everybody-in, winner-takes-all postseason tournament in favor of a system that divided schools by size.

Basketball in Indiana has long been more than a game. James Naismith, who invented the sport in Springfield, Mass., more than a century ago with a soccer ball and two peach baskets, once said that "basketball may have been born in Massachusetts, but it grew up in Indiana."

From Wooden (he was a Purdue all-American long before he became the "Wizard of Westwood" at UCLA) to Rick "the Rocket" Mount (the first high school player to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated) to Damon Bailey (the first eighth-grader featured in SI), Indiana's best high school and college players became state-wide icons.

Let's hope Indiana can get it together - after all, if the Pacers are the only alternative for Indiana basketball, then we've all got a lot of mourning to do.

- Arik