The great Gene Hackman is gone, and so is Hollywood’s greatest coach: Norman Dale of ‘Hoosiers’

You might think of him first as Lex Luthor or Popeye Doyle or Little Bill Daggett or even as the blind hermit who sets Peter Boyle’s thumb ablaze. But chances are, if you are both a sports fan and a movie buff, when you learned that Gene Hackman had died at 95, after an acting career as accomplished and diverse as any in the history of Hollywood, you thought first of one character and one film.

You thought of Norman Dale, coach of the Hickory High School Huskers. And you thought of Hoosiers.

In and around Philadelphia, Rocky will always be regarded, rightly, as the greatest sports movie of all time. But Hoosiers, released 10 years after Rocky in 1986, is a close second, for its familiar and sentimental underdog narrative, for Jerry Goldsmith’s stirring soundtrack, for the quotes that many of us can still recite by heart (“My team is on the floor,” “Now boys, don’t get caught watching the paint dry,” “I’ll make it”). And for Hackman.

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It might not be his best performance — he delivered so many marvelous performances in so many memorable roles that it’s almost impossible to place one of them above the others — but it’s likely his most beloved one. The quality that made him a remarkable actor is the same quality that Robert Duvall possesses: They disappear completely into their characters. When you watch Al Pacino or Robert De Niro, you’re aware at all times that you’re watching Al Pacino or Robert De Niro. Not so with Hackman. He becomes Norman Dale: the coach-as-gunslinger who rides into town and cleans up the basketball team, who wields his black game-plan folder like a baton, who learns to love his players and earns the respect of everyone in Hickory, and who was every bit as demanding as Hackman himself.

“He is the heart of Hoosiers,” longtime sportswriter and Lehigh Valley native Jack McCallum writes in his excellent book The Real Hoosiers, “but nothing about dealing with him was easy for the filmmakers.”

The movie was Hackman’s 36th but the first for director David Anspaugh and screenwriter Angelo Pizzo, and Hackman didn’t give them much grace for their inexperience.

“He constantly referred to us as amateurs, which compared to him we were,” Pizzo tells McCallum in the book. “Gene took it out mostly on David. I don’t think he liked me particularly, either, but he came from the theater, where there was a tradition of not changing a word of dialogue unless you asked. He held to that.

“But I learned a lot from him. Gene would say, ‘See this line right here? I don’t need to say it. The camera will be on my face, and my face will say it.’ I pulled 10 lines of dialogue out because of that.”

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As wonderful as it is, Hoosiers is of course imperfect, and over the years, one of the primary complaints about it — from Spike Lee and Oscar Robertson, among others — is that, in the film’s triumphant climax, an all-white team beats a team made up mostly of Black players. Since Hickory High School was loosely based on little Milan High, which won the Indiana state title in 1954, and since Milan beat Robertson’s Crispus Attucks High School team in the ‘54 state semis, the ending has long left Robertson cold. “Is the proverbial race card being played?” he once asked.

These objections are understandable if overstated. Anspaugh and Pizzo don’t present South Bend Central’s coaches, players, and fans as terrible people blocking Hickory’s rightful path to the state championship. They don’t frame them through the lens of racist tropes. SBC is simply a great basketball team. The true “villains” in the film — the Hickory residents who want to run Dale out of town, the opposing players who start a brawl with the Huskers and try to bully and intimidate them, even the South Bend Central guard who commits an unforgivable mistake by shooting the ball late in the game — are all white.

What’s more, Dale himself is as flawed as any character in Hoosiers. He has an explosive temper that he struggles to control. He comes to Hickory in the first place only because he’s trying to escape his checkered past: During his acclaimed career as a college coach, he punched one of his best players. And he is so stubborn that it almost costs him his job and, later, the state championship.

(Seriously, Norm. After Jimmy Chitwood has spent the night scoring at will against South Bend Central, you want to run Merle on the picket fence out of some inflated sense of unselfishness and teamwork? The season’s on the line. No decent basketball coach would have needed to see those hangdog looks from his players to know he should get the ball to Jimmy and tell everyone else to get out of the way.)

No matter. His strengths outweigh his shortcomings by a ton, and it’s Dale’s own journey to redemption, without compromising his core values, that makes Hoosiers’ final scenes — Chitwood swishes the shot, the Huskers celebrate their improbable victory, Dale’s lessons linger forever in the school’s tiny gym — so moving. When Norman Dale tells Rade Butcher to sit back down on the bench, when he tells the referee that he’ll play with four guys just to prove his point, when he shakes his folder at the booing crowd as if to say, I know what I’m doing, and you can’t break me, he is nothing but a man making a stand for what he believes in, for what is right. The five players on the floor are supposed to function as one single unit. Team, team, team. RIP, Coach.