Hoosiers
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Hoosiers is a 1986 movie about a small-town Indiana high school basketball team that wins the state championship. The film is set during the 1950's, when all high schools in Indiana, regardless of school size, competed in one state championship tournament. It stars Gene Hackman as a new coach with a spotty past, Barbara Hershey, Sheb Wooley, and Dennis Hopper as the basketball-loving town drunkard, a performance that brought Hopper an Oscar nomination. The movie was written by Angelo Pizzo, who co-produced the underdog sports movie Rudy, and directed by David Anspaugh, who directed Rudy. The score was composed by Jerry Goldsmith.
The film was loosely based on the story of the real-life Indiana state champions of 1954. In that year, Milan High School, a Southern Indiana school with 161 students, defeated Muncie Central High School, a school with ten times Milan's enrollment, on a last-second basket.
Hoosiers was recently the choice of the readers of USA Today newspaper as the best sports movie of all time. In 2001 the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.
