“In 49 other states, it’s just basketball,” Carlisle said to the crowd at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, “but this is Indiana.”
Carlisle would know. This is his second stint—and, if we count his years as Larry Bird’s top assistant, it is his third—coaching the Pacers.
He grew up in New York, then played his college ball in Maine and Virginia. He was part of the great Bird-led Boston Celtics teams of the 1980s and built a solid if unspectacular career as a player before transitioning to coaching.
He knew the game when he came to Indiana, and he was smart enough to come to know the state.
In some ways, only a newcomer—a convert—can appreciate Hoosiers’ fervent devotion to basketball.
I know.
My ancestors on my mother’s side of the family settled in Indiana in the early 19th century, but I was born in Ohio and spent the first eight years of my life in the Buckeye State.
Ohio was and is a state where football is the dominant sport. In the early 1960s, basketball was almost an afterthought there.
We moved back to Indiana as I was about to start the fourth grade. In that era, male Hoosiers in late childhood and early adolescence had to learn the game if they wanted to survive, much less fit in.
Fortunately, learning the game was fun.
Basketball’s constant motion and thus the importance of players moving without the ball appealed to the analytical parts of my mind. It taught me to appreciate the importance of the roles performed by players who didn’t command the spotlight, a leadership lesson that guides me to this day.
I also learned how the game fits into Indiana’s identity.
We’re a small state, accustomed to being overlooked and underestimated. Basketball is a leveler. It doesn’t require a set of players the size of a small army to get up a game. Any lonely or bored kid on a farm, in a small town or in a city who has a ball and access to a hoop could practice and develop skills on his or her own.
But it was and is a social game, one in which the best team almost always wins.
Great as they were individually, Wilt Chamberlain, Michael Jordan and Lebron James couldn’t win championships until they melded their spectacular talents into a team’s framework.
This, too, is part of Indiana’s culture.
There’s a reason we Hoosiers embraced Oscar Robertson, Larry Bird and Caitlin Clark—three of the best passers the game has ever seen—and are less enamored of showboats and ball hogs than fans in other states are. We value the game’s fundamentals because we know that mastering them will allow a player—a person—to compete with any opponent, regardless of how much more naturally talented that adversary might be.
The Pacers always have been part of that.
Not long after my family moved back to Indiana, the Pacers began the run in which they captured three championships in four years in the upstart ABA league.
I cannot calculate the number of hours my friends and I—all of us diehard Pacers fans—spent speculating on who would win if there were a kind of World Series of professional basketball between the NBA and ABA champions.
We wanted such a showdown for reasons that went beyond sport. We thought a contest of that sort would demonstrate that we, children of a largely rural and often forgotten part of America, were just as good and just as important as anyone else.
And sometimes, even a little bit better.
That’s why beating the New York Knicks always touches off celebrations in the Hoosier state that are closer to religious revivals than they are victory parties.
What many New Yorkers struggle to grasp is that, while we Hoosiers may occasionally refer to ourselves as hicks, we don’t care for it at all when others call us that.
Our Pacers now will play for the biggest championship in professional basketball. They go into the series against the Oklahoma City Thunder as decided underdogs.
That’s OK.
We Hoosiers have been there before. We’re used to it.
As Coach Carlisle said, in 49 other states, it’s just basketball.
But this is Indiana.
