In Indiana, Basketball Is a Way of Life

INDIANAPOLIS — His family couldn't afford a basketball, so John Wooden's mother made one for her son. It was a black sock filled with rags. "My mother tried to make it as round as the size of a basketball," Wooden remembers now, some 80 years later. "My dad tacked up on the barn a tomato basket. Not a peach basket like Dr. Naismith. We grew tomatoes."

Wooden grew up in Indiana in a small town south of Indianapolis, near Martinsville. Martinsville isn't a big town, but it seemed so to Wooden. Martinsville was where the high school was and where Wooden would play basketball. Of course, he would play basketball.

Baseball was Wooden's favorite sport and maybe if he had lived in a small town east of Cincinnati, say, Wooden would have played baseball and became a great baseball coach. But he didn't. Wooden lived in Indiana. He had no choice.

It doesn't matter if the basketball is of the grade school, high school, college or pro variety. The people here will smell a game, feel a game, taste a game, find the game and watch it.

There is an apartment complex in New Castle, about 50 miles from Indianapolis and home of the world's biggest high school gym, capacity 9,800. It is a complex for senior citizens. The executive director of the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame, which is also in New Castle, lives in the building. Roger Dickinson is 61 and lives in that apartment building.

"There are Pacers signs hanging inside windows, hanging on doors," Dickinson says. Indeed, the building looks kind of like a college dorm or frat house all duded up before the big game. "It kind of surprises me," Dickinson says. "These people went to a lot of trouble and I wouldn't expect it of them. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised. It is Indiana and this is basketball. Pacer fever has swept the state. It's that passion I talked about. It's just here, it's pride. Even if we are defeated by the Los Angeles Lakers, there will still be great pride about the Pacers."

Wooden's grade school team would play organized games in a league. Many were outdoors. Sometimes snow had to be shoveled off the court. But there were always dozens of people lining the court, standing in ice and snow maybe, but eager to watch basketball.

Fifteen of the 16 biggest high school gyms in the world are in Indiana. Dickinson tells you that. One was in Martinsville, where Wooden played. It seated 5,000. There weren't many more people than that in the town and Wooden never played before any empty seats while he was in high school.