By ARDEN ZWELLING IN ANDERSON, IND.
Sportsnet Magazine
INDIANA — It’s 11:00 p.m. and, save for one secluded soul, this massive high school gym in Anderson, Ind., is completely deserted. It’s called the Wigwam, and Ron Hecklinski, a physical education teacher, coaches basketball here. On this night-about five years ago-he’s camped out in his small office, hunched over in a black leather chair, poring over film. A television flickers from the middle of a weathered shelving unit, bouncing flashes of cold light off the big red letters painted on the wall over Hecklinski’s head: “INTENSITY.” He watches the film closely, running his hand through his long, thin, light brown hair, pushing it away from the part that runs down the left side of his head. He’s studying plays, formations, tendencies. Looking for weakness. That’s when the Wigwam’s scoreboard just starts screaming.
The Wigwam-the second-largest high school gym in the United States with 8,996 seats-is home to the Anderson High School Indians and a big, old scoreboard. It’s the kind made specifically for basketball. No team can score more than 199 points; no game will run longer than 99 minutes, 99 seconds; no more than 19 fouls allowed. And now, all those numbers are as bright as stars, flashing away like uniform supernovas. It goes on for a good 15 or 20 seconds before it stops and sits dead in the dark, empty Wigwam. Hecklinski notices but never flinches. Over more than a decade of coaching in this grand building, he’s learned that sometimes strange things happen. Not much scares him anymore. “Hey, c’mon man, I gotta watch some film,” Hecklinski bellows from his office to an empty gym. “I’ll be outta here in a minute.”
To be a high school basketball coach in Indiana is to come to terms with the extraordinary, and not just the ghosts. Everything about this state’s passion for the game defies normalcy. When the Indiana Pacers opened Conseco Fieldhouse in downtown Indianapolis in 1999, the words flashing across the video screens said it all: “In 49 states it’s just basketball… but this is Indiana.” This is a place where one out of every 290,000 males born will play in the NBA-the highest rate of any region in the world. This is a state with 13 of the 14 biggest high school basketball gyms in the United States. This is an unusual place where, about 70 km east of Indianapolis, there is a $55/night motel, the Steve Alford All-American Inn, named after the Indiana native who led the Hoosiers to the 1987 NCAA championship under Bob Knight. Stationed out front is a truck-sized high-top basketball shoe. So yeah, people get a little crazy about hoops here.
 New Castle High School Fieldhouse. |
Yet, over the last 30 years, what was once an obsession has faded to an afterthought. Kids in Indiana have gravitated to other sports like football and soccer. High school gyms across the state that were filled to capacity every night with as many as 10,000 fans are struggling to attract half that. The Indiana University Hoosiers, a powerhouse through the ’70s and ’80s winning three NCAA championships, reached the Sweet Sixteen this season for just the second time since 1994. The sport that once breathed life into the state is now gasping for air. And Indiana, itself reeling from recession, has been unable to do anything about it.
This all began in the early 1900s, when Indiana was predominantly rural and agricultural. Basketball season just so happened to begin right after the harvest and wrapped up tidily before the next year’s planting season. The communities around more than 700 high schools across the state packed local gyms-often converted barns-on Friday nights to watch the state obsession. Come March, towns practically shut down when every single high school in the state competed in a tournament to determine Indiana’s top team. It started in 1911, and soon there were so many entrants that the tournament was broken up into a complex series of smaller tourneys. Teams began in one of 64 sectionals, facing the six or seven other schools in or around their towns. The 64 winners advanced to regionals, placed into pools of four. From there, the 16 remaining teams played four semi-state tournaments, determining a final four that played in the state championships. The whole thing lasted a month and it was impossible to go anywhere in the state without seeing, talking or feeling basketball. Schools cancelled classes so students and teachers could travel to sectionals and regionals to support their teams. Tournament games became the hottest tickets in town and the state finals were played at the Butler Fieldhouse in Indianapolis with 15,000 fans packed to the rafters. More than 1.5 million fans attended the state tournament in 1962 alone. They called it “Hoosier Hysteria.”
Rural towns-their schools with enrolments of 100 or even less-were especially captivated by the tournament. Winning a sectional, let alone doing well at the regional, turned meek adolescents into local legends. In 1954, 11 teenagers from Milan High School-enrolment 161-went 19-2 in the regular season before winning their next nine to capture the state title. The team knocked off several big schools on the run, including a 32-30 triumph in the state final over Muncie Central, who had won two of the previous three titles. The remarkable run inspired a 1986 feature film called Hoosiers. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.
Then there was the arms race. Franklin High School, fresh off a state championship in 1920, built a new gymnasium the following year that could seat 3,000 fans, or 60 percent of the town’s population. Franklin hosted its sectional in the new gym and went on to win the tournament again that year and the next. Other towns began fundraising efforts to build their own colossal gyms in order to host sectionals and regionals; home court advantage was everything. In the late 1940s, Huntingburg-population 5,000-built a gym with a capacity of 6,214 in order to steal the sectional away from neighbouring Jasper. Shortly after that, New Castle, tired of travelling to Muncie for regionals, began construction on the 9,325-seat New Castle Chrysler Fieldhouse that remains the largest high school gym in the country. Feeling the heat of two North Central Conference rivals with enormous gyms, Anderson decided in 1961 to build its own cathedral: the Wigwam. Now the two biggest high school gyms in the U.S. sat just 40 minutes away from each other in small manufacturing towns. And every Friday night, both were filled to the brim.
The New Castle Fieldhouse looks like a giant pressed his thumb into the earth and left an impression, with bleachers lining the sides. It’s a hell of a sight. While most prefer to erect their stadiums upright, New Castle dug down, building directly into the ground. Fans enter at the top of the massive oval and clamber into the crater to find their seats, the bottoms of which are caked with generations of gum. Below the pale hardwood floor are small metal-and-rubber pads reinforcing the court. New Castle says this provides more give; it’s easier on the knees. But it actually has more to do with the time, decades ago, when the floor collapsed during the middle of a sectional due to a drainage problem. At the time, they simply shoved whatever they could find under the wood, taped everything back together with duct tape, and kept playing. There was no way they were halting that game.
There were times when the Fieldhouse would be so packed they had to turn people away. Hundreds of fans watched through the windows in the doors, following along on the scoreboard. When New Castle hosted regionals in the ’60s and ’70s, ticket demands were so high that they held a draw on the court. A series of trash cans were set up, filled with thousands of envelopes. Ten thousand had tickets in them. The rest had blank pieces of paper. You got one shot. “Talk about some distraught people,” says New Castle assistant coach Steve Swim, who was there. “They’d put their hand in, get a blank in their envelope and sit down and cry.” ?The frenzy was much the same at the Wigwam about 40 km west on IN-38. More than 6,000 people in Anderson were season-ticket holders and scalpers made a good profit hawking tickets outside the gym on game nights. Inside the Wigwam the roar was overwhelming, wood bleachers reverberating under 8,996 pairs of feet. Every game in Anderson starts the same way. The gym goes pitch black as the band picks up the pace, and through the darkness a pair of spotlights pierce down. One illuminates a bare-chested boy, wearing bison-skin pants and a war bonnet with tails of feather dropping to his ankles. He carries a small hatchet and never smiles. The other spotlight finds a young, pretty girl wearing a simple tan dress and a headband holding a feather behind her head. In Anderson, they’re known as the Indian and the Maiden. Every year, the school holds auditions to fill the roles; dozens try out. The drums start, and the duo hop around the floor in circles on one foot, alternating feet every four hops. The spotlights follow while the entire crowd chants: “Woahhh-hoo-hoo.” The dance ends with the Maiden kneeling in front of the Indian, two spotlights becoming one as shadows spill in four directions around them. The lights come back up, the Indians wearing shorts and sneakers enter, and it’s time to play basketball. The crowd eats it up. “On game nights I look at the crowd and see all the kids,” Hecklinski says. “They’re always having fun, cutting up, trying to rap on some chick.”
Hecklinski is Anderson and Indiana basketball royalty. After graduating from nearby Manchester College in 1978 with a bachelor’s degree in physical education, he bounced around four Indiana high schools, teaching gym and coaching basketball at each stop. He earned his master’s and twice took assistant coaching jobs at Indiana colleges, including his alma mater, Ball State, where his teams went 97-34 and made two Sweet 16 appearances. But like a strong undercurrent, something beneath the surface was constantly pulling Hecklinski back to high school ball, and when a head coaching job at Anderson opened up in 1993, he couldn’t refuse. A dozen television and radio stations showed up for his press conference at the Wigwam. He was going to be just the 12th head coach in nearly 100 years of Anderson Indians basketball. He spoke of tradition and honour-how the Wigwam and the Indians stood for something. After living the nomadic coaching lifestyle for a decade and a half, Hecklinski finally felt at home.
Anderson won its sectional and its regional his first year as head coach, sending the town into a craze. The team won four more sectionals under Hecklinski’s guidance as he piled up nearly 275 wins over 18 seasons. From 2000-2003 he served on the coaching staff for the McDonald’s All-American Game at Madison Square Garden and Boston Garden, coaching future NBA All-Stars like LeBron James and Chris Paul. But no matter where he went, none of it touched the Wigwam. “You walk into this gym,” Hecklinski says, “and you can smell tradition.”
Hecklinski’s connection to the sprawling gym is incredible, almost maternal. Throughout the years he had Native American tribes come into the gym to bless the facility. On June 25, 1999, someone set fire to the old Anderson High School, a four-storey brick building next to the Wigwam that sat empty for years after the school was moved into new digs about five minutes away. Like most buildings from its era, it went up like a pile of dry leaves. The firefighters made a point of battling the blaze away from the Wigwam in order to limit any damage to the gym. Hecklinski, just returning from a family vacation in Florida, looked up at a television in the Indianapolis airport and saw the fire on TV. He hopped in the car and told his wife to step on it. About an hour later, a firefighter wandered into the Wigwam and found Hecklinski in his office, furiously packing up jerseys and memorabilia. “Hey man, I’m just watching the gym here, making sure everything’s cool,” Hecklinski yelled, still packing. If he had to, he would have faced the flames like Joseph protecting the Holy Grail. “It’s simply the greatest venue for high school basketball,” Hecklinski says. “I mean, it was just phenomenal.”
Was being the key word.
In the mid-1990s, everything that defined Indiana basketball-the hysteria, the excitement, the pageantry-changed dramatically. Like the hardwood at New Castle years ago, the bottom suddenly fell out. As NCAA basketball began to rise in popularity and televisions started beaming games from across the country into Indiana living rooms, high schools watched as once-reliable crowds slowly trickled away. Teams across Indiana that consistently expected nightly sellouts were suddenly looking up at empty stands. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, a period in which the state’s population held steady at 5.5 million, attendance at sectional, regional and even semi-state tournaments dropped by 25 percent.
Most in the community can trace the decline to two words: class basketball. In the ’90s, a group of small-school principals started lobbying the Indiana High School Athletic Association to move to a class system, with schools divided into divisions based on size. No school with an enrolment of 500 or less had won a state championship since Milan in 1954. Smaller schools wanted a better chance of going deep in the tournament and bringing home a banner. Purists scoffed at the suggestion, refusing to change an 86-year-old tradition. So the principals took matters into their own hands. Several of them earned spots on the IHSAA executive board and began whispering in ears, changing opinions from within. By 1997, they successfully switched the tournament format into one with four classes-1A, 2A, 3A and 4A, separated by enrolment in ascending order. They simply lopped the entire state into four quarters and in 1998 awarded four state titles to four schools that had never won one before. In the 14 years since class basketball’s inception, there have been 56 state champions.
The argument against class basketball is that it eliminates much of the allure and magic of a small school taking a run through the tournament. Milan’s 1954 triumph could never happen in class basketball. Anyone who played at a small school in the single class system will tell you the most exciting part of the tournament was travelling to Anderson or New Castle and trying to knock off the big boys. Winning a sectional was akin to winning a state title for some small schools. But now the romance was gone; it was small schools vs. small schools and big schools vs. big schools. One year after the class system was introduced, attendance at regionals dropped from 168,715 to 71,384 and at the state finals from 55,125 to 27,295. The IHSAA saw a $600,000 dip in revenue between 1997 and 1998 alone.
Not helping the cause was the rapid consolidation of schools in Indiana, which dropped the number of tournament entrants from 755 in 1955 to just 401 this season. As manufacturing jobs started to disappear in the 1990s, more and more families left the state. High school enrolments plummeted. A town like Anderson, which once had three schools, no longer needed-or could even afford-that many. Since 1959, more than 400 small schools in Indiana have been consolidated with others in their areas. Cross-town foes, and even regional rivalries, were eliminated. Community identities and fierce loyalties went with them.
As schools were shuttered, so too were their storied gymnasiums. The biggest gyms stayed intact, gigantic symbols of what basketball used to mean here. But in the early morning on July 1, 2011, the unthinkable happened. The Anderson school board dispatched a service crew to change the locks at the Wigwam.
Every small town in the American Midwest has a recession story. But Anderson’s is hard to top. About 40 years ago, this town was second only to Flint, Mich., with the most manufacturing arms of General Motors in the U.S. Nearly one of every three people in Anderson worked for GM, and the city grew as the company continued to diversify its operations. Anderson’s population hit 70,000 by 1970, with more than 22,000 employed by GM. Today those numbers sit at 56,000 and zero.
When GM skipped town, Anderson was left with more than 230 acres of empty, dilapidated buildings, several posing serious environmental problems. In 2010 the Obama administration announced a $773-million trust fund as part of GM’s bankruptcy filing, specifically to clean up some of the sites in and around Anderson. And it’s not all industrial. There are so many vacant residential homes in Anderson that the city will occasionally donate one to the fire department so they can ignite it and use it to practise fighting fires. Kills two birds with one blaze.
Outside the Wigwam, many of the suburban homes that line its north and east sides are in disrepair, rotting right before the old gym’s eyes. Most have broken or boarded-up windows. Some have doors that have been filled in with bricks to discourage squatters. One has clearly sat untouched for years, yet still has Christmas lights lined across its balcony. Across the street from the gym is a classic Cutlass Supreme from the ’70s-tooth-white canvas roof and all-with its windows blown out and trunk wide open. One tall, white house just down the street is noticeably busier than the others. Every so often a car pulls up front and idles while the driver or a passenger darts inside. They come out a minute or two later and peel off. This happens over and over, different cars every time. They aren’t here for an open house.
The school board’s new locks don’t stop Ron Hecklinski. He doesn’t elaborate much on how he still has access to the Wigwam eight months after it was closed. He simply says he knows a guy. He probably knows a few, really. Nearly two decades of coaching high school ball in Indiana can make a man a few friends. Regardless, he isn’t supposed to be in here. No one is supposed to be in here. The school board would be less than pleased if they found out Hecklinski was still puttering around in the shuttered gym. “Piss on the school board,” Hecklinski says. “I don’t give a s— about the school board after what they did.”
The gym is damn cold now. Freezing, in fact. The heating units were turned off long ago. The strips of maple wood that make up the court have been so cold for so long that it sounds like you’re walking on piles of brittle bones. Their creaks and cracks fill the place. When you stand still, the Wigwam is so quiet that you can hear the clanging from a metal warehouse on the other side of the train tracks that line the gym’s west side. Every so often, the warehouse sounds a buzzer that echoes just like the one at the Wigwam once did. Much of the building has simply been left untouched. The hallways are still lined with pictures of former athletic triumph: 1945 State Track Champions; 1953 State Golf Champions; 1966 State Swimming Champions; and on and on. There must be hundreds of them. Many of the basketball offices are still adorned with posters of Michael Jordan and Larry Bird. There are whiteboards with X’s and O’s still etched in place. Lockers stuffed with loose belongings and team paraphernalia. It’s a lot like walking through a ghost town-as if one day this place was rolling, buzzing with life, and the next everyone simply disappeared. It didn’t exactly happen like that.
The school board, already facing a $5-million deficit, actually wanted to close the Wigwam in 2010 as they watched it drain hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from their budget. But the town revolted, forcing the board to keep it open one more year with the promise that community leaders would find a way to make the operation feasible. That never happened. The school board faced a choice of either laying off teachers or closing the historic gym, and the motion to shut down the Wigwam came forward once again. Most estimates put the Wigwam’s utility costs alone at around $300,000, while wages and maintenance added more than $400,000. The only money coming in, meanwhile, was the annual revenue from ticket sales at Anderson home games, a figure somewhere in the neighbourhood of $40,000. Hecklinski didn’t hide his opposition to the motion, telling the press he would resign if they closed the gym and threatening to chain himself to the doors. He argued that every square inch of the Wigwam was being used. There were kindergarten classes, administrative offices and even a vocational program for students who had been expelled from other schools. But use and cost are rarely agreeable factors. And while 200 Anderson residents showed up at the meeting to protest the Wigwam’s closing, the vote still proceeded just as everyone expected it to. The Indians had three months to clear out their belongings. The board cut 140 teachers, too.
Hecklinski kept his word, stepping down as head coach after 18 years, handing over the reins to his assistant of 12 years, Joe Nadaline. He never did chain himself to the doors. He’s had almost a year to reflect on the board’s decision. It hasn’t helped. Sitting in that old, black leather chair where he used to work late into the night, Hecklinski wrestles with a phone, tearing it out of the wall. Holding the base in one hand and feverishly wrapping cord in the other, the receiver tumbles to the floor as Hecklinski grumbles barely above his breath. “I’m taking this phone. This is my phone,” he says, as if he needs to justify it to anyone. “Why should they get my phone? I should take it.” The TV he once watched film on is gone now, as are most of the rest of his belongings. But it still says “INTENSITY” on the wall above his head, which seems more fitting now than ever. Fumbling for the spilled receiver under his desk, Hecklinski’s rage simmers barely below the surface. “This place, man. It makes me sick,” he murmurs. “Makes me want to puke.”
This past January, Indiana Senator Mike Delph, a Republican representing the city of Carmel, introduced a bill to return to single-class basketball. It also included provisions about teaching cursive writing and the start date of the academic year, but there was only one topic the politicians were interested in discussing-for three hours. “When we had a one-class basketball tournament it was a time that brought our state together,” Delph told the legislature. “Basketball is part of our culture, part of our fabric.” He eventually dropped the basketball provision after reaching an agreement with the IHSAA to reopen the debate on a smaller, more reasonable level.
Even now, nowhere else in the world is basketball taken this seriously. Nowhere else is the highest governing body in the state arguing over the merits of a high school tournament. Nowhere else do high school teams draw crowds in the thousands for an early season game. Nowhere else do schools interview your wife when you apply to be a basketball coach. People in Indiana will readily admit that it’s all a little crazy. But they also take a strange sense of pride in the absurdity of it all. As if to say, yeah, this is crazy, but it’s our crazy.
On a mild Friday night in February, you can see it. Anderson has travelled east to Richmond-a small tool-and-die town bordering Ohio-to play the Richmond High School Red Devils. Around 3,000 show up; not a bad crowd, but still just a sprinkling in the 8,100-seat Tiernan Center where the Red Devils play. After the pre-game warmups, a big school band wails pop song melodies while teams of cheerleaders perform acrobatic flips on the floor. Three different radio stations show up to broadcast the game, including one that employs Hecklinski, who now moonlights as a broadcaster. You can take his gym away, but you can’t keep “Heck” away from high school basketball on a Friday night. The Red Devils go up 34-21 by half and hold off a late Anderson charge for a 69-62 triumph. After the game, a dozen workers descend on the stands to clean the place up. Most of the fans have gone now, either back home or to a local haunt for a beer or a slice.
But on the floor at the Tiernan Center there is still life. Two boys, couldn’t be older than 12, are playing one-on-one before more than 8,000 empty seats. Their shoes screech with every cut on the court, every juke to the left or right and hard stop for a pull-up jumper. They compete fiercely, playing as if they were before one of the packed houses of decades ago. They might dream of playing on this floor one day when they’re old enough. Fantasize about pulling on a Red Devils jersey and being a small part of one of the nation’s most unique sporting cultures. But even if they do, they’ll never really know what Hoosier Hysteria was like. It’s different now; it doesn’t mean as much. Life and basketball in Indiana have slowly become two separate entities. Still, the kids in Richmond are lucky. They still have their gym.