Hoosiers II? This just scares me to death.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0989656/

http://www.tiburonfilmfestival.com/filmInfo.php?film_id=2775

It was never made, right? Sweet Lord, tell me it was never made.

 

It was never made.

I hope.

 

It was a joke short film for the ESPYs:

 

The end looked like the 2006 NBA Finals highlight reel.

 

Actually, "Hoosiers II" could have been a premise for a good movie -- they even threw in a little setup for a possible sequel near the end, when the reporters shout out, "are you coming back next year?"

1. Does Norman Dale come back or not?

2. After Dale and the Hoosiers win the state championship, undoubtedly some reporter would dig up the story of his banishment from college basketball and his supposedly "lifetime suspension."

3. Assuming he does come back the next year, how does Dale deal with the underclass players on the team? IIRC, Ollie, Strap and Everett were supposed to be juniors or sophomores. Does he make Ollie into an actually decent player, or is he still a geek who dribbles off his foot?

4. What happens to Jimmy Chitwood when he goes off to college?

5. Does Shooter manage to kick the bottle? Is he back as an assistant the next year, or lying drunk in his tarpaper shack? Does Everett carry through with his promise/threat to come live with him?

6. What about the townspeople? Of course they're all lovin' Coach Norm for 6 months after the championship game, free haircuts, free malts all summer long at the soda bar, but what happens after he loses to Deerlick in Week 2 of the next season??

7. And of course, what happens with the romance between 55-year-old Norman and 30-year old Myra. People will talk, you know.

 

I have wondered about many of these questions for years. Dammit, I hate sequels, but dammit, I want answers.

 

Just check out "That Championship Season" with Robert Mitchum as the coach and Bruce Dern and Paul Sorvino and Martin Sheen as a former team that holds a reunion.

 

"I'll make it."

 

"MY WORD IS LAW WHEN IT COMES TO THIS BASKETBALL TEAM."

 

I'm guessing that Coach Dale never even got on the bus back to Hickory -- he took the first offer from a town that had indoor plumbing.

The man didn't win a game until Jimmy showed up and then never lost one once he was there. Overrated.

 

Hoosiers 2: Electric Boogaloo

 

Yeah, I joke around with some of my real "Hoosiers"-maniac friends that just about every single thing Norman Dale tried to do in Hickory blew up on him:

1) The "four-passes-before-every-shot" rule went out the window the minute Jimmy stepped on the court.

2) The "no-one-player-more-important-than-any-other" went out the window the minute Jimmy stepped on the court.

3) Norm's quest to rehabilitate his own image, show the world he was older, wiser, blew up too -- he was thrown out of what, six or seven out of 25 games? I don't think I've ever heard of a HS coach getting thrown out of six games in a season (and I've covered some screw-loose nut jobs).

4) Norm's allegedly terrific coaching skills were unable to make Strap or Ollie, the team geeks, into anything more than geeks at the end of the season. When each of them go into a game and make a decent play, everyone still regards it as a miracle. Anybody can coach Jimmy Chitwood -- it's whether you can turn geeks like Strap and Ollie into decent players that tells how good a coach you really are.

5) Norm's iron-clad discipline, "my word is law when it comes to this basketball team," goes out the window with 10 seconds left in the championship game, when he calls the picket fence play for Merle, and Jimmy goes into his Scottie Pippen imitation, and the whole team goes along with it, and Norm does too.

6) The attempt to clean up Shooter and turn him into a respectable citizen could only be described as a partial success, since he has to be dragged to the hospital after marching onto the court in a drunken stupor.

Actually, a kind of quirky, much lower-key, actually realistic sequel to "Hoosiers" could indeed have been made. Sure, some of the nutjob townspeople would have been back on Norm's neck the minute he lost a couple games, but maybe a few of them might change their ways a little bit.

Maybe Hickory only finishes 15-10 the next year, but Norman Dale might actually do a better coaching job. Maybe they make the semi-states for a rematch against South Bend Central (Crispus Attucks) and "Boyle" (Oscar Robertson) hits the "Jimmy Chitwood" shot.