By Paul Schmidt
Let me tell you a story. There’s a small school, competing against a bunch of larger ones. They a plucky bunch of overachievers — underdogs, if you will. They might even be described as scrappy.
They are constantly beating up on bigger schools on a great run through the post-season tournament. They continue to beat these larger schools until they come up against one of the state’s biggest schools, a team full of athletes. The underdogs, improbably, win that state title.
Now, replace “scrappy” in the first paragraph with “white”. Replace the word “athletes” in the second paragraph with “African-Americans.”
That’s your plot to the movie Hoosiers. Sounds just a little racist, doesn’t it?
Now, it most likely wasn’t pitched that way, and you can’t rewrite history. That was, in fact, what happened — with some liberties taken, granted, but it’s Hollywood. The larger spirit of the story was the same.
Perhaps then, it isn’t fair to say the movie Hoosiers is racist. I certainly don’t think it’s going too far to say that the hero worship of the underdog such as Hickory High might be, though.
Spike Lee first floated this idea his book “Best Seat in The House,” co-written with the late Ralph Wiley. And it isn’t crazy. America loves it’s underdog stories, but it especially loves it when it’s of the flavor of “Band of overachieving white guys take down the bigger, more talented black players” variety.
Which is, in a little bit of a convoluted way, why I’m rooting for Duke tonight.
I think this first came to mind when I heard this special run by the Butler Bulldogs being referred to as “Hoosiers II.” It certainly seems like it — Hickory High had some great players and weren’t exactly Cinderellas when it came down to it, and neither is Butler. They were a five seed that was actually ranked in the top-10 at the end of the regular season. This was a well regarded team.
However, you no doubt see where I’m going with this — Butler has, as a group, overachieved greatly by pulling off upsets against Syracuse, Kansas State and even Michigan State (where, though Vegas had the Bulldogs set as favorites, the Spartans were the more talented team). Those schools all have some extremely talented athletes (many of whom will play in the NBA, and many of whom are black). Butler, as a group is very, very white — not lily white, like Hickory High, but extremely white nonetheless.
And given that a majority of our favorite March Madness upsets involve a whole lot of pale, it’s hard not to wonder just how much of a point Spike Lee really had.
America, for the most part, isn’t making a conscious decision to pull for the white kids. But you have to wonder just how much of people’s subconscious is really influencing things during the NCAA Tournament. You have to wonder just how much our subconscious enjoys seeing people…”like ourselves”…succeed.
Of course, the screw also turns both ways — it’s just as racist towards white people as well. For one, it assumes that the white kids always will be that band of overachievers, which is horribly unfair to both teams in any game. It also means that many pull against teams like Duke — teams that are largely successful on an annual basis with a high percentage of talented white and black athletes. Apparently, not only do we only like to see our white kids as the scrappy underdogs, we don’t particular care to see them successful and coexisting with an equal number of black athletes.
In short, I’d go as far to say that Spike really was right about all of us — we really are racist deep down, even if we don’t want to be.
And no, that’s not why I’ll be rooting for Duke tonight — it’ll even be an older and more deeply ingrained reason than race as to why I’ll be rooting for the Blue Devils tonight: I can win some money if they do. Pretty easy.
But if you’re pulling for Butler because they’re the Cinderella, and they have beaten some bigger, badder schools on the way to tonight’s NCAA Championship game…it might be time to start substituting the races for the adjectives like scrappy and athletes.
It might make us all better people in the end.