History of our Hysteria: How Indiana fell in love with basketball Hoosiers and hoops: A match made in Crawfordsville 120 years ago.

Zak Keefer | zak.keefer@indystar.com

CRAWFORDSVILLE — Your pursuit has pulled you here, of all places, a most ordinary sight upon first glance. You gaze around at the 100 block of West Main Street in windy, wintry Crawfordsville, and you see nothing but a nondescript parking lot nestled behind a nondescript bank. This is where it all began, you wonder, this is where the seeds of a state's passion were first planted?

You were expecting more.

A sign sticking out of a small patch of soil speaks to its significance. "The Cradle of Basketball," it proudly boasts. It was here, on this very spot March 16, 1894 — 120 years ago — that a collection of young men from Crawfordsville and Lafayette first tried their hand at a new game.

Indiana, meet basketball.

It seems a gross injustice: a culture born on these hallowed grounds, inside a gymnasium that's been gone a half-century, long demolished in favor of a bank and a slab of asphalt. Hoosier Hysteria's humble origins are now only memorialized by that sign, a memento to which passers-by rarely give a second look.

You're left to consider the game's journey since — of the masses who have crammed into the cathedrals erected to house the contests on their hardwood stages; of the legacies written within these borders, from Wooden to Robertson to Bird to Bailey. The game's impact echoes in what virtually serves as a state soundtrack: Leather smacking against maple, the squeak of sneakers chiming in a warm gym on a cold evening, the whisk of nylon met by the roar of a crowd.

And yet — only a sign? It all began here, when two neighboring YMCAs met on the second floor of the Terminal Building in Crawfordsville for the first organized game of basketball in the state of Indiana.

An account in the following day's Crawfordsville Journal-Review never could have foreseen all that was to come: "Basket ball is a new game, but if the interest taken in the contest last night is any criterion, it is bound to be popular."

Consider it among the greatest understatements in the history of sports.

The game took hold on Hoosiers like nothing before and thrived in Indiana like nowhere else. Seldom was there symmetry between state and sports so seamless, and an undeniable truth remains rooted in Hoosier folklore a century later. Indiana was made for basketball, and basketball for Indiana.

But why? Why from the outset of that first game 120 years ago did hoops and Hoosiers blend so impeccably together?

For the answer, one must begin in a parking lot behind a bank.

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The game was not conceived in Indiana but in Springfield, Mass., in 1892, the brainchild of a Canadian YMCA instructor who stayed up all night one evening desperate to concoct a wintertime diversion for a restless group of young men.

And to his great delight, James Naismith's wintertime diversion — he first called it "Basket ball" after using peach baskets as the original goals — quickly caught on. Soon, Naismith's YMCA proteges carried copies of his 13 rules of the game packed neatly under their Bibles as they ventured across the Midwest, missionaries of the basketball movement.

One of them was named Nicholas McCay, and he was headed to Crawfordsville.

The state McCay settled in was ripe for a new amusement. Baseball had never boomed. As for another sport quickly growing in stature nationwide … "Football is all but dead in Indiana," Isaac Neff, secretary of the Indiana High School Athletic Association, declared in 1912. "Only 20 of our 250 schools had teams on the field for interscholastic games."

Football was a hard sell, after all. At the turn of the century, Indiana was little more than a rural expanse dotted with hundreds of small hamlets spread across its endless plains. The state lacked the heavily populated industrial cities that neighboring Illinois, Michigan and Ohio had. Schools were small. For most, fielding a football team was out of the question.

Basketball, on the other hand, met all the necessary criteria. Because it could be played indoors in the winter, it didn't interfere with harvest season in the fall or planting season in the spring. And best of all: It was cheap. Even the smallest schools had no trouble scraping together five-man teams.

Although the sport was invented in Massachusetts, it was Indiana that provided fertile ground for it to flourish.

"It all boils down to the fact that Indiana was a fundamentally agricultural state," says Dale Ogden, a basketball historian and curator at the Indiana State Museum. "It was all spread out, and consolidation in the schools came late. All you had were kids living on farms miles from each other."

And so, in the winter of 1893, in the YMCA gymnasium inside the Terminal Building at 100 West Main Street in Crawfordsville, McCay introduced Naismith's game to Indiana. He did so with one amendment: Instead of peach baskets, he had a local blacksmith fashion two metal rings. Nailed to the wall, they served as rims, while burlap coffee sacks dangled beneath.

The first organized game came a few months later, a 45-21 victory for Crawfordsville. Yet the final score is not what J.B. Griffith, a player on the winning team, recalled decades later. It was of his bruised knuckles.

"Being just about the tallest and slimmest kid on the floor, it became my job right off to jump each time a goal was made and knock the ball out of the sack," he told the Journal-Review in 1944.

The March 23, 1894, edition of The Crawfordsville Star noted as many as 300 fans paid admission to witness that first game, "crowding into the gallery to look down on the gladiatorial scene below."

Revisions to Naismith's original rules quickly came. Slits were cut into the bottom of the coffee sacks so the ball would slide through (and spare Griffith's knuckles). Free throws were awarded for fouls. Teams were trimmed from nine to five, and in 1898, dribbling was first allowed.

Farm boys statewide fell hard and quick for the new game, and the fire that had been lit by McCay and the town of Crawfordsville swiftly spread. They played on the skating rink in Madison, on dirt fields in Martinsville, on the driveway of a lumberyard in Carmel. There are accounts of others pushing church pews against the wall and dragging desks from schoolhouses into the snow.

"If you grew up in Indiana, the most important thing was figuring out where the nearest basket was," says Les Habegger, raised in Berne in the 1930s. "When our family moved, the first thing my brothers and I did at our new house was look for a spot we could put our backboard up. That's all you did, you just played ball."

Habegger, now 89, recalls his seventh-grade team traveling to nearby Decatur for a county tournament, despite the fact they only had five boys on the team and seven in the entire grade. No matter. They left as Adams County champs. It was the first time any of them had played basketball indoors.

The game became an epidemic because it was so easily accessible. A boy didn't need 10 friends, or five or three. He didn't even need one. Fathers would swipe slabs of wood from the nearby lumberyard and nail makeshift baskets to barns, trees and outhouses. All a boy needed was a ball.

"It was a sport for the lonely," journalist David Halberstam would later write. "There was nothing else to do, and because this was Indiana, there was nothing else anyone even wanted to do."

It also served as a haven to combat the unbearable winter. There was no television and, early on, no radio. But there was basketball. Fans flocked to gyms by the hundreds, even thousands. Rivalries were hatched of one small town battling its neighbor. High school games on Friday nights became the social event of the week.

Indiana had found its pastime.

"In a dark and lonely winter, the gym was a warm, noisy and well-lit place," Halberstam wrote. "For Indiana, basketball was a godsend."

MORE: Buy our book chronicling Hoosier Hysteria

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Yet the confluence of demographics, climate and timing pale in comparison to the final impetus stirring Indiana's basket-crazed soul. It was the vehicle that, more than any other, drove the state's love affair with the game: the high school state tournament.

Appropriately, it was Crawfordsville that won the state's first crown in 1911, commencing a decade of dominance for the Cradle of Basketball. Each of the first eight state champions came from schools within 30 miles of Crawfordsville.

As interest grew, entries into the state tournament skyrocketed. Consider: In 1916, the tournament consisted of 204 teams. Eight years later, the total had grown to 564. By the 1950s, about 900 schools were throwing their hat in the winner-take-all ring. With no professional teams competing for newspaper coverage, the gospel of Indiana high school hoops filled the sports pages. Teenagers with a jump shot became legends; teams that won a sectional lived forever.

"When I was a kid, everyone in my family would fill out the state tournament bracket for all 700 schools, just like everyone does now for the NCAA tournament," says Bobby Plump, the boy from Pierceville, Ind., who grew up to hit the most famous shot in the history of the state.

Plump's basketball arc mirrors the era of his youth: As a 9-year-old, in 1945, he received a basketball hoop on Christmas morning. Sure enough, a few hours later, he was outside shoveling snow so he could try it out.

Plump's goal stood somewhere around 9 feet. When he wasn't shooting at it, he'd play at his friend Roger Schroder's barn, where they'd shove hay bales against the wall, or on a court off to the side of the Schroders' garage, where they'd have to avoid the piles of cow manure in the corner. At night, Plump and Schroder would set a shovel on the roof of the garage, wrap a piece of galvanized metal on the end and string a 300-watt bulb on an extension cord to reflect light down on the court. That way, they could shoot until 10 p.m. in the fall and winter and midnight in the summers.

"Why did we play basketball?" Plump asks, looking back. "Think for a second. I grew up in a town of 50 people. It was the only thing to do!"

The stage Plump starred on years later, Butler Fieldhouse — where he sank the jumper to lift tiny Milan over Muncie Central in the 1954 state title game — proved just as vital as the underdog myth the farm boys of Milan furthered with their historic upset.

Their triumph came to embody the splendor of the single-class system, one in which David always stood a chance against Goliath. Fans couldn't get enough of it. And the later-renamed Hinkle Fieldhouse, home to the state finals for four decades, served as the cathedral where Hoosiers came to worship.

Originally, in 1928, the plan called for a 10,000-seat arena on the campus of Butler University, a head-turning plea for a school of only a few thousand students. But IHSAA Commissioner Arthur Trester, anticipating an explosion of interest, persuaded the school to expand the building to 15,000 by promising to house the state finals there for 10 years.

Trester's foresight paid off. The tournament sold out for 60 straight years.

Furthermore, the construction of colossal gymnasiums (several of which were capable of holding well more than the hometown's population) came to symbolize the game's grip on the state. The rationale was simple: The school with the largest gymnasium hosted the sectional tournament.

"During a 1929 meeting in which a motion to put an extra $300 to hire a librarian was voted down, the Muncie City Council decided to reward the 1928 state champs by spending a hundred thousand dollars to build the biggest gym in America," Phillip Hoose wrote in his 1995 book, "Hoosiers: The Fabulous Basketball Life of Indiana."

An arms race commenced among neighboring towns. Anything you can build, we can build bigger.

Years later, the tangible impact remains in the structures that for decades served as the state's nightclubs. At one point, 15 of the world's 16 largest gymnasiums stood within Indiana's borders.

As the game's popularity boomed, winning came at all costs.

"The notion of amateurism in Indiana high school basketball was a cynical joke," Hoose wrote. "Merchants rewarded winning coaches with bonuses — once a Pontiac sedan — and players with gold watches. Coaches went after the parents of any tall boy who could shoot a lick, promising the father a better job in their town."

Hoose is right. A scroll through the early minutes of the IHSAA proves as much. New Castle once tried to enlist a player on its roster named Raymond Jolly but was punished after it was discovered that Jolly was a 21-year-old student at Indiana University. A 1920 game between Connersville and Falmouth was ruled no contest after the IHSAA learned that fans handed money to the Falmouth players after their victory.

But the scandals did little to stain the sport. Basketball wasn't going anywhere. Not in Indiana.

In 1925, the inventor himself ventured to the Hoosier state and took in the state finals as Trester's guest. On a night when thousands were turned away at the door for lack of space, Naismith looked around at the packed gymnasium and marveled at all his wintertime diversion had become.

"The possibilities of basketball as seen here," he would later write, "were a revelation to me. Basketball may have been invented in Massachusetts, but it was made for Indiana."

MORE: IndyStar book features pictures and stories about Indiana high school hoops

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There should be more than a sign in Crawfordsville, more than a parking lot behind a bank. The sport McCay brought from Massachusetts became embedded in Indiana's identity, as synonymous to Hoosiers as cornfields and race cars.

It galvanized communities, and successful teams became an eternal source of pride.

It created heroes of boys such as Bobby Plump, their legends born of nothing more than a jump shot.

It spurred towns to erect stadiums that fans filled to the rafters, thousands upon thousands there to witness for themselves leather smacking against maple, sneakers chiming in a warm gym on a cold night and the whisk of a net met with the roar of a crowd.

Now, as Indiana and the nation turn their focus to a spectacle Naismith never could have foreseen, the modern-day NCAA tournament, it is appropriate to look back. To think of that first game in Indiana, 120 years ago today, of the nine-man teams, of the iron rings and coffee sacks. Of games with no dribbling, of set shots and bruised knuckles.

Who could have imagined all that was to come?

Call star reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.