Here is a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about the 1975 Topps baseball set:

​www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/1975-topps-baseball-featured-key-rookies-big-stars-colorful-design/

​Jack McCallum brings his “A” game in his latest book.

A fixture at Sports Illustrated for three decades, McCallum knows when to pass and when to shoot. The basketball analogies are appropriate.

In The Real Hoosiers: Crispus Attucks High School, Oscar Robertson, and the Hidden History of Hoops (Hachette Books; hardback; $30; 336 pages). McCallum digs deep into the psyche of Indiana basketball, a sport viewed with reverence by residents of the Hoosier state.

McCallum strips away the underdog, feelgood Hollywood narrative that made “Hoosiers” such a wonderful movie when it was released in 1986. He instead focuses on the harsh realities of racism, integration and segregation during the early 1950s in Indiana, when Crispus Attucks High School rose to prominence. The school fielded the first all-Black team to win a high school state title in the nation, and was the first to go undefeated in Indiana with a 31-0 mark in 1956. It was also the first squad from Indianapolis to win a state crown.
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While the team lost to unheralded Milan in the 1954 semifinals, Attucks would go 61-1 over the next two seasons, winning back-to-back state titles. The teams would be inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame, each squad earning enshrinement 50 years after they played.

“Their success changed things in (Indianapolis) and went well beyond the realm of high school sports,” Chris May, the Hall of Fame’s executive director who retired after 15 years in 2022, told Sports Illustrated in 2018.
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Attucks had its star player and star coach, with Oscar Robertson on the court and Ray Crowe from the bench. Robertson declined to be interviewed for McCallum’s book, which was not a surprise; he also refused to talk to Sports Illustrated for what became a long feature in 2018 about Crispus Attucks High School.

​Robertson already spoke his piece in his 2003 autobiography, The Big O, but his refusal to lend his voice to McCallum’s narrative is actually a blessing. The subjects McCallum interviews and the extensive research he did provide a deeper, richer portrait of a state invariably called the most northern state in the South — or the most southern state in the North. Take your pick. Less charitably, Indiana has been called the middle finger of the South.

One of my history teachers at the University of Florida, David Chalmers, wrote an exhaustive history of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1960s, Hooded Americanism, and Indiana had more than a bit part. Instead of riding horses to cross-burnings, Klansmen in 20th century Indiana would pull up to gatherings in Winnebagos, he once lectured.
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Those prejudices did not go away easily, even after the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which ruled that segregating children based on race was unconstitutional. Enforcing that decision proved to be slow and torturous, based on personal experience. The high school I attended in Delray Beach, Florida, from 1971 to 1975 did not become fully integrated until the 1970-71 school year, and it took a court order for Palm Beach County to enforce it among all the schools in the county.

Robertson, now 85, was a beloved player at every level of basketball. His enshrinement into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 1980 was a foregone conclusion. Robertson changed the game with his vision as a court general. Averaging a triple-double during the 1961-62 season was an astounding feat. As a high school player, Robertson was named Indiana’s “Mr. Basketball” for 1956.

Robertson retired from the NBA in 1974 after scoring 26,710 points, handing out 9,887 assists and collecting 7,804 rebounds during 1,040 regular-season games, according to Basketball-Reference.com. He won an NBA title with the Milwaukee Bucks in 1971 with Lew Alcindor, who later changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He was also a driving force on the labor side, helping players to bargain more effectively for their services.
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Robertson’s talents “snuck up on you because his brilliance came from fundamentals, versatility, and, above all, consistency,” McCallum writes.

Noted for his 2012 book, The Dream Team, McCallum brings humor, snark and turns many a phrase in The Real Hoosiers, like dishing off no-look passes. His writing is every bit as breathtaking as Robertson’s court demeanor.

A favorite line: Bailey “Flap” Robertson, Oscar’s older brother, “could talk the shell off an egg.”

Of Crowe, who had a 179-20 record in seven seasons at Attucks but was never named Indiana’s Coach of the Year, McCallum writes that he “commanded respect with a tough-but-fair demeanor and a way of getting along with everyone.”

“A man comfortable in both the boardroom … and the locker room,” McCallum notes.

And Crowe mostly knew how to hold his tongue, except in rare instances, but it is hard to imagine why. He was a basketball coach in Indiana, where for a half century “they had been hailed as geniuses, molders of men, pillars of small communities.”

Except those men “were all white,” McCallum writes, noting with irony that Crowe grew up in the town of Whiteland, 19 miles south of Indianapolis. And there was the rub.

The other rub was the officiating, where white referees would whistle calls against Black squads in tight games.

Crowe took over the basketball program at Attucks before the 1950-51 season. The Tigers reached the 1951 state semifinals, featuring Hallie Bryant, Willie Gardner and Flap Robertson.

A poor call against Bryant during the 1953 playoffs — he was whistled for charging when he was knocked to the floor by a pair of Shelbyville players — eliminated the Tigers from the playoffs. Attucks would lose to Milan in the ’54 semifinals.

McCallum observes that Attucks players like Bryant “knew they were much more likely to get bad calls from white refs.”

In a game during the 1951-52 season, Willie Gardner had fouled out and was sitting on the bench when he heard an official call a foul on him.

“I’m right here,” Gardner said, standing up and raising his hand.

Bernard McPeak, a respected Black referee from Pennsylvania, was finally allowed to officiate in Indiana after originally being rebuffed. But as McCallum notes, Crowe was not always happy to see him on the court, noting that McPeak was “bending over backwards” to avoid the appearance of giving Attucks any breaks.

“He was killing us,” Crowe would say.

“Be right without fear. Unfair victory is bittersweet,” was one of Crowe’s principles, McCallum writes. Another one: “No team can beat you at your best; right is unbeatable.”
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So, it is amazing that Crowe’s squads at Attucks High School were so right. From the start, the high school was built for the wrong reasons.

Robertson’s family lived in the Frog Island area of Indianapolis near the confluence of three rivers, “none of them pleasing.” The area was also known as Bucktown, Naptown or Pat Ward’s Bottoms. Robertson grew up viewing the Harlem Globetrotters as role models.

Attucks was built over the objections of the Black community, which did not want a segregated school. Civil rights activist John Morton-Finney called their opinions “downright hostile,” McCallum writes. There was even consternation over naming the school after Attucks, who was killed by British soldiers during the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770.

“It does not appear that his services were such as to call for commemoration of his somewhat unrememberable name,” an unsigned article in the Indianapolis News noted. “Will the pupils of the school be able to remember it, and pronounce it?”

And yet, McCallum writes, there was a “can-do attitude” about the school that was built to “keep Blacks in their place, built by haters, built to fail.” He spends the first chapter walking the halls of the high school, pointing out the notable graduates of the 97-year-old school. Not all of them were athletes; in fact, these alumni made solid impacts on society as a whole, in Indiana and beyond.

Attucks integrated in 1970 by a court order and became a junior high school in 1986. It is now a magnet school for students in grades six through 12.

But during Robertson’s time at the school, Attucks did not have a serviceable gym to play games; many of their home games were played at Butler University. Other schools, like Muncie Central, “played in a virtual palace,” McCallum writes.

That gym held big-time acts like the Globetrotters, the Supremes, and Abbott and Costello, but at Attucks’ home gym, “you could barely fit all three Supremes, and you definitely couldn’t if you added Costello.”
 
Long road trips to play games were common for Attucks, and finding food and lodging was problematic due to the racial mores of the time.

Attucks’ first state title was bittersweet. Players were driven around the city on  a fire truck as part of  a motorcade but were not allowed to stop and celebrate at Indianapolis’ Monument Circle, a tradition for Indiana state champions. City officials were expecting riot-like conditions from Blacks celebrating if they had won the state title.

"There floated a sense of some unease in some segments of the white community, which had never engaged in wholesale racially integrated celebration,” McCallum writes.

McCallum chronicles the key games in Attucks’ state title runs, including a semifinal win in 1955 against Muncie Central, where Robertson made a game-saving steal of a pass that was similar to Larry Bird’s theft against Detroit in the NBA playoffs three decades later.

On March 19, 1955, the Tigers prevailed 97-74 against another all-Black school, Roosevelt High in Gary, to win it all.

“At that age, we had no historical perspective on what it meant for two Black teams to play each other in that setting at that time,” Dick Barnett, a Roosevelt player who would go on to a 14-year career in the NBA, told Indianapolis Monthly in 2014.
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And then there is “Hoosiers,” the film that received two Academy Award nominations. It starred Gene Hackman, best supporting actor nominee Dennis Hopper and Barbara Hershey. Hickory High School, the small school coached by Hackman, mirrored the journey of Milan High, which stunned the field to win the 1954 crown.

Crowe played the coach of the South Bend Central team that lost to Hickory High in the title game of  “Hoosiers.” Flap Robertson also had a role.

McCallum devotes a chapter to the movie, titled, “Separating Fact from Fiction in Hoosiers.” He notes that the real Attucks story has been “subsumed by the fictional story” and obscured historical truth. The film, as most Hollywood efforts have a tendency to do, took broad editorial license, and even though the story was fiction, it mirrored an actual event — sort of.

Robertson and many of Attucks’ fans were furious, McCallum writes, “either with the movie, the misguided interpretations of it, or both, and that is entirely understandable.”

Robertson wondered why the filmmakers “twisted the truth.” When Milan won the title in real life during the 1954 final, Muncie Central was a racially integrated team.

“Hickory defeated a fictional team of Black players, coached exclusively by Black men, whose rooting section consists of Black men, women, boys and girls,” Robertson said. “Is the proverbial race card being played?”

Screenwriter Angelo Pizzo defended the movie, noting that it was not a documentary or a docudrama.

“It’s not 100% Milan,” he told McCallum. “These are completely new characters made out of whole cloth by me.”

That being said, Hoosiers remains one of the great sports movies. I prefer Slap Shot, but perhaps that is because I liked old-time hockey and the Hanson brothers.
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The 1956 state champions were dominated by Robertson, who played a game “as coldly efficient as a Stasi agent.” On Feb. 10, 1956, he scored a career-high 62 points in Attucks’ 76-47 win against Sacred Heart. In the state tournament, he scored a championship game-record 39 points.

When Robertson was asked if a 56-point effort for the University of Cincinnati against Seton Hall, which set a scoring mark at Madison Square Garden, was his biggest thrill, he said no. His career highlight was helping Attucks win a pair of high school state titles.

“A Hoosier has his priorities,” McCallum writes.
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So does The Real Hoosiers. McCallum offers a well-researched, balanced look at a basketball program that broke down racial barriers in a city that was loathe to change. He also offers a sobering look at prejudice that was still prevalent 70 years ago. Readers should be aghast and angry at what took place during the 1950s, and no feelgood movie is ever going to erase that.

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily previewing the high-end 2024 Topps Tribute baseball set:

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/2024-topps-tribute-baseball-information-release-date-checklist/

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about seven 1928 Greiner Bread cards that are headed to auction:

​www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/rare-1928-greiner-bread-cards-part-of-heritage-auctions-sale/

Here is  a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily, looking back at the 1984 Donruss baseball set, which is 40 years old this year:

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/1984-donruss-baseball-still-resonates-with-collectors-40-years-later/