We headed up Rte. 3 in eastern Indiana today, stopping first at the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in New Castle. Fascinating, and quite elaborate place. Of course it is Indiana, where basketball is a close second to breathing. At the Hall of Fame we learned the legendary James Dean, before he was a Hollywood rebel, was a “rebel on the hardwood” for the Fairmount (IN) Quakers in 1949. After viewing displays about Oscar Robertson, Larry Bird and a host of other homegrown Hoosier basketball players — I came to the “Miracle of Milan” display. A short video here explained that in 1954, this tiny school in Milan, Indiana did the impossible. On a last second shot by a boy named Bobby Plump, Milan beat the tremdously bigger Muncie Central: to win the state championship. The movie “Hoosiers” was based on this team. (During campaign 2000, I was asked by a Fox News reporter in Indianapolis to characterize our campaign. I said: “Have you ever seen the movie Hoosiers?) After the Hall, we headed north where we stopped at Muncie’s Annual Black Expo. Part of the event, included a basketball tournament at an outdoor court. The stands were full, with neighborhood people enthusiastically cheering their teams. I couldn’t help but think this day tht we should be supporting these local teams, and local players, much more than we do. And, wouldn’t it be nice to see “Halls of Fame” in every town in America — featuring these same local ‘sandlot’ players.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We headed up Rte. 3 in eastern Indiana today, stopping first at the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in New Castle. Fascinating, and quite elaborate place. Of course it is Indiana, where basketball is a close second to breathing. At …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}