Lots of folks believe Indiana high school basketball died in 1997, when the state’s high school athletics board decided to scrap the winner-take-all playoff format romanticized in the movie Hoosiers in favor of a system that divided schools into classes by size. But at least one guy still thinks Hoosier Hysteria is an affliction worth bearing.
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He’s planned this particular trip since the season’s first tip-off. Every October he thumbs through a copy of Hoosier Basketball, an annual preseason magazine, picks out the high school rivalries, players, and gyms he wants to observe, and makes a plan. His itinerary can morph over the next few months, depending on his schedule, or, more often, if a matchup that didn’t seem compelling at first becomes more so. Lawrence isn’t a stat-head, or even a fan with a rooting interest. He hopes above all for a close game–so he’s disappointed when Boone Grove pulls away from Hebron in the fourth quarter for a blowout victory. He attends both boys’ and girls’ games, and if he roots for anyone, it’s “teams that aren’t particularly talented but play well together. And I don’t care for dirty teams.”
Mainly, however, Lawrence is there to soak up the atmosphere–to smell the popcorn in the gym, hear the band play, and feel the electricity from the stands. “This is the arena where Bob Knight’s philosophy–that what you’re really playing against is the game itself, that if you learn to execute a set of fundamentals to perfection you will have a good competitive basketball team–seems most at home,” he writes. “But, more importantly, this is also the most emotional level of basketball, more emotionally involving for both players and fans. For the majority of players, this is as far as their ‘career’ will go, the highest level of basketball in which they’ll ever participate, and they’re lucky enough to be doing it in the one state where people are most interested in watching them. At a lot of the games (especially in smaller towns and rural areas), it’s simply impossible not to notice the immediacy in the air, how much seems to be at stake, the blurring of lines between ballteam and town. This is not just parents watching their sons and daughters perform in an extracurricular activity: This is an adult community that actively looks forward to each new season. They know who’ll suit up from the JV squad. They not only identify with the action on the court, but, in their loyalty and support, actually feel like they’re a part of that action, a part of any success that the team might have (and they’re right).”
He wasn’t immediately hooked, but then again his weekends were busy with the Boatmen, who soon signed to Warner Brothers’ East West subsidiary. By 1995, though, he was going to games whenever and wherever he could, and his schedule cleared up after East West dropped the band in 1996. Eventually he started feeling like he should have something to show for all the time he’d put in, so he decided to write a book. He visited every one of the state’s 300-some high school gyms, either by going to a game or just walking in during the summertime. “A lot of those were before Columbine,” he says. “I don’t think I could get away with that now.”
When he first moved back to Indianapolis, Lawrence figured he’d be there for five years max. “It’s an easy place to live, rather than a good one,” he admits. Over the years, as he made a career of music, friends and gigs in Indiana led Lawrence to turn down opportunities to move to Chicago (twice) and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, among other places. But now the Vulgar Boatmen play twice a month at the most, and Lawrence has to commute to Bloomington for most of his musical activity: his main sidekick in the live version of the Boatmen is Jake Smith, leader of the Bloomington-based Mysteries of Life. Lawrence and Smith write songs together–two appeared on Distant Relative, the Mysteries’ first No Nostalgia release–and Lawrence has also played piano in the touring version of Smith’s band. Meanwhile the Vulgar Boatmen retrospective is being assembled in Bloomington with Paul Mahern, a former member of another Indiana punk band, the Zero Boys, who sometimes works with John Mellencamp.
