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If anyone in America knows what a miracle basketball team looks like, it is the man who hit the last shot that won tiny Milan High School the Indiana state championship in 1954, which inspired the movie “Hoosiers.”
All these years later, a tiny school from Jersey City is starring in its own real-life movie, and Bobby Plump — the inspiration for Jimmy Chitwood in ”Hoosiers” — understands better than most anyone why Saint Peter’s has captured so many hearts and imaginations.
“That’s nationwide, where we were only statewide,” Plump told The Post, “but that ended up being worldwide with the movie ‘Hoosiers,’ but they’re having a great time, I’m sure of that.”
The Peacocks, 40 miracle minutes from the Final Four, battle North Carolina on Sunday night, and Bobby Plump is certain they have a shot.
“My impression would be that they’re not thinking, ‘Oh, my goodness, we’re here, what the hell is gonna happen to us?’ ” Plump said. “They’re playing just like they played during the season. And, you know, strange things can happen.
“They’ve got a great possibility of winning this thing.”
The Peacocks will feel the same love from the Wells Fargo Center that Plump and his Milan Indians felt at Butler Fieldhouse (renamed Hinkle Fieldhouse in 1966).
“I like the way they distribute the ball,” Plump said. “Their offense is wonderful. I think they got a great defensive team.
“They’ve got a great chance here. Everybody except those that graduated from the university they’re going to play is gonna be for ’em. Just like in our situation, everybody at Hinkle Fieldhouse, it seated 15,000 back then, everybody except the team we were playing was for us.
“I’ll tell ya, don’t count Saint Peter’s out.”
Plump, now 85, has owned Plump’s Last Shot, a renowned Indianapolis sports bar known for its breaded tenderloin sandwich, since 1995. His Last Shot, a jump shot from 16-to-17 feet out with three seconds left gave Milan — population 1,150 — the 32-30 victory over Muncie Central that remains the stuff of legend in Indiana.
“How big of an upset? Well, it was big enough that 40,000 people came to Milan the next day,” Plump recalled, “and Milan’s a town of 1,100. You can’t get 40,000 in a town like that. It was the most major upset ever — and still is in Indiana basketball tournament history. Nobody thought Milan was gonna win except those from Milan.
“The year before, there were fans from Milan that had to borrow money to get back home because they bet on Milan. They cleaned up the next year.”
Muncie Central didn’t get a desperation shot off before the buzzer.
“The tickets were $3.50, you saw two games that morning and early afternoon, and the championship that night, there are people that have come into our sports bar restaurant to tell me they paid $20 to get in to see that final game,” Plump said.
He can still remember the roar that followed Plump’s Last Shot.
“It almost took the roof off of Butler Fieldhouse and then everybody swarmed the court,” he said. “I think we were up on the court an hour-and-a-half before we went down to the dressing room.
“We stayed in Indianapolis that night. Milan is just 45 miles due west of Cincinnati, 80 miles away [from Indianapolis]. That next day we drove down, there was an 18-mile long caravan behind us. We got to Sunman, which is nine miles away from Milan. Cars were parked along the side of the road and people were walking. And we were stopped, and a friend of mine got out of his car, they were behind us in that 18-mile long caravan, he told his wife, ‘I’m gonna walk, you drive.’ He walked the nine miles and beat her to Milan. They had state police in Milan to guard the town, they closed down the town.
“They estimated between 30 [thousand] and 40,000 people came to Milan that day and they came from five different states. We were a bunch of naive kids. You know what we thought? ‘Hey, look what happens when you win a state tournament!’ We thought that happened everywhere. Well, it didn’t.
“But when the movie came out, it took it worldwide. A year-and-a-half ago, I got two letters from kids in Paris, France, asking for my autograph. Nine months ago, a sports announcer from Spain called a friend of mine, wanted to know if I’d be on his program. So the movie ‘Hoosiers’ just took this thing worldwide. It was always in Indiana and the neighboring states. But they made a great movie, and I’m very thankful for it.”
Milan coach Marvin Wood (Gene Hackman played the coach in the movie) instructed Ray Craft to inbound the ball to Plump.
“Bob,” Plump remembers Wood telling him, “you just dribble around until there are maybe five or six seconds to go and you can drive all the way, stop and shoot a jump shot.”
It didn’t unfold that way, however.
“Guess who took the ball out of bounds? I did,” Plump said. “But you know what? Ray got it back to me and it worked all right.”
Plump remembers Wood asking guard Bob Engel before the season if he would consider moving to forward. Plump recalls Engel telling the coach: “I’ll move to forward if you think it’ll make us a better team.”
To this day, that tells Plump everything about why Milan was a champion … and why America has been an eyewitness to magic from Saint Peter’s.
“We may not have had the best talent up and down the line, but we had the best team in the tournament,” Plump said. “Saint Peter’s probably got those same type things. A good team will often beat great talent, that’s why Saint Peter’s is there. Further than that, Marvin Wood didn’t have an ego so big that he forced everything down our throat. If he didn’t know the answer, he sought the answer.”
Saint Peter’s coach Shaheen Holloway seems to know the answer. Exit, Kentucky. Exit, Murray State. Exit, Purdue on Friday night.
“We’re in Big Ten territory, and there’s a lot of Purdue fans around,” Plump said. “There were people that still wanted Purdue to win, but the majority of people, if they don’t have the connection with the Big Ten or Purdue being the last team in the Big Ten, obviously they’re all for Saint Peter’s.”
Was Plump rooting for Saint Peter’s?
“I am now,” he said. “I had two daughters and a son-in-law graduate from Purdue. A little difficult for me to root for Saint Peter’s against Purdue.”
New York and New Jersey, at least until now, have been mostly far from the basketball hotbed that Indiana — the Hoosier state — has forever been, long before the movie.
“If you lived in Indiana the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s even into the ’90s, you lived that story,” Plump said. “I probably have given 500 or better speeches to high schools and different clubs and things. It still resonates.”
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Plump grew up in a small Indiana town called Pierceville.
“My dad, when I was in the fourth grade, built a backboard bought a goal and a basketball and gave it to me for Christmas, hung it up on the highest place we could get, which was about nine feet,” Plump recalled.
He never dreamed of winning the state championship.
“We thought winning the county tourney was the biggest thing,” Plump said. “We never thought about winning the state tournament. It never entered our mind until we got there.”
You had better believe that winning the national tournament has entered Saint Peter’s mind.
“It’ll be a tough game,” Plump said, “but I wouldn’t bet against ’em.”
He was asked what advice he might have for the Peacocks.
“Their coach has plenty of advice for them,” Plump said, and chuckled. “My advice wouldn’t mean anything. But if I was talking to ’em I would just tell them to continue having fun, do what they’ve been doing all during the season and during this tournament. It’s a game, it’s another game like the other games. Play it like you’ve been playing. You’ve done pretty well.”
It was time to go.
“Go Saint Peter’s!” Bobby Plump said.
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