Something to Cheer About

Release date: April 27 ltd

Distributor: Truly Indie, Lantern Lane Entertainment
Director/Screenwriter: Betsy Blankenbaker
Producers: Betsy Blankenbaker, Willie Merriweather and Oscar Robertson
Genre: Documentary
Rating: Unated
Running time: 64 min.

The 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking professional baseball’s color barrier is fresh on the minds of sports fans, and moviegoers won’t have forgotten last year’s college basketball integration flick Glory Road. So it’s a good time to release this modest yet important movie, made in 2002, about African-Americans who made a landmark contribution to racial sanity in sports on the high-school level.

The story begins in 1927 when the city of Indianapolis, under pressure from the Ku Klux Klan, established an all-black high school in order to keep blacks and whites apart and the former subjugated. Crispus Attucks High School (named after the first person killed during the Revolutionary War) was a tool of segregation that seemed to thrive. In 1950, Ray Crowe, an African-American coach with a painfully ironic surname, took over the school’s basketball program and encouraged kids from the city’s poorest neighborhoods—accustomed to playing street ball—to join the team and get an education.

Crowe was first and foremost interested in the development of the whole person, but he was also committed to winning. The success bred by his philosophy and the team’s innovative playing style made white and mixed-race teams from around Indiana eager to play a team with no home court of its own. The Attucks Tigers became the first all-black high-school hoops team in the country to win a state championship in 1955. Overcoming endemic prejudice as well as biased officiating, the squad headlined by Oscar “Big O” Robertson—considered among the best all-around basketball players ever—went undefeated the next season and repeated.

The movie is a straightforward chronicle built on player testimonials and interviews with Crowe, who passed away shortly after it was completed. Filmmaker Betsy Blankenbaker, whose father was a friend of Crowe’s, sold her house to finance the project, and it deserves to be cheered by a wide audience. - John P. McCarthy -