In ‘Hoosiers,’ Gene Hackman gave us Norman Dale, a basketball coach we can’t forget

When great actors die, our grief multiplies. It feels like we lost them and every character they blessed with humanity. The emotions are deceiving because their art makes them eternal, but for those of us who become saddened while we watch a favorite movie starring a person no longer here, the pain is real nonetheless. The body of work is immortal. The soul is elsewhere.

That’s how it felt Thursday night when I sat and watched Gene Hackman play Coach Norman Dale one more time in “Hoosiers.” The world learned about the mysterious death of Hackman, his wife and a dog earlier that morning. Even though Hackman was 95, the news came as a shock. Even though he left acting behind 20 years ago, it seemed as if he was ever-present. And even though he had more than 40 years of memorable roles in film, television and theater, he will always be known as the most aspirational coach ever brought to life on screen.

RIP, Gene Hackman. And RIP, Norman Dale. It was necessary to say goodbye to both, which is crazy because, in “Hoosiers,” Dale came into our lives for one season, led Hickory High School to an improbable 1952 state basketball championship in Indiana and lingered in glory as the closing credits rolled. There is no “after” to Dale’s story. We don’t know whether he continued at Hickory or leveraged the success to rebuild the college coaching career he lost for hitting a player. We don’t know whether he helped Jimmy Chitwood play at the next level. We don’t know whether he married Myra Fleener. And that’s the beautiful part, the unknown. It’s always 1952, and Dale is always managing his temper, teaching his players how to win together and learning when to let go and trust.

How wonderful would life be if it paused at our finest, most clarifying moments?

If it were so easy to rewind the best times in perpetuity?

We can research what happened to Milan High, the school of 161 students that won the 1954 Indiana state title and inspired the fictionalized “Hoosiers” tale. We can learn more about Marvin Wood, the Milan coach who was quite different from Dale. We can go to Indianapolis and visit Plump’s Last Shot, a restaurant run by the family of 88-year-old Bobby Plump, the 1954 Indiana Mr. Basketball and real-life Chitwood. The truth is its own amazing story. It’s difficult to nail a sports movie because the real drama is already captivating. But in this case, the dramatization of Milan’s triumph captures an idyllic side of sports that remains as enchanting today as it was during the 1986 release of “Hoosiers.”

As Coach Dale, Hackman holds it all together. Other actors, good ones, could have drifted from profound to hokey. Coaches make tricky characters. They’re such stern and stubborn leaders who live by a sometimes indecipherable code. They can straddle the line between complicated and cartoonish. But Hackman had an instinctive feel for people, and with Dale, he created a man with understated strength, a taskmaster with emotional intelligence and a tormented winner yearning to redefine success.

No coach, real or imagined, has ever said so much while speaking so little. Hackman doesn’t waste a syllable in the role. When the coach does have something to say, it endures.

Early in the season, when he was teaching his team to be selfless, he finished a game with four players instead of subbing in a disobedient player. After the referee told him, “You need one more,” Dale shot back, “My team’s on the floor.”

As he sat on the bench, Hackman used his whole body to make the statement, showing both firmness and a hint of resignation. You felt the conflict of a coach hurting his team to help his cause.

“If you put your effort and concentration into playing to your potential, to be the best that you can be, I don’t care what the scoreboard says at the end of the game,” Dale told his team. “In my book, we’re going to be winners.”

The film’s prescient coaching lessons have lasted nearly 40 years. Today, the takeaways are more relevant than ever. Hackman’s layered brilliance explored what a coach is, isn’t and should be. He didn’t do it in a sanctimonious way. He was a flawed coach in pursuit of self-awareness, desperate to save his career while banished to a small town with different basketball tastes. Before he could get better at managing people, he had to learn to manage himself.

We talk regularly now about the evolving purpose of a coach, about how difficult it is to be a no-nonsense disciplinarian, about how so many adults cannot connect with younger generations. But in this movie — easily one of the five greatest sports films — Hackman transformed into a character who evolved from shamed dictator to the ultimate servant leader in less than two hours. By the end, his players were overruling him on what play to call on the final, game-winning possession.

Every coach has borrowed from the “Hoosiers” manual. The most popular cliché in sports is to mention the measurements of the court, or any other field of play, when articulating why a big game on a big stage shouldn’t be intimidating. Interestingly, Dale’s “I think you’ll find that’s the exact same measurements as our gym back at Hickory” line is as true to the actual Milan account as anything in the movie.

Before Jason Sudeikis created “Ted Lasso,” Dale was the coach of our pop-culture dreams. Both fictional coaches show the importance of positive reinforcement in their own way. As an outsider, Dale came to Indiana, mocked the Midwest way of life and then found salvation in blending his style with his players’ values and leaning on unlikely allies such as Wilbur “Shooter” Flatch, the addiction-battling basketball savant he empowered as an assistant coach. The more Dale was willing to be vulnerable, the more he bonded with his new team and community.

And as an outsider, Lasso came to England from Kansas, brought his cheesy Midwest charm with him and reenergized a professional soccer club with his optimism and genuine love for his players. He masked his pain with humor, but the more Lasso was willing to be vulnerable, the more effective he became as the coach of a sport unfamiliar to him.

It speaks to current times that “Ted Lasso” needed to go overboard with sentimentality and transparent tropes to captivate its audience. But the television show was as powerfully excessive as the “Hoosiers” movie was deft in its messaging. They’re unassailable testaments to sports’ ability to motivate, uplift and unite communities. And the coaches radiate integrity despite initially seeming like men ill-equipped to function as philosophers.

But even Lasso knows to bow to Dale. He did it multiple hilarious times during the series, but my favorite was the opening episode of Season 3 when assistants Roy Kent and Coach Beard are talking in the office.

“So I finally watched it,” Kent said. “I liked it.”

Coach Beard mumbled in acknowledgment.

“Gene Hackman was good,” Kent continued. “The drunk geezer. Stuff with the team. I did have one question.”

“Yeah, what’s that?” Coach Beard asked.

Said Kent: “Why the [expletive] is it called ‘Hoosiers’?”

Before Coach Beard could answer, Lasso entered the office with his “Hey, what’s up, sweetie pie?” energy.

We don’t know whether Kent ever received a tutorial on basketball in the Hoosier state. But one thing couldn’t be left unsettled. Not even Kent, the gruff and cantankerous legend, could say a bad word about Hackman.

The actor will be buried soon, and while the coach endures in film, we just know we lost Norman Dale, too.