A few years back, if I recall properly, Mishawaka and South Bend were looking for a slogan that could help attract tourism.
Our state had chosen the phrase “Wander Indiana.” The impression was that we would have to look really hard in a lot of places for something useful to do.
Local leaders too were looking for something flashy to tout our unique assets. That’s how I ended up with a column suggesting “At Least We’re Not Kokomo.”
The premise was that most of us had driven around Kokomo dozens of times on trips to Indianapolis. For all we knew, Kokomo was like our own Roseland, just a collection of gas pumpers and burger cookers. We in Mishawaka might not be cool, but at least we had more to offer than that.
I had a flashback of sorts a few days ago when I saw photographs of the new sculpture honoring Marvin Wood at Mishawaka’s Central Park.
The life-size bronze figures honor Marvin’s most famous moments as coach of the state-champion boys basketball team in 1954. His Milan Miracle team, beloved by small-town basketball fans everywhere, served as the basis for the hit movie “Hoosiers” in 1986.
I thought I knew Marvin fairly well by the time the movie came out. He had been the boys basketball coach at Mishawaka High School when I joined the South Bend Tribune in 1978. During the season, I would spend my Monday afternoons talking with Coach Wood at Mishawaka, Bill Wilson at Marian and Ike Tallman at Penn for a weekly roundup on local teams.
That 1978-79 season was particularly brutal for him. His Cavemen won just two of 21 games, beating only Marian and New Prairie. His next season was better, with a 10-12 record, but it was his final one with high school boys.
He stayed on as a counselor at Mishawaka High and filled in as the girls basketball coach there during the memorable 1982-83 season. That team battled its way into the semistate tournament, finishing with a 22-2 record.
Later, he coached at Saint Mary’s College, served on the Mishawaka Common Council and continued to be one of the city’s treasures. He exuded decency wherever he went.
He was battling cancer when I last saw him, at a city council meeting a few months before his death 24 years ago, on Oct. 14, 1999. I always had the sense that he was more concerned about me and others than he was about himself.
In the 20 years I knew him, I remember only one conversation about the Milan Miracle. “Oh, that,” I recall him saying. “We were so blessed.”
He was young, just 26 years old, when fame found him. In 25 other boys basketball seasons, his teams totaled 300 or so more wins, and he is a member of the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame.
My best memory of the man isn’t about any of those wins. It is from one of the blowout losses his Cavemen suffered during that 2-19 season.
I can’t remember which one exactly because they lost six times by 30 or more points. It could have been against Plymouth (80-29), Adams (101-60), LaSalle (84-40), Elkhart Central (70-38), Elkhart Memorial (97-57) or Michigan City Rogers (92-52).
At one of those, I went into the Mishawaka locker room after the game to get a quote for the next day’s paper. I would not have been surprised to see players and coaches yelling at each other or crying because of the embarrassment of losing so badly.
Instead, I saw Coach Wood moving from player to player with words of encouragement. It was like, “Remember how we said No. 34 would try to get you to fall off-balance by driving you to the right? And in the third quarter, you saw that, adjusted and got the steal?”
He was coaching a learning team, not a losing team. Each player, as I recall, got a Popsicle.
I can put this scene into words but not into bronze. But if it were my call, that’s the Marvin Wood we would see in the city park. He had 329 locker-room celebrations but also 279 losses. We in Mishawaka knew him as someone who looked past the final scores – and who didn’t let events from 1954 change how he lived the rest of his life.
I’m glad to see Mishawaka remembering this great human being.
But when I see the statues, I feel like I’m seeing a moment that belongs to someone else and should be in some other place. It’s wrong, but it’s almost as if we don’t have something important of our own, so we’re leaning on Milan.
I suppose it could be worse. At least, it’s not Kokomo.