About 10 minutes into the 2000 movie “The Replacements,” Gene Hackman’s character asks Keanu Reeves’ washed-up quarterback Shane Falco if he knows who he is.
“You’re that old coach from the ’80s,” Falco says.
Hackman, who died Thursday at age 95, hadn’t acted in the last 20 years, but his passing brought back fond memories for generations of filmgoers of decades of memorable roles and lovable characters.
It’s impossible to distill his career down to just a few movies, but for sports fans, they’ll think of two, and especially the clever nod from Falco to the 1986 classic “Hoosiers,” which had Hackman as Norman Dale, a fictional high school coach in 1950s Indiana.
If “The Replacements” has a cult following for one of Hackman’s final acting roles, “Hoosiers” is one of his most iconic. Both characters are out-of-work, out-of-luck coaches leading underdog teams to predictable movie success, though “Hoosiers” is a little more subtle in unfolding its story.
Hackman was convincing as anything — a cop, a lawyer, a cowboy, a soldier, heroes and villains alike — but he always seemed right to play a coach. Even back in 1969, when he wasn’t even 40 yet, he played Robert Redford’s ski coach in “Downhill Racer,” always conveying toughness, authority and respect — and of course, a great quotability.
“My team is on the floor,” Coach Dale famously tells the official expecting him to replace a player who has fouled out of the team’s first game. Dale was unrelenting in his desire for his team to pass the ball at least four times before taking a shot and proved his point by choosing to finish the game short-handed.
“It was Dentyne,” Hickory High’s Buddy Walker says to Dale, long after his coach had told him he wants him to play defense so pressing that he knows what brand of gum his opponent is chewing.
“Hoosiers” was set 35 years in the past, yet was so ahead of its time. We learned about meddlesome parents and boosters, the fear of a high school athlete’s life peaking at 17 years old and quick-cut musical montages of a team’s steady improvement. I still like the little things you notice: The actor who plays principal Cletus Summers is Sheb Wooley, who sang “The Purple People Eater” back in the 1950s, and the assistant coach who proclaims “Coach stays!” is also the Mountie who says, “I don’t approve of your methods” in “The Untouchables.”
“Hoosiers” was in the middle — some would say the heart — of an amazing five-year run of sports movies, after “The Natural” and leading up to “Bull Durham” and “Field of Dreams.” You can argue “Hoosiers” is one of the best, if not the best, sports movies ever, still good for goosebumps in the state final no matter how many times you’ve seen it. So much of that is Hackman, playing a flawed character who has to win the audience over as he does the team and the town.
We lost Hackman on Thursday, but we also found him again, with social media flooded with old clips from a career so long and varied you’d forgotten huge movies he was in, scenes you hadn’t seen in decades, like Hackman himself. The back-and-forth with Denzel Washington in “Crimson Tide,” the absolute camp of his Lex Luthor in the Superman movies, the frenetic car chase in “The French Connection.”
I spent $3.95 to rent “Hoosiers” on Thursday, and it holds up so well almost 40 years later, the formula for so many sports movies that followed. You know Hickory is going to win the unlikely championship, and you still watch the old coach from the ’80s.
Sports was just a small part of his body of work, but for a trip back in time as Norman Dale, Hackman was irreplaceable.
Greg Auman is an NFL Reporter for FOX Sports. He previously spent a decade covering the Buccaneers for the Tampa Bay Times and The Athletic. You can follow him on Twitter at @gregauman.
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