On Saturday, Erin and I decided to take a weekend drive out to New Castle, Indiana to see the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame. In a state where Oscar Robertson, Bobby Plump, and Damon Bailey are the other trinity, this New Castle museum does a nice job of showing some of the highlights of Indiana's crazy basketball past.
There are nice exhibits covering the 1954 Milan tournament win chronicled in the movie "Hoosiers," the rise of Crispus Attucks High School and its star, Oscar Robertson, and the 1990 state title game where 41,000 packed the Hoosier Dome to watch Damon Bailey. And then there's the John Wooden exhibit. The exhibit features a wax (?) figure of Wooden speaking to wooden (hah!) cutouts of basketball players. He's neatly dressed in a suit and tie, and when you press a button, a DVD projects the real Wooden's face onto the figure, and it gives a pep talk to the boys. There was something very creepy about the whole thing. I kept expecting blood to start oozing from Wooden's eyes and him go all zombie on the boys. Very strange.
The museum was run by a lovely group of elderly women who were eager to tell us about all of the attractions to be seen in Henry County. We nearly had to make a run for it to get out of a lingering conversation about the Wright Brother's Birthplace. All in all, it was definitely a worthwhile trip, and we'd highly recommend it as a quick day trip from Indianapolis on a weekend.
There are nice exhibits covering the 1954 Milan tournament win chronicled in the movie "Hoosiers," the rise of Crispus Attucks High School and its star, Oscar Robertson, and the 1990 state title game where 41,000 packed the Hoosier Dome to watch Damon Bailey. And then there's the John Wooden exhibit. The exhibit features a wax (?) figure of Wooden speaking to wooden (hah!) cutouts of basketball players. He's neatly dressed in a suit and tie, and when you press a button, a DVD projects the real Wooden's face onto the figure, and it gives a pep talk to the boys. There was something very creepy about the whole thing. I kept expecting blood to start oozing from Wooden's eyes and him go all zombie on the boys. Very strange.
The museum was run by a lovely group of elderly women who were eager to tell us about all of the attractions to be seen in Henry County. We nearly had to make a run for it to get out of a lingering conversation about the Wright Brother's Birthplace. All in all, it was definitely a worthwhile trip, and we'd highly recommend it as a quick day trip from Indianapolis on a weekend.
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Bret, Karen and I took Mamaw and Papaw to Amish country a few years ago and stopped in New Castle at the museum on the way home. On a later trip to Bedford, I took him to the NCAA hall of fame in Indy and the following day we met Drew and went to New Castle to the museum. I thought you had gone with us on that latter trip. I agree, it is a nice museum. As a result of our trip, I persuaded Papaw to put together an exhibit on basketball in Lawrence County. That is what prompted him to go to the various schools and make a copy of their team pictures.
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