Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (52 page)

On page 163, we told the story of the Milan Indians, the small-town
basketball team that inspired the film
Hoosiers
. But a few miles
northwest of Milan, another Indiana team was about to make
history of their own—and change the face of basketball.

In the United States of the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was a fact of life. The racist organization was at its zenith, with nearly five million members nationwide, and Klan-backed politicians rose to power in many states, particularly in the Midwest. Nowhere were they more politically powerful than in Indiana, where the governor, the mayor of Indianapolis, and a majority of members in the state legislature had Klan ties. In this atmosphere, the city of Indianapolis decided to build a segregated all-black high school—the only one in the city—in 1927. In defiance of its racist origins, the school’s first administration named it Crispus Attucks, after an African-American sailor and runaway slave who is said to be the first American killed in the Revolutionary War.

Racism was so prevalent in the school’s early days that it was barred from the Indiana High School Athletic Association, and its basketball team had to travel out of state to find teams who would play them. Even after they were allowed to play in Indiana (starting in 1943), they played mostly small rural schools, where team members were often subjected to racial slurs. The rest of the state avoided them—bigger schools didn’t want to compete with (or get beaten by) an all-black school.

Taking a “don’t rock the boat” approach, Crispus Attucks’s principal, Russell Lane, thought of sports as a way to show the black community in a positive light. To that end, he recruited players
who he believed would be well behaved and keep their tempers in check. The basketball team was coached not to guard white players too closely, to keep two hands on the ball except when dribbling, and not to lift their feet off the ground when they took “jump” shots.

But when Ray Crowe took over as coach in 1950, things changed. Crowe agreed that sports and sportsmanship were a way of breaking down barriers between the races, but he also believed that everyone—black and white—respected excellence and competition.

Crowe coached a more aggressive offense, with more emphasis on speed and ball-handling, and utilized a man-to-man defense instead of the traditional zone defense. He emphasized fundamentally sound basketball, but he wasn’t opposed to a little flash too, though it took him a few years to fully embrace it. Under Coach Crowe, the Attucks scored more points than most high-school teams did, and they ran up and down the floor more. He also recruited bigger, more athletic players than most high schools did. The result was a new kind of basketball.

In the early 1950s, Coach Crowe, like Principal Lane and many others in the African-American community, worried how white Indianapolis would react to an all-black winning team. They soon found out.

In 1951 the Crispus Attucks Tigers made it all the way to the Regional Finals, where they played all-white Anderson High School at the 15,000-seat Butler Fieldhouse. The game was sold out—black fans rooted for Attucks, white fans for Anderson—and the event was broadcast on radio and fledgling TV stations across the state. Before the game, Principal Lane gathered the team in the locker room and delivered a lecture on the “importance of good sportsmanship” (code for “don’t play too aggressively”), much to the players’ and Coach Crowe’s dismay.

The game lived up to all the hype. Down by 10 points with less than four minutes to go, the Tigers’ Willie Gardener and Hallie Bryant stepped up their offense, repeatedly stealing the ball and
scoring easy fast-break baskets. With 11 seconds left, the score was 80–79 Anderson. Crispus Attucks had the ball, and Coach Crowe set up a play for Bryant. At the last minute, he also put in sophomore Bailey “Flap” Robertson. The inbounds pass was deflected to Gardener, who quickly passed it to Robertson in the far corner. Robertson jumped and let the ball fly—and Attucks won the game, 81–80. It was the greatest win in school history, making Attucks the first all-black basketball team ever to advance to the State Championship Final Four.

But then something happened: In the Semifinals, Coach Crowe backed off, sounding less like himself and more like Principal Lane. He lectured the team on good sportsmanship, or what he saw as “the relationship between the players’ attitudes and the morale of the community.” Flap Robertson wasn’t even called on to play in the game, perhaps because he was only a sophomore but perhaps because his style of play was a little too flashy and he was known to “talk trash” to other players and even to referees.

Crispus Attucks lost in the Semifinals to Evansville Reitz, 66–59. Afterward, Coach Crowe took responsibility for the loss. He knew he hadn’t let the team play all out, and that had been a mistake. He never coached that way again. “We were not ready,” he said later. “And that was my fault. I made up my mind right then that we would be back, and the next time we would be ready.”

But though the Tigers lost, they’d made it farther than any Attucks team ever had, and became the first Indianapolis team—black or white—to make it to the state Final Four. Their success inspired the black community and gained them new respect in the press…and even among some white fans. But one fan was probably more inspired than any other by the team’s win. That night, Flap Robertson’s 13-year-old brother, Oscar, went to sleep thinking of the glory the Tigers had achieved and dreaming of his own future.

Do you tune in to your local news on television each night? Every year, fewer people do. In some U.S. markets, the viewership for local news has declined by more than 50 percent since the 1980s. And as more people get their news from cable and the Internet, advertisers aren’t willing to pay the same money to sponsor local newscasts as they once did. The only way for the stations to get that vital ad revenue back is to get those viewers back. To do that, the local newscast has been revamped significantly over the last couple of decades.

The most obvious change: the weather report. Local weather is the reason most viewers tune in, so that segment has become much longer, taking up to 20 percent of the entire broadcast; the most expensive ad slots come prior to and after it. But that still leaves about 17 minutes of news to fill up with the top local stories, a segment sent directly from the network covering the day’s national stories, plus sports, traffic, and a “puff piece” at the end.

To fill up those 17 minutes, the stations get news stories from wire services or online services. But sitting alongside actual stories from legitimate outlets such as Reuters or the Associated Press are well-produced news reports that aren’t really news at all.

They’re called
video news releases
, or VNRs, paid for by corporations and produced by public relations companies. “A VNR is a short clip of marketing propaganda produced in the language and style of real news,” explains tech journalist Farhad Manjoo in his book
True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society
. “Public relations firms send news stations thousands of such videos every year, the most sophisticated of which are virtually indistinguishable from honest news, featuring interviews with (paid) experts
and voice-overs by (fake) reporters who subtly pitch products during their narratives.”

Another benefit: VNRs give stations provocative stories they can use in promos to “tease” viewers into watching. So not only does the station get a news story for free, they get one that can increase ratings…and ad revenue. Perhaps you saw one of these VNRs:

•
What you don’t know about flu season might kill you!
This two-minute VNR began with the results of a “national flu survey” that stated that people don’t take flu season seriously enough. A “family doctor” warns of the risks of dehydration and even heart failure. Then the narrator says, “But there’s a new product on the market which simultaneously treats multiple flu symptoms: Zicam flu medicine.” The only edit that most stations made before running the segment was to remove the corporate logo at the end.

•
Is your child’s iPod a portable pornography machine?
This VNR, which ran during the 2005 holiday shopping season, reported that the Apple iPod Nano is capable of video, and because it can connect to the Internet, kids could easily access what the narrator referred to as “iPorn.” Newscasters teased it as “the scariest gift of the season.” (It turns out that the VNR was made by a firm hired by Apple’s competition—Panasonic, Namco, and Techno Source.)

•
Coming up: Do you have that Latina Glow?
This VNR about strong Hispanic role models aired on the E! network, VH1, and some Spanish language stations. It centered around Jennifer Lopez’s accomplishments, including launching her own line of perfume, “Glow.” The story’s main purpose: to sell the perfume.

•
Tomorrow begins National Pancake Week!
In March 2006, several stations ran a 75-second VNR that talked about the benefits of “heart smart” pancakes. The segment made multiple mentions of Bisquick and Betty Crocker products, both of which are owned by General Mills, who paid for the VNR.

Consumer advocacy groups such as the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) have been lobbying the federal government to crack down on commercialized news. But it isn’t that simple
because, technically, the practice is legal. If the companies paid the stations to run VNRs,
that
would be illegal. But because no money changes hands, no “payola” (or pay-for-play) laws apply. What is illegal, however, is news stations failing to inform viewers that they’re watching an ad. The CMD did a 10-month study of stations all over the United States and found that 77 had tried to pass off fake news stories as real. On the heels of that report, the FCC fined each of the stations approximately $4,000 per violation.

But the fines have done little to slow down the practice. And the FCC never addressed the VNRs that were paid for by the federal government. In 2005 the
New York Times
reported that PR firms hired by the Bush administration provided local stations with VNRs that showed the president’s policies—mainly the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—in a positive light. From the report:

As alarming as the implications are—the government controlling the flow of news (as is the case in China)—the practice, so far, has been quite limited compared to the staggering number of corporate VNRs that are continually fed to local newsrooms.

As long as news organizations need money, it looks as if they will remain open to new options. For example, in 2009 a PR firm representing McDonald’s made a deal with a local Las Vegas morning news show to place the restaurant’s new iced coffee drinks on the table in front of the newscasters during the “Lifestyle” segment. When asked what the newscasters would do if they had to report a story that showed McDonald’s in a negative light, the station manager explained, “We’d remove the cups before reading the story.”

The lesson: Take all of your news with a grain of salt…but not just any salt—make sure it’s pure Morton’s Salt!

 

THE LEGEND:
In a scene in the 1987 film
Three Men and a Baby
, Jack (Ted Danson) and his mother (Celeste Holm) walk through the rooms of Jack’s apartment carrying the baby that was left on his doorstep. In the rear of the scene you can see a mysterious human figure standing behind curtains in a doorway. About the size of a child, it’s wearing a white shirt and black pants and carrying a long black object that appears to be a gun. Who is it? It’s a ghost. No one really noticed it until the movie came out on home video in 1988. That’s when the filmmakers researched it and found there was no one on set at the time who matched the description of the “ghost.” More research revealed that the ghostly image looked exactly like a nine-year-old boy who had accidentally shot himself in the apartment where the movie was filmed.

HOW IT SPREAD:
This is one of the most famous movie-related urban legends of all time, but it’s unclear how it spread. One theory: The
Three Men and a Baby
ghost started appearing in newspapers and on TV magazine shows in 1990, right around the time the sequel,
Three Men and a Little Lady
, was hitting theaters. The suggestion is that Universal Studios, the production company behind the movies, invented the legend as a publicity stunt.

THE TRUTH:
There
is
a figure in the scene in question. But it’s not a ghost. It’s a standee—a lifesize cardboard cutout—of Ted Danson. His character, a famous actor, has a lot of old movie promotional materials lying around the house. The cutout depicts Danson in a black tuxedo jacket, matching pants, and a white shirt. The curtains obscure the jacket, with the visible part forming what sort of looks like a gun. The standee reappears throughout the movie in the background. And no boy shot himself in the apartment where the movie was filmed, because it was filmed on a soundstage in Toronto.