SportsLit (Season 8, Episode 4) - Jack McCallum (Sports Illustrated) - The Real Hoosiers

Jack McCallum is on the case of the Crispus Attucks Tigers, a young Oscar Robertson, and purloined glory in the heartland of hoops.

In The Real Hoosiers, his 12th book, McCallum dives into why Indiana celebrates the 1954 Milan Miracle, and the film “Hoosiers,” more than Attucks. Repping a school community forced into existence in a “bewildering and openly racist big-city educational system,” future NBA assist king and players’ union leader Robertson and his teammates won back-to-back Indiana schoolboy titles barely a decade after the competition was opened to Black schools. It was the first time anywhere in America that a Black team had won ‘State,’ and that gets into some “freighted” history.

Best known as a longtime NBA writer at Sports Illustrated, McCallum’s basketball books include Dream Team, Golden Days, and Seven Seconds Or Less. He also detailed a personal health challenge in The Prostate Monologues.