Two We Lost (1948, 1986)

One you know, and one you may not have known.

This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture and politics, and everything in-between.

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I. Gene Hackman (1930-2025)

Let me start here, since this is (at least ostensibly) a newsletter about sports: Hoosiers (1986) was not Gene Hackman’s best movie. It was arguably not even among his 10 best movies. In fact, here are 10 Gene Hackman movies, in chronological order, that I believe are empirically better movies than Hoosiers:

1. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

2. The French Connection (1971)

3. The Conversation (1974)

4. Night Moves (1975)

5. Superman (1978)

6. Mississippi Burning (1988)

7. Unforgiven (1992)

8. The Firm (1993)

9. Get Shorty (1995)

10. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

I could probably name 10 more, because nearly every movie Gene Hackman made was interesting, usually because he was the one who made it interesting. He was not as flamboyant as some of his contemporaries, but his work may wind up being more lasting than many of them. And this is especially the case with Hoosiers, which is an otherwise very traditional sports movie that Hackman (who died this week at the age of 95) manages to elevate into a classic by turning his character—a basketball coach trying to harness his own volanic temper, an unspoken homage to the most controversial coach in Indiana basketball history—into the kind of tortured soul who makes an indelible impression. Hoosiers is of that brand of mythical sports film that came around in the 1980s and 1990s in a more optimistic American era. It is, in retrospect, quite gauzy and formulaic, though it managed to transcend some of that formula through its use of unique detail. Still, if a film like that doesn’t have a central performer of Hackman’s caliber, the way Robert Redford elevated The Natural, it can feel empty and cliched (see Rudy).

“All of (screenwriter Angelo Pizzo’s) knowledge…would be pointless without Hackman’s great performance at the center of this movie,” wrote Roger Ebert in his four-star review of Hoosiers. “Hackman is gifted at combining likability with complexity – two qualities that usually don’t go together in the movies.”

There are far better and far more complex sports movies than Hoosiers¹; there are far better and far more complex Gene Hackman movies than Hoosiers. (The Conversation is one of my favorite films of the 1970s, and I still haven’t entirely grasped the meaning of it.) This is Gene Hackman’s legacy: He elevated every one of his films into something far more real. He grounded them in a unique kind of truth, and in an era where the truth feels lost, I suppose that counts for something.

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II. Lou Prato (1937-2025)

There is, at nearly every major institution worthy of preservation, someone who documents the history of that institution. At Penn State, Lou Prato, who died this week at the age of 87, was that guy for the athletic department, and particularly the football team. I first became aware of him over two decades ago; I was a young writer who working on one of many book ideas that went nowhere, and as part of my research for that idea, I picked up Prato’s massive Penn State Football Encyclopedia, a 650-page tome that eloquently recapped every single Penn State football season from 1881 through the late 1990s.

Back in the pre-Wikipedia age, I owned dozens of these kinds of reference books, all of them written by historians and obsessives like Lou, who dove so deeply into a single subject that they were willing to devote their lives to it. What set Lou apart was his background: In the decades before he became Penn State’s preeminent historian, he was a journalist, working as a writer and a broadcast news director. He had a fealty to Penn State, but he also had a fealty to the truth, as it was when I contacted him over a decade ago for a profile I was working on about the former Penn State football player Wally Triplett.

Over the course of the years since that article ran, Triplett’s story has become an essential part of Penn State’s mythology. And it is a hell of a story, because Triplett, as one of two black football players at Penn State in 1946 and 1947, experienced bigotry both at home and on the road. That led his teammates to boycott a game in segregated Miami, and then to insist that their black players travel with them and stay in the same lodging with them during the Cotton Bowl against SMU in 1948. The story went that one of Penn State’s captains, during a team meeting, declared, “We are Penn State. It’s all or none”—and the myth went that this was the direct inspiration for the We are…Penn State chant that is perhaps the university’s most iconic tradition.

Lou knew that wasn’t true. And Lou would tell anyone who listened that it wasn’t true—that, in fact, the chant had been originated by Penn State cheerleaders in the late 1970s and early 1980s who apparently had no knowledge of the words reportedly uttered in the Penn State locker room four decades earlier. Lou understood that the truth did not take away from the courage of Wally Triplett and his teammates—“the spirit behind the cheer was what mattered to Wally,” he once told me in an email. He understood that somehow glossing over the truth in order to embrace a convenient myth was a betrayal of his principles, both as a journalist and as a historian. And as best as I can tell, Penn State’s official history now reflects that truth.

There is a complexity (and sometimes even a danger) to telling the truth about something you hold dear, especially at this tenuous moment. I think Lou understood that, and this is what made him so valuable to the place that he loved.

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This newsletter is very much a work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas for future editions? Contact me via twitter or at michaeliweinreb at gmail, or leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please subscribe and/or share it with others.

1. Here are five off the top of my head: Slap Shot, Moneyball, North Dallas Forty, Breaking Away, Raging Bull.