JIMMY CHITWOOD SHOOTING; LITERARY FEUDS

Jerry Crowe, of the LA Times, wrote about Maris Valainis the actor who appeared in the   movie “Hoosiers”.

“The man who made perhaps the most famous shot in cinematic hoops history never played high school basketball.

“I tried out three years in a row,” Maris Valainis says, “and I got cut three years in a row.”

But as Jimmy Chitwood in the venerated 1986 film “Hoosiers,” Valainis calmly sinks the game-winning jumper to give the Hickory High Huskers the 1952
Indiana state title.

Movie fans haven’t forgotten.

Valainis says he’s still recognized from his portrayal of Chitwood, whose shy, reserved personality is similar to his own.

“When I’m playing, yes,” says Valainis, whose picture-perfect shooting form can still be seen in Southland pickup games, “and when I’m out sometimes too.

“If I’m in a social situation, I’ll get a lot of, ‘You look really familiar to me.’ And then finally someone will figure it out, which is amazing to me that 25 years
later people would remember.

“But I guess it was pretty popular.”

In fact, “Hoosiers” ranked 13th on the American Film Institute’s list of America’s most inspirational movies. USA Today readers voted it the best sports movie of all time and a 2008 AFI poll of 1,500 artists, scholars, critics and historians placed “Hoosiers” fourth in a ranking of greatest sports films behind “Raging Bull,” “Rocky” and “The Pride of the Yankees.”

It seems to be especially popular among basketball lovers.

Valainis, 47, says that even NBA players have done double takes when meeting him. One was Kobe Bryant, leading to a round of golf with the Lakers star.
George Steinbrenner once told the filmmakers he’d seen “Hoosiers” about 250 times.

The movie’s David-vs.-Goliath tale, inspired by the true story of a small-town team from Milan High winning the 1954 Indiana state championship, obviously resonates with viewers.

“As kids growing up in Indiana, we all knew the Milan story,” Valainis says during an interview outside a coffee house in Redondo Beach. “I had a friend that had a Super-8 version of the final game, and we’d sit around and watch it.”

Valainis’ character is based on Bobby Plump, who in 1954 made the championship-winning shot for Milan.

But Valainis, though portraying the star player, was not the star of the movie, which featured Gene Hackman in the lead role, supported by Barbara Hershey and Dennis Hopper.

Valainis speaks only four lines.

“I got something to say,” he says as Chitwood, addressing a gathering of townspeople intent on ousting Coach Norman Dale, Hackman’s character. “I don’t know if it’ll make any change, but I figure it’s time for me to start playing ball.”

Then, after announcing his return to the team after a self-imposed exile, Chitwood adds, “There’s one other thing: I play, coach stays; he goes, I go.”

In the climactic scene, shot at Butler’s Hinkle Fieldhouse, Chitwood wears a pained look as Dale sets him up as a decoy on the final play, finally telling the
coach, “I’ll make it.”

Moments later, he does.

“What you see is what actually happened,” Indiana-born director David Anspaugh says on the DVD release of the movie. “Maris hits it on the first pop.”

Valainis was a Purdue student in 1985, spending the summer at home in Indianapolis, when a “Hoosiers” casting director spotted him playing basketball and asked him to audition.

Showing up at an open call the next day, he stood last in a line of about 600 would-be actors and was about to leave until the casting director noticed him and pulled him inside.

“I dribbled a few times, shot a few shots,” Valainis says, “and he says, ‘Why don’t you come down tomorrow and read some lines?’ If I wouldn’t have walked in when I did and he wouldn’t have walked out when he did, I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

Valainis, nearly 6 feet 3, isn’t exactly sure why he landed the role but notes, “It was probably a look more than anything, and I could play halfway decently, I guess.”

During shooting, Valainis says he was bitten by the acting bug. Encouraged by Hackman, he moved to California after the movie wrapped to pursue a career in front of the camera.

But after landing small roles in films starring Sean Penn, Michael J. Fox and George Clooney, he walked away.

“I enjoyed it — when I got work,” says Valainis, a construction consultant who lives in Costa Mesa with wife Sheri and their two young daughters. “I don’t
think people realize how talented these actors are and how much work goes into it.

“Maybe at the time, being so naïve and having something almost handed to me, I maybe took it for granted a little bit. It’ll eat you up if you do that. You can’t take it for granted.”

A former scratch golfer who walked on to the golf team at Purdue but didn’t make it into matches, Valainis worked in golf-course management before landing his current job.

But he’ll be known forever, of course, as Jimmy Chitwood.

“I remember the director saying right before we started filming, ‘Just remember when that camera’s rolling, you’ve got to give 110% because it’s going to be on film forever,’ ” Valainis says. “We all took that to heart, and I think it really showed up.”

Feuds seem to be very interesting to a lot of people. Norman Chad, the syndicated writer (I’m in awe of that- the fact that he’s in syndication) lists and describes several:

“In the 19th and 20th centuries, there were old-fashioned literary feuds: Herman Melville-Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scott Fitzgerald-Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac-Allen Ginsberg. In the 21st century, there are newfangled media feuds, multiplatform spats played out loudly and loutishly on radio, TV and the Internet.
It makes you pine for the simpler, saner days when Leo Tolstoy challenged Ivan Turgenev to a duel.
Here is a brief catalog of recent media squabbles:
Keith Olbermann vs. Bill Simmons: What happens when the 800-pound anchor monster bumps into the 800-gigabyte Web monster? Ka-BOOM! There was massive ego fallout over three continents and the Canary Islands. The new-age spit fight was provoked by Simmons’s ill-conceived live-chat notion that Tiger Woods’s comeback would be more difficult than Muhammad Ali’s comeback.
The MSNBC host blogged, “I am again left to marvel how somebody can rise to a fairly prominent media position with no discernible insight or talent.” The
ESPN.icon responded by tweeting that Olbermann is “a pious, unlikable blowhard.” Then it got ugly, and, well, I felt so uncomfortable, I left the cyber room Charles P. Pierce vs. Bill Simmons: Actually, this one was the undercard to Olbermann-Simmons, also caused by The Sports Guy’s Woods-Ali comparison.
Pierce, who blogs for the Boston Globe, wrote “that young Bill perhaps is unread on the subject of The Sixties, possibly because ‘The Karate Kid’ was not set in that era.” Let me say this: Pierce is one tough customer and I would not want to provoke him. Plus, he’s maybe the smartest sports journalist around — I couldn’t out-write him if I had a 2,000-adjective head start and I was rooming with Don DeLillo. So if I were Simmons, I’d alphabetize my 1975-78 Red Sox baseball card collection and pray Pierce doesn’t show up on at my front door with a gaggle of angry soccer moms.
Tony Kornheiser vs. Lance Armstrong: On his radio show, the balding, aging, mildly contemptuous ex-newspaperman made fun of cyclists for the 739th time, suggesting they should be run off the road by motorists. The seven-time Tour de France champion responded on Twitter, “What a f—– idiot.”
Lance, buddy — you need to get off your bike and smell the shtick. Kornheiser belittles everything. He’s basically at odds with the world around him; heck, he talks about his rabbi behind his back.
I’d understand if Lance were critical of Tony’s “Monday Night Football” work, but in this instance, it’s just a harmless circus act. Anyway, Kornheiser
apologized — lately, he says he’s sorry more often than Jesse James on E! — and Armstrong went on his radio show, where they enjoyed a disingenuous truce.
Michael Wilbon vs. John Feinstein: This was a minor dustup between the affable “PTI” yapper and the boorish serial typist. They disagreed about
something — believe it or not, partly in regard to Tiger Woods — and got into a war of words; because of Feinstein’s involvement, it was a rather poorly
written war of words (what, you think we’re talking Norman Mailer-Gore Vidal here?). I’m not even sure what they were arguing about, I’ll just side with Wilbon (or, as I always say, when in doubt, root against Duke). The kerfuffle was eventually settled by — of all people — Kornheiser, which is like having a prison tiff officiated by Charles Manson.
Deadspin vs. Sean Salisbury: This is an ongoing smackdown between the tragically hip Web site and the comically unzipped ex-NFL analyst. Deadspin
delights in reporting embarrassing things about Salisbury; for instance, Deadspin alleged Salisbury engaged in “sexting,” which prompted his firing from a Dallas radio station. Salisbury finally imploded and exchanged many misspelled e-mail diatribes with Deadspin’s editors before following through on a threat to sue the site for defamation. Then it got uglier, and again, I had to vacate the cyber room for safety.
Couch Slouch vs. local liquor store: My problem is this — I’m such a media lightweight, nobody feuds with me. So I have to pick my fights elsewhere.
Anyhow, my easy-to-walk-to liquor mart has stopped selling PBR in a can. A liquor outlet not selling Pabst? That’s like Sears not selling Maytags. It’s
un-American. My first instinct was to challenge the proprietor to a duel, but I still had to pick up some Diet Mountain Dew Code Red from the place.

Ask The Slouch
Q. If it’s your job to stay home all day on the couch watching TV and drinking beer, then what do you do in your leisure time? How do you tell the difference?
(Mark Burack; Silver Spring)
A. When I’m working, I drink PBR in the can. When it’s leisure time, I pour the Pabst into a chilled mug.
Q. Why are there commercials on every channel at the same time? (Kenny Younes; Crofton)
A. The business of America is business; I don’t know who first said this, but I first said it when I was 4, watching “Captain Kangaroo.”
Q. When a basketball player misses a free throw, he usually gets hand slaps from the rest of the team. Do other writers shake your hand when you make a
typo? (Jeff Stover; Bohemia, N.Y.)
A. No, but we fist-bump when I libel someone.
Q. For LeBron James to leave Cleveland, doesn’t he need to win the Cy Young Award? (Mitch Margolis; Woodbine, Md.)
A. Pay the man, Shirley.
You, too, can enter the $1.25 Ask The Slouch Cash Giveaway. Just e-mail asktheslouch@aol.com and, if your question is used, you win $1.25 in cash!