This post isn't Hancock County related, but it's about a neighbor that's very special to fans of Indiana high school basketball.
The lights go out. The spotlight is focused on one corner of hardwood after the teams have headed to their locker rooms.
Thump. Thump.
Two teenagers -- one male, one female -- in full Indian regalia slowly work their way around the floor.
Thump. Thump.
The anticipation builds. Tipoff is a few minutes away, but no regular-season game can go on without this ceremony. It's psyched out opponents, worked up a crowd that has seen it countless times -- many in the stands have witnessed this same ceremony hundreds of times. The people in the costumes change, but the moment doesn't.
A maiden and brave dance -- authentic and kitschy at the same time -- has been a part of every Anderson High School basketball game since time immaterial. It has survived many coaches, many players, many recessions, many tourney near-misses. And it's survived two Wigwams.
Once upon a time, the thump, thump of the drum would eventually work nearly 9,000 fans into an uproar. But when I finally witnessed a part of this timeless Indiana tradition, only a smattering of the Wigwam's 8,998 seats were occupied by Anderson followers in red and green, and fans of the opposing school in blue and gold.
Sure, it was a weeknight in the middle of December, but this was only two decades removed from a day when Anderson High School sold 5,000 season tickets, while neighboring Madison Heights and Highland High Schools routinely played in front of full houses at gyms about half the size of the Wigwam.
Now, both of those schools are memories -- Madison Heights painted over in Indian red and green a few years back, Highland turned into a junior high a year ago. And now, one last Anderson tradition appears to be gone.
This week, the Anderson Community School Corporation board voted 6-1 to shutter the Wigwam, citing high operating costs. The building is 50 years old, and since the closing of the 1910-built Anderson High School -- which later burned to the ground -- has stood alone, guarding over West 14th Street in Anderson while the student-athletes who inhabited it every Friday night went to school a few miles down Madison Avenue at a building that once housed the Madison Heights Pirates.
In my professional life, I've been fortunate enough to coach or cover varsity games in some great gyms -- the Muncie, New Castle and Southport fieldhouses, Richmond's Tiernan Center, Rushville's Memorial Gym, Muncie's Ball Gym and Knightstown's Hoosier Gym among them. But there was something magical about the Wigwam. I'll be honest -- it was a terrible place to cover a game as a media member, and it wasn't too comfortable for players and coaches to do their jobs, either. It was always incredibly hot in the building, and those of us working the game had to do our jobs from the stage in one end zone -- which doesn't provide the best view of the game for a reporter or broadcaster attempting to keep accurate stats or describe the game to our listeners. Right below us, for many years, were the team benches -- on the baseline in the same end zone, where one coach was always watching his team from behind, with the action taking place 60 feet from the benches half the game. The IHSAA finally made the teams move to their traditional sideline positions a few years back.
But that view was awesome at the same time. One could sit on the stage and see nearly 9,000 blond wooden bleacher planks topped with red wrapping around the gym, in two decks that went up as far as they could be.
This place seemed magical, from the moment I heard of it, reading about the fanaticism of its inhabitants in books like Philip Hoose's "Hoosiers: The Fabulous Basketball Life of Indiana," which spent its entire first chapter on Anderson and the Wigwam, the basketball epicenter of the state's hoops culture, where demand for sectional tickets was once so great, an annual draw had to be held to give fans an equal shot at tickets (and fans would buy season tickets to neighboring schools to have a better shot at sectional tickets). It was a place where college classmates would talk about how the entire county would band together to root against the three Anderson schools. It was a place where, even through listening to the great WLHN broadcasts hosted by announcers like Bill Stanczykiewicz and the late Rod Brooks -- two of the many great radio broadcasters who described the action of the local heroes -- hearing them pause to allow the public address announcer to say "Welcome, sports fans, to the Wigwam" and the ensuing roar from an overflow crowd before the lineups could make the hair stand up on your neck. For a Hoosier hoops junkie, this HAD to be the place where you visited. I always begged our high school coach to put Anderson on the schedule just to see and experience the place. After all, we played Muncie Central and Highland. Finally, as a young sportswriter with the Daily Reporter, I took a rare night off and dragged myself to the inaugural Madison County Tournament just to see the place -- even though I covered close to 100 games a year and could probably use a night away from a gym. When Greenfield-Central put the Indians on the schedule the next year, I called dibs and covered the game.
Back in the heyday, the Wigwam place was so galvanizing, a trip to crosstown Highland (where the 4,000+-seat Bob Fuller gym was packed that night even though Highland's girls were playing in the 1992 regional final at exactly the same time) netted lots of evening conversation at the concession stand before the tipoff (and of course, a fife & drum corps playing Scotland the Brave before the game -- the northeast siders' version of the Maiden and Brave dance). None of it was about the aforementioned Highland girls, nor about the HHS basketball team that was ranked third in the nation at the time. all of it was about the Anderson-Richmond game going on across town that night (and all of it assuming Richmond would win. Anderson would win the sectional that year -- Richmond its one and only state title).
There was magic just walking into the Wigwam -- seeing the old team photos on the wall, walking through the catacombs looking older than they really were, and then seeing thousands of seats open up in front of you. Unfortunately, that magic wouldn't last when you walked around the upper deck and wondered "what was it like 10 years ago when these seats were packed."
Things have been moving toward the inevitable for a long time. As noted, Madison Heights closed and its gym was painted over to be a mini-Wigwam (it's called the Tee Pee and has hosted the AHS girls team since the move down the street -- and was the home of one of the greatest tourney games I've ever witnessed, when Anderson beat G-C in double OT in the 2005 girls sectional). Highland is no more. The battered American auto industry has seen many old North Central Conference towns fall into decline, and Anderson -- a town with huge General Motors plants -- was probably hit the hardest. With that, the population has been in decline, creating a spiral that's been hard to shake. Much of Anderson's season ticket base kept getting older, and there weren't any younger fans left to take their place when they passed on.
Class basketball has also shifted the spotlight into the county, where neighboring Lapel and Alexandria have won Class 1A and 2A titles and Pendleton Heights has advanced to the semistate level in both boys and girls basketball. It's made playing for those schools as attractive as being an Indian once was -- and created an easier path to a state title in those communities than would be possible in Anderson, which hasn't won a title since Jumpin' Johnny Wilson led the Indians to the title in 1946. Open enrollment has claimed more of Anderson's population, as many would-be AHS students -- and children of Anderson, Highland or Madison Heights alumni -- are now driving out of the city to Frankton, Lapel, Pendleton Heights, Yorktown and other nearby schools. Their parents now support those teams. The great Anderson sectional -- which brought about story after story after story every night -- went away, and the Wigwam hasn't hosted a tourney game in years.
As a tourney venue, Hancock County teams had some good memories there. The great Eden teams of 1945-46 didn't play their regional games in the current Wigwam, but the original 5,000-seater next door that burned down mysteriously in 1958. However, in the last days of single-class basketball, the winner of the Hancock County sectional -- which was often Pendleton Heights in later years, but New Palestine in 1997 being the last such local team -- fed through the Wigwam. NP would eventually fall to Delta -- another conference squad that went on to dazzle the state and become the last single-class runner-up.
The Wigwam's likely swan song happened a couple of weeks ago, when the Indians rallied to beat Chatard in front of a nostalgic, half-full house. However, to me, the real "last dance" happened in 1998. Anderson and Pike were ranked 1-2, and met in the Wigwam in the old ill-fated one-game regional. The place was stuffed to the gills and WNDY-TV beamed it to a statewide audience to watch two great teams go toe-to-toe and decide who would move on. With the place rocking and 9,000 fans stuffed into every corner of the gym, Pike survived a heated game and went on to win the first Class 4A championship, while Anderson suffered another near-miss -- just like had happened in all those single-class years.
The magic just seemed to go away after that night. The crowds dwindled, the town kept dying and nothing ever could quite revive either. I still have that game on tape -- as a Pike grad, I was a bit interested in the outcome and was out of town that night -- and never erased it. I only wish I could've witnessed one of those great nights in person when the place was packed.
Since that night, the inevitable has been seen in rapidly-declining crowds, which would now comfortably fit in the Tee Pee most nights. Anderson has tried -- staging a "Fill the Wigwam night" a few years back -- and hosting an all-day Wigwam Classic the last two years -- but it just hasn't been enough to bring the fans in. They just aren't there anymore. The magic just seemed gone -- it's hard to get excited to play or watch a game in front of 7,000 empty seats and remember that supercharged atmosphere.
In a way, it's been a microcosm of what's happened in Indiana high school basketball, where the fan decline began to accelerate about two decades ago due to a confluence of factors -- the rise of the NCAA Tournament's popularity, the rise in success of big-city teams with smaller fan followings, the eventual coming of class basketball, which took the decline of fans and moved it to warp speed.
Hopefully, someone will step up and find another use for the Wigwam -- a community center, a place for travel basketball games like the Spiece Fieldhouse or the Fishers Fieldhouse. Other iconic arenas have been shuttered and reopened. In Marion, the old Coliseum is still in use as a YMCA. In Vincennes, the old Adams Coliseum was used by the local private school for many years. In Brownsburg, the Varsity Gym was used as a community fitness center.
For the Anderson Indians, life will go on. There will be another team take the floor next November -- either in the Tee Pee or at the slightly-larger Bob Fuller Memorial Gym at the old Highland building. There will still be a trip to the Lemon Drop or Art's Varsity Pizza on the way there. But it won't quite be the same without walking into the gigantic brick cube with the Indian head on the side.
A place that was built 50 years ago because a 5,000-seat gym was never big enough now suddenly is too big. Unfortunately, this is likely to be the first of many of the still-existing great old gyms on the endangered list.
The thump, thump of the drum and the P.A. announcer's one sentence greeting whipping 9,000 fans into a frenzy has faded into history. But for many of us, our memories of when the Wigwam was the epicenter of one of the greatest cultural phenomena in America will never go away.
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