“Every week of the tournament was another celebration. “We paraded around like rock stars,” says Bock. The Adams players were princes for a month - and for a program that had never advanced out of the regional. Four weeks in a row fans jammed the facility for midweek pep rallies. The Eagles played to mostly packed houses at the intimate gym known as Hadaway’s Shack - with its short court plus a stage at the east end - over on Twyckenham Drive. Single-class high school basketball was king. Why does that epic day in Bloomington - many Adams fans missed the beginning of the Adams-Anderson game while driving through a snowstorm - remain so prominent? Maybe it’s because of the cultural changes.īack then, there were no laptop computers, no video games, no cell phones, no other electronic distractions. To other members of that team, the run down state to Bloomington (the tournament finals moved for three years to Assembly Hall while Hinkle Fieldhouse was being renovated and Market Square Arena was being built) remains larger than life in their memory banks. Head coach Dave Hadaway passed away last September after battling Alzheimer’s. Star guard Jimmy Webb died way too young back in 1988, succumbing to kidney cancer at age 33. Why does the 2016 IHSAA rendition qualify as noteworthy? It’s the first for which the two most accomplished members of that Eagle squad will not be around to see. That 1972-73 season still brings back a flood of memories for anyone connected with those halcyon days. The Eagles later that same day dropped the championship contest, 74-69, to New Albany.Īs the latest IHSAA event concludes this weekend, that Adams team now views its accomplishment 43 years in the rearview mirror. They still watch the black-and-white images, all a bit blurry and containing stone-age graphics, of their record-setting 99-95 victory that remains the highest scoring game in Indiana state finals history. They did mail-order business with the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame, purchasing now-out-of-date VHS tapes of their John Adams High School boys basketball victory over favored Anderson in the 1973 Indiana High School Athletic Association state semifinals. Heisler, a senior associate athletics director at the University of Notre Dame, is a 1973 John Adams graduate and was a student manager and statistician for the Eagles’ boys basketball program during the school's 1973 run to the state title game. Editor's Note: With another chapter in high school boys basketball state championships to be written this weekend, John Heisler looks back at a special time in South Bend.
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