When March Madness descends upon the nation, it doesn’t feel crazy to us to cast off our daily cares to worry about more important things — like how to build a winning bracket or find the bar with the best big-screen TV.

We know that for a three-week stretch, there’s no better drama on television than the NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Tournament. With its wild buzzer beaters, long-shot underdogs, and towering powerhouses just waiting to be toppled, it’s reality TV at its best. For fans and viewers, there’s not a segment to be missed, and that’s why Evansville Living and CBS 44 WEVV (with its exclusive broadcast coverage) teamed up for this tournament playbook with a distinctly Evansville twist. It’s filled with our winning picks for how to enjoy the season of madness from Selection Sunday all the way through to the Final Four.

Want even more? Tune in to CBS 44 WEVV on March 20-21 at 11 a.m. for the CBS 44 WEVV – Evansville Living Hoops Preview Show for color and commentary from Tucker Publishing Group president Todd Tucker and other local experts.
The Heart of Hoosier Hysteria
By Louis LaPlante

Hoosier Hysteria is ingrained. It’s a disposition. It’s who we are. And though it’s been mythologized, even popularized (the movie Hoosiers, anyone?), Hoosier Hysteria isn’t exaggerated. The first game played outside of basketball’s birthplace of Massachusetts – home of the game’s inventor James Naismith – was in Indiana.

The Hoosier version of Naismith’s game improved and strengthened the sport when, in 1892, an Indiana preacher used iron hoops attached to old coffee sacks as goals instead of Naismith’s peach baskets.

Thirty-three years later, Naismith traveled to Indiana to watch the 1925 state high school basketball championship tournament games that attracted 15,000 fans. He left impressed with how Hoosiers had embraced his game. “Basketball,” Naismith said, “really had its origin in Indiana which remains the center of the sport.”

No team may personify that better than “Team Joe Willis” – five Evansville septuagenarians who brought home the national title last year from the Senior Olympic Games in Louisville. The men – Bob Walker, Joe Willis, Bob Ewin, Jim Duffey, and Rich Koressel – grew up learning to play the game on dirt courts and neighborhood playgrounds.

Willis, a Baptist preacher who serves as team captain, describes their style of play as “fundamental basketball.”

The team defeated opponents from throughout the nation in a 34-team tournament over four days, playing three on three for a half-court matchup. Their only loss came to a northern Virginia team in pool play, but Team Joe Willis bounced back in the championship round, leaving Evansville at 3:30 a.m. on a Monday to make to make the 7 a.m. tip-off time, then won four games in one day to claim their gold medals. The roars from the crowd came, Walker says, from the men they’d defeated over the weekend who cheered for “those Indiana boys” because their style of play is how basketball should be played: rebounding, blocking out, filling the lanes.

It’s the kind of game Willis mastered as a star player at Chandler High School more than 50 years ago, playing for Gene Cato, who’d later go on to become commissioner of the Indiana High School Athletic Association. “I didn’t have natural ability,” Willis claims. “I wasn’t a jumping jack.” But to be good, “Nothing replaces determination,” he says. A thought echoed by his four teammates.

Perhaps best known among the five is Walker, who learned the game as a kid hanging out in the gymnasium at the old Carpenter School in Downtown Evansville, and became a standout at Central High School and Evansville College, where he was coached by the legendary Arad “Mac” McCutchan. Today, Walker remains one of the university’s career leading scorers with 1,044 points. His seven-year record as head coach at North High School is 102-61, and his stint as assistant coach includes a state championship. It was a run to the top that included their slogan “How sweet it is!” among Huskie fans. Walker has long since retired from coaching, but his home office is a shrine to the game and adorned with painting by artist Wendell Field, titled (of course) “Hoosier Hysteria.”

Duffey, meanwhile, grew up in Greene County, Ind., across the street from a playground with a basketball hoop. In 1955, he earned a spot on the Butler University basketball team playing alongside Hoosier Hysteria poster boy Bobby Plump. It was Plump’s last-second shot for tiny Milan High School in the championship game in 1954 that became known as “the shot heard ‘round the world” and the inspiration for the movie, Hoosiers. Duffey played against some of the era’s best, including University of Cincinnati superstar and NBA Hall of Famer Oscar Robertson.

Koressel also loved the game as a child, but his college career was shorter-lived. The Mater Dei High School graduate attended Evansville College at the same time as Walker but played on the college’s junior varsity team, known as the Deuces. Koressel took one look at his first report card and knew his hoop dreams needed to take a back seat to his engineering scholarship. He ended his college career with two points against Murray State University.

Ewin, meanwhile, grew up playing on outdoor dirt courts. It wasn’t until he was a junior that his school, Millersburg High, built its first gymnasium. He taught and coached basketball in the Warrick County school system for 41 years and picked up the sport again two years ago when Willis tapped him for his Senior Olympics squad. Ewin was 69 at the time. “If I’m ever going to play anymore,” Ewin said to himself, “I’m going to have to get going.”