ZestVlog

Western University and Indiana were about to clash for the second night, and Bob Knight was angry. Or maybe he was just being himself. All these years later, those on hand that summer night in 1993 can’t be sure.

This was the final game in “Blue Chips,” a fictional showdown between the illegally re-stocked Dolphins and the nation’s No. 1 team. Director William Friedkin wanted to let the teams — both crammed with NBA talent — just go at it in front of a hoops-crazy crowd in Frankfort, Ind. Then Friedkin and his staff would cut up footage and piece it together for the film. According to nearly everyone’s memory, Indiana won both nights.

Advertisement

Knight was surly, more so than usual. The scorekeeper — yes, there was one — said the former IU coach had argued with a television reporter before the game. Marques Johnson, the former UCLA star who played a Western assistant coach, said Knight was upset that he had to wear his trademark red sweater — the same one he had worn the previous night — for the sake of scene consistency.  Rob Ryder, a basketball consultant for the film, said Knight kept yelling at the scorer’s table to keep the clock running, even during foul shots and timeouts.

“For whatever reason, he didn’t want to be there anymore,” Ryder said.

But Knight still had one last trick to pull. With time running out, Friedkin stopped action to set up the final play. It took 15 minutes to get the cameras and crowd in position, and while the Indiana team waited near the bench, Knight gave the Hollywood Hoosiers specific instructions on how to defend the final scripted play, a lob to Neon Bodeaux, played by Shaquille O’Neal, coming off an All-Star rookie season with the Orlando Magic.  On the scoreboard, Indiana’s lead was reset to 93-92. Time remaining: 12.2 seconds, which gives us time to tell the story of Blue Chips, released 25 years ago.

Let’s start the countdown:

0:12 — ‘It’s a joke’

Ron Shelton was known for sports movies. (“They’re the only ones I can get financed!” he joked.) The University of Arizona alum has also written “White Men Can’t Jump,” “Tin Cup,” “Bull Durham” and “Cobb.”  For Blue Chips, he focused on a college coach who sacrifices his ethics for winning, paying elite prospects to help lift his struggling program.

Shelton’s goal is to tell a good story, but in this case, the NCAA, which he calls a “corrupt organization,” was part of the motivation. “It’s hard to be a Division I coach and be honest,” Shelton said. “Every one of them tells me you cannot be successful and not be guilty of something — you just hope it’s jaywalking. I don’t care if you’re God, you’re going to break the laws. You’ve seen the NCAA manual. It’s a joke.”

Advertisement

0:11 — Transforming Nolte

Shelton insists he didn’t write the coach Pete Bell character specifically with Nick Nolte in mind, but the gruff 52-year-old seemed like the perfect choice. Only hiccup: To start, Nolte wasn’t interested. In an interview with the Directors Guild of America, Friedkin said he and Shelton drove out to Nolte’s house on the beach to try to convince the actor.

Friedkin told him: “You’re not going to play a coach. You’re going to be a coach. I’m going to take you to Indiana, where Bob Knight is coaching, and you’re going to be there every day for practice. You’re going to meet the players. You’re going to meet Bobby Knight. You can ask him anything you want. … In three weeks or a month or maybe it’s going to take longer, I’m going to make you a coach.”

Nolte shadowed Knight for eight days. He attended practice and watched game tape. The IU coach taught Nolte how to talk like a coach and dress like a coach. Nolte even coached a squad of IU recruits in a high school all-star game, losing 118-102. Nolte later told reporters that Knight wrote him a note telling him coaching demands three qualities: passion, commitment and honesty.

Nolte absorbed it all. During filming, he had everything he had learned from Knight printed out and taped to the walls of his trailer, daily reminders of how to act and speak like a coach. By the time he left the trailer, he was transformed.

“Nick Nolte was unreal,” said Mitchell Butler, a UCLA product who played on the Western team. “He would get into character before he got to the studio lot. The (opening) scene where he threw the Sparkletts jugs in the locker room — he was in character for that the whole day, so if you passed him and said, ‘Hey, Nick, what’s up?’ He’d yell at you: ‘WHAT? WHAT DO YOU WANT?’”

0:10 — Finding Penny

Shaq was involved from the start. Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway required more work.

Advertisement

One day, Ryder talked with Kevin Benton (an actor and one of his assistants) and Dan Parada (a casting official) in a bungalow on the Paramount Pictures lot. They leafed through several college basketball magazines, looking for candidates to play Butch McRae, the versatile 6-foot-7 guard from Chicago.

“We couldn’t find Penny’s character for a long time,” said Benton, who also played one of Nolte’s assistant coaches in the film. “We were up against the gun and I was just reading a magazine — I think it was Sports Illustrated — that had an article on him. We really didn’t know much about him because (he was at Memphis State) and we were on the West Coast. I looked at Rob and said: ‘What if we try this guy?”’

Recalled Hardaway: “They called my agent and said they were looking for a basketball player who looked the age of a college guy and could really play. They wanted real basketball players. They didn’t want actors.”

Benton picked up Hardaway at the airport and for a couple of days, they worked on McRae’s lines. Benton told Hardaway what to expect from the audition: Try to be calm. Sell them on who you are. They’re going to ask you to read this dialogue and if you blow it, don’t worry, just keep going.

“At some point, we ended up at Friedkin’s house with Nolte,” Benton said. “I think that was his first call. He had to literally go to the director’s home and work opposite Nick Nolte for the first time ever. I laugh, but I look back and think, ‘Oh, my gosh.”’

Said Hardaway: “It was easy, actually. I didn’t have too many lines. I only had one scene — when I went in with Nick Nolte and asked him if I left (school), would my mom lose her house and job. Kevin Benton taught me my lines and everything was good after that.”

0:09 — Assembling talent

This wasn’t the first basketball movie with a strong Indiana flavor. Eight years earlier, “Hoosiers,” starring Gene Hackman, hit the big screen. Friedkin enjoyed “Hoosiers” but one thing bothered him. The action sequences. Too many actors on the hardwood, he thought. Not enough basketball talent. For Blue Chips, he wanted basketball players.

Advertisement

Aside from Western and Indiana, Blue Chips needed to field two more teams for the movie, which meant  Ryder needed to recruit more than 40 players who recently had graduated or left college. He went to work, securing commitments from players such as Arizona’s Chris Mills, Tennessee’s Allan Houston, Wake Forest’s Rodney Rogers, Purdue’s Matt Painter, as well as North Carolina’s George Lynch and Rick Fox.

“I know in the movie we had over a dozen (NBA) first-round draft choices,” Ryder said. “The only guy that really ticked me off that we couldn’t get was (Michigan’s) Chris Webber, and I’m not exactly sure why.”

“It was kind of like a big old reunion,” said former Indiana guard Jamal Meeks, who played on the fictional IU squad. “You had a lot of big-time players here for this glorified pick-up game, which was awesome.”

0:08 — A Blue Devil in strange colors

Knight assembled most of Indiana’s roster, lining up, among others, former players Calbert Cheaney, Eric Anderson, Keith Smart and Greg Graham. He told them that some of the money earned would go to the IU Library Fund on behalf of the basketball program.

Recalled Smart: “Coach Knight just said, ‘Hey, I’m doing this movie. We want you in it to play a role as one of the players.’ That’s it. No negotiation. It was just, ‘OK, Coach, we’ll be there.’”

Knight also wanted Bobby Hurley. When this leaked, it actually made headlines in Indiana. After all, Hurley had helped Duke knock IU out of the 1992 Final Four — and now he was going to wear cream and crimson.

“I was really still very intimidated playing for Coach Knight, but I had a lot of respect for him,” said Hurley, who had just been drafted by the Sacramento Kings. “He kind of reminded me of my dad, (a strict Hall of Fame high school coach in Jersey City, N.J.). I always threw a lot of lobs and behind-the-back passes and I just thought: I have to be very fundamentally sound this weekend, just bounce passes, chest passes.”

Advertisement

Hurley recently had signed a sneaker deal with ITZ — In The Zone — and he had hoped to wear the shoes during filming. Shortly upon arrival, he found out otherwise. “Coach Knight wasn’t having that,” Hurley said. “He said, ‘Find Hurley a pair of Adidas.”’

0:07 — ‘I got this shit’

In addition to Shaq, Penny and Matt Nover — a former IU post player cast as Ricky Roe — Nolte’s Western squad mostly featured former UCLA and USC players. (According to Parada, actor Jim Caviezel — who later starred in “The Passion of the Christ” — was in consideration for the Roe role. Caviezel ended up as a “Blue Chips” extra.)

Also on the Western roster: Anthony C. Hall, a budding actor. Hall had played basketball with Shelton and Benton at the Hollywood YMCA, so getting an audition as an extra was easy enough. But he wanted more. He told them he wanted to read for a part. Which part? Hall told them he hadn’t seen the script. They handed him one. Hall quickly scanned it, saw there was a part for an actor named “Tony,” and thought: “My name’s Tony. That’s the part I want.”

He got it.

“That’s my closed-mouths-don’t-get-fed story,” Hall said.

He has one more.

His first day of shooting. His biggest scene. The one where Coach Bell comes to Tony’s dorm and asks about an alleged point-shaving incident. Hall and Nolte had rehearsed. Both felt good. They get to the UCLA dormitory — where the scene was shot — and were ready to go.

“I think I got this shit,” Hall said. “I do exactly what I’ve done in every take and every rehearsal. But Friedkin wanted more. For some reason, every time we would start he would cut the scene and come in screaming and yelling. ‘Tony, what the fuck is going on? Don’t you get the fucking scene?’ He did this probably like four or five times. Then he got to the point of screaming and yelling at me: ‘Do you trust me?’ Yeah, I trust you. I’m wondering, ‘Where the fuck are you going with this?’ and then he slaps the shit out of me. ‘Now do my fucking scene’ and walks out. I look at Nick Nolte. He turns his head. And I’m like, ‘What the fuck just happened here?’ But I know what he wants from me now, and I give it to him — but I think he could have verbally told me that shit.”

Advertisement

0:06 — Shaq shenanigans

When asked about Shaq, everyone says the same thing.

Marques Johnson: “Shaq was great, man. He would come in after the game and everybody started dancing, doing this kind of tribal dance that they’d do, and he’d get on the floor and do a break dance and spin on his head and spin on his neck.”

Mitchell Butler: “He was absolutely nuts. NUTS. I mean, what you see is what you get. The guy hasn’t changed in 30 years. In 30 years, he’s the EXACT SAME GUY.”

Hall: “Shaquille was bubbling with personality. Of course, that’s going to come across on screen.”

Butler: “I remember a time, we were in-between shooting and he had a golf cart, so he and Anthony Hall were in the front. His cousin and I are in the back and we’re going down this hill and we’re going pretty fast. We get to the bottom of the hill and Shaq does this fishtail and whips the cart around. I’m holding on really hard. His cousin flies out of the golf cart, rolls into the gravel. He’s got scratches all over him. Shaq is laughing so hard, and I was like, ‘Dude! You tried to kill him!’ Shaq’s like, ‘Get in, I’ll take you back up the hill.’ I’m like, ‘No, I’m OK.”’

0:05 — An NBA bond

This wasn’t the first time Shaq and Penny had hooked up. In 1990, they were teammates at the U.S. Olympic Festival in Minnesota, where they had played well together and helped the South win gold. (In fact, in their first game, Shaq posted the first triple-double in festival history.) “We were there for about a week,” Hardaway said, “but other than that, I really didn’t know him.”

Despite finishing 41-41 during Shaq’s rookie season, the Orlando Magic won the NBA Draft Lottery for the second consecutive year. Most thought Orlando would pair Shaq with Michigan forward Chris Webber. But after working out with Penny on Blue Chips, Shaq had other ideas. “This is my CEO mentality,” Shaq once told the website Grantland. “I said, ‘I know C-Webb is a great player, but Penny — I need Penny.’”

Advertisement

Although Penny doesn’t remember specific conversations about teaming up in Orlando, Shelton insists it happened. “I remember listening to them talk,” he said. “(Shaq said) ‘I got to get you on my team.”’

0:04 — Hoosier hysteria

Much of the film was shot in Los Angeles, but Friedkin knew that to make “Blue Chips” authentic, he had to shoot the basketball scenes in Indiana. Knight suggested Frankfort, a basketball-crazed town of 15,000 about 50 miles northeast of Indianapolis. It was wild.

“That gym we used was a high school gym out in the middle of a cornfield,” Shelton said, referring to the 5,000-seat arena at Frankfort Senior High. “It was like, ‘Are you kidding me? Out in the middle of a cornfield, they built Madison Square Garden? It was really obvious: It was God, family and basketball — and you name the order.”

Players got a police escort. Restaurants displayed “Go Dolphins!” on their marquees, a nod to Western University’s nickname. Local newspapers ran daily star sightings. (Nolte visiting the mall to buy socks was a particularly big deal.)

Perhaps the best part: Instead of paying the locals to fill the arena, Friedkin charged them $3 to attend. Demand was so high, scalpers sold tickets for as much as $30 a pop.

“That was a stroke of genius because usually you’re paying these people $50 to $150 a day,” said Ryder, the basketball consultant. “It’s a job to them, so it’s hard to get their energy up. Friedkin just said: ‘Hey, let them pay. We’ll get all these great players and they’ll come out.’ And we all looked at each other like, ‘Bullshit. That will never work.’ But it did. It worked out really well.”

Said Calbert Cheaney, an Indiana native who spent four seasons at IU: “People don’t realize that Indiana basketball … that’s like an every week occurrence.”

0:03 — Assisting Nolte

In the movie’s opening scene, Coach Bell walks into the Western locker room, tells the Dolphins he’s tired of losing then storms out, only to return to deliver a similar message seconds later. At one point, he throws a water cooler.

Advertisement

“They basically just had (Nolte) ad-lib,” said former UCLA forward Kevin Walker, who played on the Western team. “He would come in guns blazing over and over and we had to kind of put on that stern face because we were kind of cracking up and at the same time, trying to maintain our composure.”

During game action, Nolte had help. Marques Johnson had lost his voice during practice scenes, so he wasn’t much help, but Pete Newell was. A retired and respected coach who had won a national championship at Cal, Newell played Western’s team doctor and sat beside Nolte.

“Pete would be the one that would kind of guide Nolte along and tell him, ‘Go chew out the official,’ ‘Go get into that player,’ ‘Go pat that player on the back,”’ Johnson said. “He was really instrumental in helping Nick kind of get the nuances of what it took to be a coach.”

0:02 — Knight being Knight

Dick Vitale plays himself in the movie, delivering an enthusiastic preview of the Western-IU showdown. No script needed. Vitale was just given the details and 3-2-1 … . “Hey, everybody, Dick Vitale. Tonight, we have …

“I could do that in my sleep,” Vitale said.

Vitale actually had made headlines during filming. Before the second Western-IU contest, he walked up to Knight and tried to bear hug him from behind. Startled, Knight shoved Vitale to the floor. Said one witness: “We’re like, ‘What? You got to be kidding me.’” (Knight could not be reached for comment.)

All these years later, Vitale mentions all the stars — Shaq, Penny, Nolte — but what stands out most, is “basically, Bob Knight didn’t want to lose.” He wasn’t the only one to notice.

Former IU guard Joe Hillman: “He wanted us to win bad the first night — there’s no doubt about it.”

Eric Harmon, a former Big Ten official who played himself: “That’s just Knight. He is hardcore.”

Advertisement

Cheaney: “There might have been a couple of instances when he was playing for the cameras. Other than that, he was his normal self.”

0:01 The final play

Even so, Western had to win. Friedkin and his staff set up the final play, a lob to Shaq that would give the Dolphins the victory.

Marques Johnson: “Everything was set. Fans were buzzing. We already orchestrated how we were going to do it. A backscreen from Mitchell Butler on Shaq, and Penny Hardaway was going to throw a lob and Shaq would win it.”

Hurley: “This was after the game so we kind of wanted to get out of there. We’re in the huddle and Coach just says: ‘Don’t let them freaking get it.’ He told us to grab Shaq on the lob. No one was going to disobey an order from The General.”

Shelton: “I thought it was pretty obnoxious, to be honest. I mean, we’re on a clock. It’s expensive to shoot. Every hour lost is about $1,000.”

Johnson: “Friedkin yells, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Bobby walked up and said, ‘You guys have been fucking with me this whole movie, now I got a chance to fuck with you.’ Now I’ll let you run your play.’”

Twenty-five years later, the athletes who participated in Blue Chips consider the experience among the best of their careers.

“It ranks pretty high because it’s something I wanted to do as a kid, something that I wanted to do as a young adult,” said Hardaway, now approaching his second season as head coach at Memphis.

Even those who didn’t have big roles get asked: “Hey, was that you I saw in Blue Chips?” NBA rookie Allonzo Trier brought it up this season to Smart, an assistant coach with the Knicks. Since the movie airs every year around the NCAA Tournament, UCLA’s Butler said he gets it from time to time as well.

“I also did ‘White Men Can’t Jump’ and a couple of smaller films, but for me, ‘Blue Chips’ (stands out),” UCLA’s Johnson said. “Just being around that level of talent on the court with Shaq and Penny and all the high-level players we had come through. I got a chance to talk with Rick Pitino, (a coach in the film). Had dinner with Bobby Knight and his staff. From that standpoint, it was a really unique experience because of the different levels of basketball genius, from players to coaches.”

Advertisement

Blue Chips was hardly a box office hit, grossing just $23 million, ranking 59th among 1994 feature films. Even so, it’s considered a solid basketball film, one Shelton thinks has stood the test of time. After all, the story remains relevant.

“Well, it certainly could be out of today’s headlines, couldn’t it?” said Shelton, referring to a recent FBI probe that exposed college basketball’s shadiness. “You go around and see all the (untouchable coaches) who were not only touchable but are dirty, and it’s like, ‘Wow, nothing’s changed.’”

(Top photo courtesy Paramount Pictures.)

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57mHJta2loZH9xfZhoZ29nYGl8o7jUnmScoJmlwG6t02ZpbmWknbJutc2soJ2dXajBsL7YZqafZaeawLWx0adkrqaZq7Kzv8itsGauo2KvsK6MpKWin5ipwG60zqiqop2iqHw%3D