LIKE MANY GREAT metaphors, the concept of “Hinkle Magic” starts in the realm of the literal. It is the slivers of natural light that make their way into the arena at Butler University’s Hinkle Fieldhouse.
“Monitor windows is the correct architectural term,” says Sally Wirthwein, a season ticket holder for Butler men’s basketball and one of several “Hinkle Hosts” who provide volunteer tours of the building.
The amount of light that comes in varies both by day and time of day, which makes for unique viewing experiences for players and spectators alike, though renovations five years after Hinkle was built in 1928 changed the direction of the court. “Right now it’s running north-south [but] originally it ran east-west,” Wirthwein explains. Among many other updates to become more Big East-comparable, changes were made in 2014 to limit the amount of sun that comes in from the windows on the eastern and western sides of the arena. Some Hinkle Magic, then, but not too much.
But that’s where the metaphor breaks down. Implications of the sun aside, there could never be too much of the basketball-related magic that first started March 7, 1928, when the Bulldogs defeated Notre Dame in overtime during the first basketball game ever played in what was then called Butler Fieldhouse. The team would finish 17-4 that year, and the school wouldn’t officially change the name of its arena until 1966 to honor Tony Hinkle, a basketball coach of 41 seasons who also spent long stretches as the school’s football and baseball coach as well as its athletic director.
Yes, basketball junkies from younger generations would know the Butler program for the still-not-50-years-old Brad Stevens, who skyrocketed from his head coaching position at Butler to the same position for the Boston Celtics two years after he led his college team to the NCAA tournament final in 2010 and 2011. The team’s arena is named after someone who long preceded Stevens.
Bobby Plump, the 89-year-old former Milan High School basketball player whose state-championship-winning shot against Muncie Central in 1954 inspired the movie Hoosiers—and who how now spends part of his days at his son’s sports bar, Plump’s Last Shot, in Broad Ripple—recalls talking to UCLA’s legendary coach, John Wooden, at an NCAA tournament game in Indianapolis. “I said, ‘Mr Wooden, I’m Bobby Plump.’ As he stuck his hand out, he said, ‘You played for The Great One.’”
Hinkle, the man, was Wooden’s “Great One,” but the fortune that made Plump famous before he even played for Butler isn’t the only example of Hinkle Magic that extends well beyond just the one institution. Hinkle hosted the Indiana boys’ high school state championship basketball games from 1928 to 1971 (except 1943-45 when the building was repurposed as a barracks for the U.S. Army and Navy). As stop number 10 of the self-guided Hinkle tour would tell you, the year after Plump and Milan won the state championship, a Crispus Attucks team that was led by coach Ray Crowe and student Oscar Robertson would become the first all-Black team in the nation to take that victory, a feat the school would repeat twice more in the 1950s.
Wirthwein’s favorite bit of Hinkle Magic comes from the Stevens years, though. In fact, it would be Stevens’ final season in Indianapolis, a little less than two years after the second national championship runner-up season. “Dick Vitale called the game,” she remembers. “…They have a student shoot a half-court shot. This was pregame, and the kid makes the shot. So it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is our day, right?’ …Butler’s [down by one] and then…somebody turns it over … Gonzaga takes it out and then … Roosevelt Jones inbounds the ball, and Roosevelt just kind of grabs the ball and then dribbles to the basket and just drops in a little floater … The place is so stinking loud.… Brad doesn’t watch to see if the ball goes through the hoop; he’s already turning to go shake Mark Few’s hand.”
The tape tells a slightly different story. Stevens watched the ball go in, but he didn’t start walking toward Few before he knew the result. And the thing about lore is that it gets added and subtracted to; we keep historical records because our memory is imperfect and jumbled. And that’s OK much of the time; storytelling is half the fun. We’re trying to describe how we felt as much as what happened, and Hinkle is a place that makes people feel things.
That’s why fans from visiting teams show up early to take in the aura. “One of the things I love,” says Nick Gardner, former Butler walk-on and now color analyst on the radio for the past 20 seasons. “[The broadcasters] get there a little early, and … there’s people there from the opposing team an hour-and-a-half before the game.… You get a non-conference game, a place that has some basketball heritage, and there’ll be a good amount of fans … checking Hinkle out.… I’ll always go say hi to them if I have a chance: ‘Welcome to Hinkle. You ever been here before?’ Strike up a conversation because they’re walking around looking at all those plaques.”
This year’s Bulldogs men’s basketball team has shown some early magic, by the way. Led by Gonzaga transfer Michael Ajayi, Maryland transfer Jaime Kaiser Jr., and Butler veteran Findlay Bizjack, the Bulldogs have jumped out to a 10-4 start that includes wins over South Carolina, Virginia, Providence, and Northwestern in the fourth season of head coach Thad Matta’s second go-around at Butler.
“I think this could be the group that gets them back in The Dance,” Gardner says.
If they could pull that off, it would be the program’s first time since 2018.