The Night I Left Gene Hackman Alone - WSJ

At a table near the back of a Chicago steakhouse years ago, Gene Hackman was having an early dinner with a friend. There was something I wanted to walk over and say to him, but then I thought: Nah. He deserves his privacy, and what I wanted to thank him for he’d undoubtedly heard 1,000 times before.

It was this: The beauty of his work in the 1986 film “Hoosiers,” in which he portrayed the coach of a high school basketball team in a tiny Indiana town, is something that first filled hearts throughout the Midwest and went on to do the same for people around the world. It still does.

The power of Hackman’s performance was that he became, in a secular sense, the patron saint of last chances—a coach with a shattered past who in 1951 drives into the town knowing that within its borders lies his sole opportunity to salvage his life. There are many of us who know every line from that film, and every square foot of that town, and understand its lesson that a shot at glory and redemption can reside in the most unlikely and overlooked places.

There are others in the town facing their own last chances: the alcoholic father of a member of the basketball team; the schoolteacher who has returned to help her ailing mother and wonders where her life will lead; the players on the team, whose longtime coach has died and left them with a void; the town itself, not even big enough to appear on most maps of Indiana.

But it is Hackman who brings transcendence to the tale. For all the much-quoted lines in Angelo Pizzo’s impeccable screenplay, Hackman’s delivery of one in particular has little to do with sports. He has asked the alcoholic father—played by Dennis Hopper—to become his assistant coach. With one catch: that he get sober. “You can’t drink in front of these boys.”

Hopper’s character angrily resists: “I don’t have to hear that from you.”

Hackman quietly explains his reason for the requirement: “You’re embarrassing your son.”

It’s the way he says those four words—in a soft tone, with a gentle undercurrent of deep compassion—that illuminates Hackman’s genius as an actor. The words aren’t spoken as an assault on the father’s dignity, or as an ugly taunt. They are meant to inspire, to show the dad how much rides on his willingness to change. Hackman turns those words into a herald of hope.

A performance, if it’s fine enough, can make an actor live forever. I’ve never regretted not intruding that evening when he was immersed in conversation with his friend, and now that he is gone, to quote another of his lines from the movie, “We’re way past big-speech time.”

In becoming Coach Norman Dale, he enriched the lives of people he would never meet. Near the end of the film he said to his players: “I love you guys.” I hope he knew that, for millions of us, the feeling was mutual.

Mr. Greene’s books include “Chevrolet Summers, Dairy Queen Nights.”