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My Team is on the Floor
RIP Gene Hackman (1930-2025). Also, some talk about "Generations of the Game"
Joe Posnanski
February 28, 2025
Gene Hackman played roughly 54,000 different roles in his incredible 50-or-so-year career as an actor. The guy was in everything. Indeed, one of the jokes that pretty much every comedian told back in the 1980s and 1990s was that they went back to look at their wedding video and found that Gene Hackman and Michael Caine were both in it.
I have personally loved Hackman in so many things — The French Connection, Unforgiven, Superman*, The Firm, and so on and so on — but there’s a tiny scene in Hoosiers that I have thought about at least once a month since I first saw the movie all those years ago. It’s probably not the scene you are thinking about.
*Our pal Linda Holmes wrote on Bluesky that Hackman “is the only person I think has ever really understood how to play Lex Luthor, one of the most iconic and plausible American supervillains.”
I so deeply agree with this. As a corrolary to my oft-written gripe about Hollywood killing what made Superman great — we’re counting on you to fix this, James Gunn! — somewhere along the way, everybody decided to make and portray supervillains as sinister as possible. To me, this misses the whole point. For someone to truly become a supervillain, it seems to me, they need charm and charisma and the ability to convince people that they’re actually NOT supervillains, that they are visionaries or misunderstood geniuses or ruthlessly effective leaders who get things done.
This is why Die Hard’s Hans Gruber is one of the greatest of all movie villains; Alan Rickman’s Gruber is funny and smart and does a pretty great American accent when necessary. You might hate him, but you can see why people follow him.
Hackman’s Lex Luthor is so funny and so likable, and he only rarely and reluctantly lets his evil show. Maybe my favorite scene in Superman: The Movie is after Luthor lets loose two missiles at the same time, knowing that even Superman can’t stop both of them. As Luthor hangs the chain of kryptonite around Superman’s neck, this exchange follows:
SUPERMAN (struggling to get the words out): “You don’t … even care … where the other missile is headed, do you?”
LUTHOR: “I know exactly where it’s headed: Hackensack, New Jersey.”
And with that, he throws Superman into the water to let him drown.
And my favorite thing: Miss Teschmacher, who works or Luthor (and maybe a love interest, it isn’t clear), says: “Lex, my mother lives in Hackensack.”
At which he looks at her, looks at his watch and wordlessly shakes his head.
Only then does she realize that he’s a true maniac with no regard for any life, even the lives of people devotedly loyal to him.
THAT is a Supervillain.
There are so many famous and wonderful Gene Hackman as Coach Norman Dale scenes in Hoosiers. There’s the scene where he’s rebounding Jimmy Chitwood’s shots at a sandy basketball hoop (Jimmy was shooting with a ball that doesn’t bounce for some reason) and telling Jimmy that he doesn’t care if he plays for the team or not.* There’s the scene where he has his players measure the height of the rim to prove that it’s 10 feet high, just like the rest. There’s the scene where he is explaining to Barbara Hershey why he hit that kid all those years ago when he coached college (“Best kid I ever coached!”). There are all the amazing scenes he had with Dennis Hopper.
*Those of you devoted to the movie Hoosiers will want me to mention that Jimmy Chitwood makes every single shot UNTIL Hackman/Dale shocks him by saying that he doesn’t care if Jimmy plays for the team. So wonderful.
And there’s the scene I reference in the title, the “My team is on the floor!” scene where the team’s best player (until Jimmy comes along), Rade, purposely disobeys Coach Dale and gets himself benched. When a teammate fouls out, leaving only four players out there, Rade tries to check back into the game. “Where are you going?” Hackman/Dale says. “Sit down!”
Official: “You need one more, Coach.”
Hackman/Dale: “My team is on the floor.”
That’s such a great bit… and it leads into my favorite little scene. The next day, Hackman/Dale is walking through town and comes upon a few of the townfolk sitting in front of the barbershop. They start razzing him.
“Hey coach,” one of them yells, “you gonna play with three next time?”
Hackman just kind of smiles and walks away.
I can’t tell you why that stays with me, but there’s something in the way he smiles and ignores them that feels profound to me. This is a coach who has already seen it all, one who understands that fans will be fans, and that it’s his job as a coach to acknowledge them with good humor but never let them think their opinion is worth more than it is.
Hackman’s brilliance, to me, came out most in those small scenes.
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