In basketball slang, a brick is a badly missed shot. Except in this case.
“Somebody had to put the first brick down,” Steve Green said. “And we were the bricklayers.”
Green was part of coach Bob Knight’s first basketball recruiting class at Indiana University, arriving on campus in fall 1971. The rise of the Indiana Hoosiers can be traced back to those first five players.
A 75-minute documentary, “First Five,” tells the story of how they changed the trajectory of the Indiana Hoosiers. The world premiere is a Heartland Film Festival preview screening at 7 p.m. Oct. 7 at the Scottish Rite Cathedral.
The five players – Steve Ahlfeld, Doug Allen, Green, John Kamstra, John Laskowski – will participate in a Q&A afterward. The preview is sold out.
There are tickets available to another screening at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 15, at Indy Art Center. Tickets are on sale to watch virtually through Oct. 18 at heartlandfilm.org.
The documentary includes interviews, archival footage and photographs, newspaper clips and background music. The director is Grant Guffin, whose sports credits include authorized biographies of Nick Saban, Archie and Eli Manning, and Bo Jackson.
Guffin likened the First Five to the “Junction Boys,” coach Bear Bryant’s first team at Texas A&M before he created an Alabama football dynasty.
“There are some iconic teams in American sports,” said Guffin, a Birmingham, Alabama, native. “I think I understood the Indiana fan base by nature of understanding the Alabama football fan base.”
Guffin suggested that the first Indiana recruiting class was foundational to two college basketball dynasties. That’s because their senior season, 1974-75, coincided with the year Mike Krzyewski was an Indiana Hoosiers assistant coach. Krzyzewski, also nicknamed “Coach K,” coached at Army before Duke, and he broke Knight’s record of 902 victories (finishing with 1,202).
“That class taught the classes behind them what it was to be an Indiana basketball player,” said Krzyewski in the documentary.
Laskowski was not a touted recruit out of high school. None of the top prospects in the state chose IU.
Pete Trgovich went to UCLA, Tim Stoddard to North Carolina State, John Garrett and Billy Nichols to Purdue University, Junior Bridgeman to the University of Louisville and Mike Flynn to the University of Kentucky.
“If Trgovich had gone to Indiana,” Laskowski said, “you never would have heard of me.”
Four of the First Five – Green (Silver Creek High School), Laskowski (South Bend St. Joseph), Ahlfeld (Northfield) and Kamstra (Rossville) – are from Indiana. Allen, then at a Virginia prep school, is from Champaign, Illinois.
Green and Laskowski both went on to play in the NBA.
Yet in the beginning, none of the Hoosiers knew what they were getting into. How could they?
There was no internet. The new coach wasn’t coming from a college basketball power. Knight was 30 when he was hired out of West Point.
It was before he introduced physical defense, motion offense and a system that led to NCAA championships in 1976, 1981 and 1987. (Knight died Nov. 1, 2023. He was 83.)
“I mean, they hung in,” Guffin said of the First Five. “And because of who those guys were – the character of who they were – he was able to build the foundation and assemble the pieces.”
As freshmen, the First Five were ineligible. As sophomores, they reached the Final Four. As juniors, they tied for the Big Ten championship and lost a playoff for an NCAA tournament berth. As seniors, they were on a team that was arguably the best in IU history – better even than the 32-0 NCAA champions of the next year, 1976.
“Dominance like I’ve never seen before or since,” Louisville journalist Rick Bozich said in the documentary. “They just made teams miserable.”
After a 29-0 regular season, Indiana lost to Kentucky 92-90 in the Mideast Regional. The Indiana Hoosiers played without Scott May, sidelined by a broken arm. Seven players from that team eventually were chosen in the first or second rounds of the NBA draft.
UCLA won the 1975 national championship, the last of coach John Wooden’s 10 titles.
Before that, in 1973, Wooden’s Bruins beat Indiana 70-59 in a Final Four semifinal, extending a winning streak to 74 in a row. That was Year 2 for Knight and Year 1 of eligibility for the First Five.
If you go
Heartland Film Festival
🗓️ Oct. 8-18
🎞️ Featuring more than 100 films screened.
📍 Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, Indy Art Center, Kan-Kan Cinema, Living Room Theaters, Newfields, Scottish Rite Cathedral. Plus, virtual screenings.
🔗 Visit Heartland’s website for more info.
The Hoosiers were ahead of schedule.
Not that the First Five ever had it easy. Not ever.
As Guffin put it:
“Coach Knight put these guys through the ringer, really. But they had an affection for Coach Knight and still speak very glowingly. They revere coach Knight because of their respect for him, and also because he was kind to them and their families – behind the scenes that nobody knew about.”
When they were freshmen, Laskowski said, preseason conditioning included running up and down stadium steps as many as eight times. He said he didn’t know he could work that hard. He remembers Knight’s forewarning:
“Laskowski, keep running. You pass out before you die.”
When the freshmen beat the varsity in practice – and it happened – that did not necessarily endear themselves to the coach.
“We weren’t his guys yet. We were the enemy,” Laskowski said.
Later, he learned, they did become the enemy – of all of Knight’s subsequent teams. All other teams, Laskowski said, “hated us” because they were compared to the 1975 graduates. They were the ones who laid the bricks.
“We didn’t know there was a story there,” Laskowski said. “We lived it.”
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Contact David Woods at dwoods1411@gmail.com.
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