-
Ryan McGee
multiple authors
GREENFIELD, Ind. – Sometimes stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason: because they’re well-earned, accurate representations of people. Texans love brisket. New Yorkers love F-bombs. And the people of Indiana – especially the John Mellencamp-serenaded “Well, I was born in a small town” people of Indiana – they really, really love basketball. From Indianapolis, where the airport currently welcomes visitors to town for the Men’s Final Four, with an exhibit in the terminal featuring everyone from Bobby Knight and Butler to Wabash and Valparaiso, a map of the state looks at the villages, hamlets and intersections that have given us gifts like Larry Bird, Damon Bailey, Bobby Plump…
And now, Braylon Mullins.
“How’s the saying going?” asks Mullins’ high school coach Luke Meredith, knowing that we know he knows the answer. “In the 49 states, it’s just basketball… but this is Indiana.”
Meredith said these words as he walked out of Lucas Oil Stadium on Friday afternoon, one of an estimated 25,000 people who came to watch this year’s men’s Final Four squads hold four largely formal practice sessions. Many of them were there to watch a pair of Illinois players — the Indianapolis product jake davis And ben hamrichs Or UConn’s new student manager, Jack Richason of Carmel — in tiny Tipton, Indiana, 40 miles north of the city.
But the biggest roar was reserved for Mullins. The one who less than a week earlier had launched one of the most memorable shots in NCAA Tournament history, A dagger 3-pointer with less than half a second left Torpedo Duke, send Connecticut to the Final Four, and bring Mullins back home to Indiana.
“When [UConn head coach] Dan Hurley was here recruiting Braylon, he was with him [assistant] Luke Murray,” Meredith remembered as he walked the streets of Indy to meet the Mullins family so they could go to “real practice.”
“When they signed him, they told us, ‘We’re going to bring him back to Indiana for the Final Four next year.’ Well, immediately after he hit the shot, I messaged him: ‘You did what you promised. Now I need some tickets!”
Everyone needs a ticket in Greenfield. It’s a town 27 miles east of Lucas Oil Stadium, with a population roughly the same size as Friday’s practice spectators. And that town plans to spend this weekend taking in every “Hoosiers” scene and stereotype the rest of us can imagine. It involves several caravans down US Highway 40 – aka Historic National Road, aka “The Road That Built the Nation” – just like all those Studebakers and Hudsons that followed the Hickory High team bus to Indy for those imaginary state finals.
In fact, the bus used in the film and the 1951 Chevy coupe driven by Gene Hackman both reside in Greenfield. Their owners will be happy to come to your local event for a booking fee. And they both regularly take those iron beasts east to nearby Knightstown, 12 miles away, the site of the Hoosier gym that was the home court for the Oscar-nominated film. You can also shoot hoops there. Just like Jimmy Chitwood… and maybe Mullins too? The Hoosier gym hosts youth games all the time, and during a visit there Friday, the volunteers keeping the gym open were pretty sure Braylon Mullins played there as a kid. Perhaps.
“I mean, he had to do it, right?”
“Hey, even if he didn’t, pretend he did. It’s good for business.”
Any association with Mullins is good for business. That’s why at the depot, which has become a train station, the watering hole, they have a framed No. 24 UConn jersey hanging at the server station. Those same servers will happily tell you that when Hurley came to town he was “at the exact same table” where he sat down with the Mullins family, trying to explain to them that Storrs is, as Hurley recently described it, “a small, rural town like Greenfield, just with more snow.”
The depot is located at the intersection of Depot and Pennsylvania Street, although now, Depot Street has been renamed Braylon Avenue. A little further up Pennsylvania, near Mullins’ home, is what is now Mullins Drive, bearing a blue sign with a pair of 24s.
He was the brainchild of the mayor and the street commissioner. They tried to do one better than that and changed the lights on the I-70 overpass leading to Greenfield to UConn’s colors, but the LEDs weren’t the right shade of blue.
And sure, that would have been nice, but there was plenty of Huskies color on the Greenfield-Central High marquee “GC Is Proud of You Braylon”, not to mention all the UConn stickers on all the trucks around town, some placed on bumpers right next to Indiana Hoosiers 2026 College Football Playoff National Title Decals. Plus, I-70 was already taken care of. On the hammer-down road to Indy, an electronic billboard located on Greenfield’s bye border of Hancock County featured an image of the Connecticut men’s and women’s Final Four squads, with Mullins front and center.
“For me, it’s a weird experience, being able to see all the family and friends and playing in front of my home state of Indiana means more than anything,” Mullins said earlier in the week, adding that he managed to secure 15 tickets for family and friends for Saturday’s semifinal. “And maybe people will learn about Greenfield. It’s a great place to grow up.”
Not just for him and his twin brothers, Cole and Clay, who are seniors at Central and have signed to play for Division III Franklin University next year. Greenfield is also where his parents, Josh and Katie, have lived their entire lives, except for their college experiences.
Katie’s family has been farming outside Greenfield since Reconstruction after the Civil War. Josh is a third-generation Greenfield, descended from Kentuckians-turned-Indians – so becoming a basketball player was predestined. The two first met in second grade and became friends. At Central, Josh played hoops while Katie cheered, and eventually Josh wised up and – as any 3-point specialist should – hit his shot. (They did it on Valentine’s Day, no less.) He attended junior college in Illinois before landing at IUPUI in Indianapolis, now known as IU-Indy.
It was here that Josh was a forward on the only Jaguars team to make the NCAA Tournament, a spot earned through a nail-biter 2003 Mid-Continent Conference Championship Game, in which they defeated Valparaiso 66–64. Josh made the All-Tournament Team.
“We were the 16-seed and played Kentucky in the first round,” Mullins recalled earlier in the week. He scored eight points, but the Wildcats – the SEC champions and the nation’s No. 1 team – won 95–64. “My highlight was making it to the tournament. Now Braylan is in the final four.”
Walking around Greenfield on Friday, it seemed as if the entire city was at the Final Four. From Union students in their UConn hoodies to a six-pack of blue-collar workers spending their lunch breaks on the depot’s back deck, agreeing to return Saturday for a big-screen viewing party, there are still new city limits signs that welcome any visitor who, as Mullins hopes, will be curious to see what their hometown is all about. As it reads, across the street from Koenig John Deere and Superior Mowers:
Welcome to Greenfield, Indiana. Experience our past…share your future.
Home of Jessie Phelps, 1996 USA gymnastics gold medalist
Braylon Mullins 2025 Indiana Mr. basketball
“The thing people love most about him is that he’s still the same guy he is even though everyone in the world knows who he is,” former coach Meredith said Friday. “He was in the hallway of our high school this time last year. He grew up so close to the school he could walk there. He’s still Braylon. He’s still his mom and dad. He’s still Greenfield.”
Before the Duke game, Greenfield’s most famous citizen was always James Whitcomb Riley. A century ago, he was a leader of what has been called the Golden Age of Indiana literature. Riley wrote favorite poems of children around the world with a distinctive Indiana dialect, including “Little Orphan Annie” and “The Raggedy Man.”
Every fall, on the eve of the college basketball season, Greenfield hosts the Riley Festival to celebrate the man and his work. In last year’s parade, the Hoosiers’ team bus and coach’s Chevy were in the lineup. This week, city officials joked that they might have to make it a Relay/Braylon Festival. At least, we think they were joking.
But on Friday, while half the town was at Lucas Oil Stadium to watch Mullins practice, a group of children, trailing their mothers, were walking along the Riley Arts Trail, which runs along Riley Avenue a block from Braylon Avenue. That path is marked by quotes from the poet painted on concrete.
It’s easy to imagine that one day, long after Braylan Mullins is no longer playing ball and, like Josh and Katie, inevitably finds his way back to his home in Greenfield, that he can sit there in the amphitheater, telling tall but true stories of Dukes and Daggers and the time his hometown fans flock to the big city to watch him try to win a national championship. Maybe he’ll point to one of those James Whitcomb Riley sidewalk quotes. It was titled “A Ballad.”
Crowd about me,
small children-
come and form a group
‘Round my knee
While I tell a little story
This happened to me once.
