Sure, you say, you know the movie “Hoosiers” frontward and backwards.

It’s high school hoops season, maybe time to haul it out again and watch Gene Hackman in one of his best roles, leading Hckory High to the state championship of Indiana in 1951.

Most people know it’s really the true story of Milan High, which won the title there more than 56 years ago. And Don Breese of Rio Rancho can add a little more to that motivational story: He was at the championship game, played in the Butler University fieldhouse, and even remembers being on the courtyard lawn, celebrating the championship.

He was still in high school at the time, playing for Noblesville High, less than 100 miles from Milan.

“Milan was a little old, wide spot on the road,” he said. And, Breese still remembers, Milan was unable to play any home games that year because its gym was condemned.

“The movie was not indicative of how great that team was,” he said recently.

Two years later, Breese was wrapping up his high school days, mulling some college scholarship offers before leaning toward entering the work field to purchase a new Corvette, just introduced to the American public that year.

A GM strike affected the apprenticeship program he was in at the company’s plant in Anderson, Ind., and so he found himself working for J.C. Penney.

In the late spring of 1954, a coach from Western New Mexico University visited Breese, asking if he’d like to get a scholarship to play the game he loved.

“I don’t have any money; I’ve got to have everything,” Breese recalled telling the coach.

The coach agreed and told him he had to come right away.

“He had a grand new Buick Roadmaster convertible,” Breese recalled, and the coach let him take the wheel. “I drove all 1,800 miles to Silver City.”

It was his first trip West, and history almost took a detour.

“I didn’t unpack for several weeks,” he said, recalling Silver City and Grant County as “desolate.”

At WNMU, he found himself among six or seven fellow “misplaced Hoosiers,” he said. “We changed coaches every year.”

New Mexico basketball coaching legends Marv Sanders and Dick Drangmeister were among his teammates, he said.

“I played in first game at Johnson Gym,” he said. That was on Dec. 6, 1957, a 68-52 victory by the Lobos over the Mustangs. “We gave them a pretty good game for a half,” he said.

By the end of his career in Silver City, Breese held 13 scoring and rebounding records at WNMU. And he was featured on the cover of a program that showed him doing a reverse dunk.

“I was 6-4½, but I could jump,” he said

He’s since been inducted into six halls of fame: WNMU basketball, WNMU track and field, plus the Colorado High School Activities Association, the Colorado High School Coaches Association, the Colorado Athletic Directors Association and the LAABO, all for administration.

After leaving Silver City, Breese spent two years in the service, stationed and playing basketball at Ft. Carson, near Colorado Springs.

Then, he said, “I took a teaching job, got out of the army two months early, but “had every intention of going back to Indiana and winning a basketball championship.”

Instead, he became an institution at Lewis-Palmer High School, where he was a teacher, coach and administrator for 38 years. Among his highlights was being named as the top high school principal in Colorado in 1985.

Those were the days: “I was making $5,000 coaching three sports and teaching six classes,” he remembers. “I got $300 more for the principalship and at the time I retired, I had the longest tenure of anyone in the state of Colorado.”

He was 55 when he retired, although he still found employment as an interim superintendent throughout Colorado. He was so well thought of that the stadium there, visible from I-25 near the Air Force Academy, was named for him and re-dedicated in his honor after a recent, $5 million expansion.

Married to his wife Pat for 49 years — she’s a former WNMU cheerleader — Breese stays as busy as he can, and busier than most people half his age, with his plethora of activities.

The couple moved here, after researching other communities in the West and Southwest, “to get out of that snow-infected place … get off this hill” in Colorado Springs.

An apparent victim of “middle-aged spread,” having gained about 40 pounds since his playing days, he was stricken by a heart attack at the age of 57.

Determined to live a long life, he started to watch his diet and became active again.

A Senior Olympian for the past decade or so, accumulating 30 trophies in nine sports’ worth of competition: basketball, badminton, horseshoes, table tennis, softball, 8-ball (pool), bicycling and golf. He also has played soccer and done some motocross.

“I do something aerobically everyday,” he said. “I’d like to live to be at least 80.” He eats red meat once a year and never drinks beer, admitting, “Occasionally, I’ll have a high ball.”

Seemingly back on the road to good health, a second heart attack hit him while he was golfing one day.

“The doctor said cut down 25 percent; I quit basketball,” he said. “I told myself, when I turn 70, I’m going to quit basketball.”

He’ll still take a few shots now and then, knowing enough not to challenge “Dead-eye” Dick Moots at the free-throw line.

“He’s an interesting character — he’s got more damn things to tell you about,” Moots, a long-time friend, says.

Moots and Breese were basketball teammates until Breese “retired.”

“He was our center and a good ballplayer,” Moots said. “We never won any championships, but with him we did pretty well.”

Moots, whose basketball days are all but behind him because of his ailing knees, said he teamed with Breese for badminton one time.

“When I play doubles with him, I just get out of the way.”