Here's your chance to see the film of 1954 basketball championship that inspired 'Hoosiers'

An Indianapolis man who is terrible at basketball and is not even much interested in basketball is the unlikely savior of one of the true basketball relics in basketball-mad Indiana.

Eric Grayson naturally at one point picked up a basketball. But he set it down almost immediately. "I was always so bad at it that my friends encouraged me not to play on their teams," he said. What interested him instead were moving pictures — he'd stay up late to watch "Sammy Terry's Nightmare Theater" — and today, at 53, Grayson is a professional restorer of old films.

The basketball relic is a 16-mm film of Milan High School's victory against Muncie Central High School in the 1954 Indiana state championship game that inspired the 1986 movie "Hoosiers." Grayson has spent the last two years, on and off, restoring possibly the last remaining copy of the game film, and on Sunday his work will make its public debut at 3 p.m. at the Indiana University Cinema in Bloomington. Admission is free, but tickets are required.

RetroIndy:The Milan Miracle story with game recap

The film didn't have sound, but Grayson found and synched up a radio broadcast, which makes it much more entertaining.

The film of Milan's semi-final win over Terre Haute Gerstmeyer, which Grayson also restored, will also be screened.

Milan is a small town in the southeastern part of the state where fewer than 2,000 residents live. Its high school team's victory 64 years ago may have been the event of the century in Indiana, practically a fairy tale.

Milan's state title, sealed by a dramatic last-second shot, still gets talked about. But the game film had been long forgotten and was in terrible condition by the time it reached Grayson. Milan's athletic director had come upon the film as he was rummaging through a packed storage closet near his office while trying to discover the source of a terrible, vinegar-ish stench. He traced the stink to a metal film canister labeled "B.B. Finals '54 Muncie vs. Milan."

The film soon found its way to Grayson, who as an Indianapolis-based restorer of vintage film occupies a rather small niche. Among Grayson's restorations are classics like Buster Keaton's "Seven Chances" (1925) and "African Queen" (1951, starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn) and also schlock like the "King of the Kongo" series (1929).

Another amazing but largely unknown story of Hoosier hoops

And another: The b-ball mecca on Indy's eastside you've never heard of

Despite being able to take basketball or leave it — he doesn't go to games, doesn't even watch them on TV unless it's the Pacers and it's the playoffs — Grayson saw the value of saving the Milan-Muncie game film. He became more acquainted with that game than probably anyone else, going through and doctoring 123,840 frames of film. He raised $8,500 on Kickstarter, which allowed him to pay himself $20 an hour. 

"Eric really took it on himself," said Andy Uhrich, an Indiana University film archivist. "He's the genius behind this."

The game has long existed on VHS. Some copies of "Hoosiers" offered it as a bonus. But VHS is not "archival," meaning it doesn't last. It's also fuzzy compared to film.

The game was shot on triacetate film by Indiana University's Audio-Visual Center, which used to film important Indiana high school sports competitions for distribution to high school coaches for use as teaching aids.  

After the screening the game film will be handed over to Indiana University officials who'll place it in their multi-million dollar Ruth Lilly Auxilliary Library Facility. It will be stored under low-intensity sodium vapor lights at a temperature of precisely 50 degrees with a steady 30 percent humidity alongside certain other of the school's treasures, such as artifacts from the Kinsey Institute, some of them 2,000 years old; and the world's largest collection of Clio Award-winning TV commercials; and the outfits worn by the actor Glen Close in “101 Dalmatians,” “Fatal Attraction,” and “The Big Chill."

Uhrich figures that in those conditions the Milan-Muncie game film will last between 300 and 400 years.

Contact Star reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter @WillRHiggins.