EVANSVILLE – If you visited ESPN’s website recently, you probably expected to see stories about the NFL preseason, or maybe some copy on the race to the Major League Baseball playoffs.
Instead, the top story chronicled a quarter-century-old feud between Evansville and a music icon.
Using a mixture of Courier & Press archives and new interviews, ESPN writer Harry Lyles Jr. – who spent portions of his childhood in the city – relived the brief drama between Evansville and Madonna: the giant pop star and actress who spent several months here during the filming of “A League of Their Own” in 1991.
Her actual stay was largely controversy-free. She played baseball, visited a local gay bar, and randomly knocked on a McCutchanville family’s door when she was out jogging and struck with an urgent need to pee.
But after production wrapped, she gave an interview to MTV elder statesman Kurt Loder in TV Guide that November.
“For the past three months – it might as well have been three years – she was stranded in Evansville, Indiana, a place she will not be revisiting in this current lifetime,” Loder wrote. “(‘I may as well have been in Prague,’ she says, by way of summing up the town’s attraction.)”
The comparison to a then-Soviet city didn’t go over well. So local radio station WSTO-96 hatched a plan.
On Dec. 7, 1991, it brought around 300 people to the Roberts Stadium parking lot. With a helicopter carrying an Evansville Courier photographer chattering overhead, participants used their bodies to spell out “Madonna.” A few formed a line that crossed out the middle portion of her name, like some sort of living, breathing no-smoking sign.
The low-stakes protest made national headlines, and solidified a weird rivalry that still survives today.
“Before the demonstration, Evansville was just the small town in Indiana that served as the backdrop for some of the most significant movie scenes in one of history’s most popular sports films,” Lyles wrote. “Afterward, it was thrust into the national spotlight, portrayed as the town that rebelled against one of the most famous people in the world.”
Madonna and Tom Hanks in Evansville
The filming of “A League of Their Own” is the biggest pop-culture moment in Evansville history.
The movie sent Tom Hanks, Geena Davis, director Penny Marshall, and scores of others spilling into the city. They filled key scenes at historic Bosse Field: an operation that required a barrage of locals donned in 1940s attire. There are still homages to the film all over the stadium.
Hanks in particular is still tied to Evansville. During an interview with Bill Simmons in 2021, he touted his stretch shooting the movie as one of the best in his life.
“It was a big-ass summer in the Midwest. We lived in a house in the middle of cornfields. We went to Burger King at night and Dairy Queen in the afternoon,” he said. “It was a great summer. And my entire family still speaks about it.”
Even that house is famous. It went on the market last year, and the listing counted its connection to Hanks as one of its biggest selling points.
Madonna’s experience here wasn’t all bad, either. Lyles interviewed former University of Southern Indiana baseball coach Gary Redman, who was tasked with teaching the actors how to play the game. He said Madonna was easy to work with, and that she especially took a shine to his two sons.
“I found out pretty quickly that she absolutely loves kids,” he said. “… She took right to them, and was just as nice as could be to them, played ball with them. When there was downtime she’d want to do things with them.”
Her interactions with Barry Witherspoon, however, didn’t go as well.
The then-WSTO program director was one of several extras on set. One day, he brought 100 t-shirts bearing the radio station’s name and tried to pass them out to the actors. He was sitting on a bench a little later when Madonna walked past en route to her trailer.
“I just looked up and said, ‘Hey, did you get that t-shirt I sent over to you?’ And she didn’t even turn her head. She just kind of looked out of the corner of her eye as she walked past me and just said, ‘Oh, is that you?’” he told Lyles. “I know it’s no big deal to give her a t-shirt, but it was just kind of, I don’t know, kind of rubbed me the wrong way.”
Months later, when Madonna’s Prague dig made TV Guide, Witherspoon rustled up some more t-shirts. But these were personalized.
According to the Courier archives, he personally designed a garment showing a caricature of Madonna floating within a map of Indiana. Evansville was marked off with a star.
“Serving Time in Prague, Ind.,” the shirts read.
The station sold them for $11, with portions of the proceeds going toward the Evansville Coalition of the Homeless.
That stunt was small compared to what Witherspoon and the station helped organize on Dec. 7. The image of 300 people lying in perfect formation just to take a shot at a pop star is one of the sillier moments of Evansville history. And that’s saying a lot.
“We wanted to spell out something a lot more colorful, but I thought it would be better to do this,” WSTO deejay Brian Jackson told the Courier the day of the protest. “After all, we are a family station.”
‘We don’t bear grudges here’
Madonna biggest gig in Indiana in the years since came in 2012, when she headlined the Super Bowl halftime show in Indianapolis.
Then-Courier & Press sports editor Tim Ethridge and now-CNN political reporter Eric Bradner used the occasion to dig up the Evansville incident. But if Madonna ever addressed it directly during her press run, it didn’t show up in C&P archives. Instead, she praised Indianapolis and promised to put on a great show.
In the ESPN article, former Courier sports reporter Gordon Engelhardt called the 1991 kerfuffle “overblown” and “overdone.” And Evansville Otters owner Bill Bussing stressed that any bad blood faded a long time ago.
“We don’t bear grudges here,” he told Lyles. “I think she would be welcomed here if she’d be willing to come back.”
This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: ESPN recounts Evansville’s weird feud with Madonna
Reporting by Jon Webb, Evansville Courier & Press / Evansville Courier & Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
