Basketball has long been synonymous with Indiana.
Hollywood has acknowledged the state’s rich basketball history in movies such as “Hoosiers,” and more recently on the NBC sitcom “Parks and Recreation.”
The show takes place in the fictional town of Pawnee, Ind., and is full of nods to the state’s obsession with hoops.
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Among the basketball easter eggs include a poster of Bob Knight displayed proudly on the wall of the office of Ron Swanson, played by Nick Offerman, and an autographed photo of Larry Bird on the desk of Leslie Knope, played by Amy Poehler.
The show even featured several cameos by NBA players, including two memorable performances by former Pacers Detlef Schrempf and Roy Hibbert.
Schrempf’s first appearance came in the Season Two episode “Telethon.” The episode featured a plotline in which Knope was hosting a telethon for diabetes research, and the writing staff of the show wanted to book a celebrity to make a guest appearance.
“The first thought was Larry Bird,” Michael Schur, the show’s co-creator, told Sporting News, “but he didn't seem like the kind of dude who would do a cameo on a relatively new TV show.”
So they started brainstorming other NBA players who had played for the Pacers and eventually landed on Schrempf.
They reached out to Schrempf to see whether he was interested in appearing on the show, and he was open to the idea.
“It turned out his son played for UCLA, and he came down to LA frequently to see him play,” Schur said.
Detlef Schrempf Scampi 🍤 (It's a slam dunk). #SportsStarFoods pic.twitter.com/d2sxhep2x7
— Parks and Recreation (@parksandrecnbc) January 10, 2018
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Schrempf would go on to appear in two other episodes: “Li’l Sebastian” from Season Three and “Ron and Tammys” in Season Four, alongside Hibbert, who made his first appearance.
Hibbert, who played for the Pacers at the time, was already a fan of the show and wanted to test his acting chops. He recalls his wife reading an article about how Derrick Rose was supposed to make a cameo on the CBS show “The Good Wife.”
“I said to myself, ‘What show could I be on that makes sense?’” Hibbert said. “And with ‘Parks and Rec’ being in Pawnee, like a fictitious city in Indiana, I said ‘that really makes sense.’”
Hibbert’s agent, David Falk, reached out to Lorne Michaels, creator and producer of “Saturday Night Live,” and was then put in touch with Schur, who remembers the day he got the phone call.
“My assistant came in and said there was a David Falk on the phone. I thought, ‘That's funny, a person calling me with the same name as Michael Jordan's agent,’” Schur said.
Falk conveyed to Schur the interest Hibbert had in appearing on the show. While they had just wrapped filming the season and wouldn’t be back in the writers’ room for a bit, Schur welcomed the idea of Hibbert making a guest appearance.
“I mean, why in the world would I say no to that?” Schur said. “Yes, 7-foot-2 Indiana Pacer All-Star center Roy Hibbert can appear on the show. Yes, of course he can.”
So Hibbert was flown out to Los Angeles in the summer of 2011 to film his cameo in the episode with Schrempf.
“It was just eye-opening, what goes into making a TV show,” Hibbert said. “I think I was in like three scenes or something like that, but I feel like it took damn-near three hours to film each scene.”
Hibbert said they’d film scenes multiple times with different camera shots, from close-ups to wide-angle. Along with Schrempf, Hibbert shared his scenes with Ben Schwartz, Adam Scott and Aziz Ansari and had to adjust to the improvisational nature the other actors took while filming.
“Literally most of the stuff that got on the show was off the top of their head,” Hibbert said. “And it was really tough to keep my composure and try not to laugh while these guys are just riffing off of each other.”
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Hibbert was even able to do some improvisation himself. In one scene, he helped Schwartz’s character dunk a basketball by picking him up.
“Ben and myself were just talking and we just made it happen,” Hibbert said. “He’s a tall guy, but very light, so he was easy to pick up.”
Schrempf even gave Hibbert some acting advice the day they were on set together.
“He just told me to relax and let it happen,” Hibbert said. “I had like one- or two-sentence lines ... and he literally had like a damn-near paragraph and he was spot on and I was very, very much impressed ... He was definitely a professional in that aspect. He came prepared and he just told me to relax.”
Schrempf and Hibbert managed to not only hit their marks, but did so in impressive fashion.
“They were game for anything,” Schur said. “Non-actors can sometimes be afraid to look silly, or to commit to whatever bit they're doing, and others are loose and happy and up for anything. The latter is much better than the former, and both of those guys were definitely the latter.”
Once he finished filming, Hibbert had a newfound respect for those working in television and movies.
“If somebody’s sick and they can’t make it, it really messes up the flow of making an episode,” Hibbert said. “If an NBA player’s sick you can miss a game, but if you miss a day of filming that throws everybody off. It throws everything off.”
He left such an indelible mark on the cast and crew that they asked whether he’d be open to coming back for another cameo.
“We loved using him,” Schur said. “We'd ask him to come back for the tiniest little cameos, and he always would if he could.”
Hibbert appeared in two more episodes before the show ended its run in 2015: Season Four’s “End of the World” in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in which he hands out shrimp, and “Two Parties” in Season Five that was filmed in Indianapolis at St. Elmo’s Steak House.
“I was able to film during training camp,” Hibbert said. “They told me if I wanted to bring anyone else on the team on set to be in the scene (I could). So I asked my rookie at the time — Miles Plumlee, who I was close with ... and he was a rookie, so he had to do what I told him to do.”
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There were attempts to get him on one of the later seasons, but it ultimately didn’t happen.
“I don't remember specifically what we wanted him to do in the last season,” Schur said. “But we probably pitched ideas for him like 10 times that we couldn't do because he was, you know, an NBA center.”
Along with Hibbert and Schrempf, other athletes to make appearances on the show included Chris Bosh, Andrew Luck and Reggie Wayne. While you might think that working with athletes would be difficult given they’re not trained actors, Schur said it’s quite the opposite: “A lesson I learned working for ‘SNL’ — most athletes have whatever the opposite of stage fright is.
“They are used to performing in front of tens of thousands of people, in absurdly high-stakes situations, often with their livelihoods and physical well-being at stake. TV acting is child's play.”