A MAGIC (AND BIRD) MOMENT

By J.A. ADANDE

March 23, 1999 12 AM PT

Most basketball fans don’t even know the name of the building where one of the sport’s landmark games was played.

It’s not a Garden or a Forum or even a Pavilion. It’s known as the Huntsman Center today, but 20 years ago, when Michigan State and Magic Johnson faced Indiana State and Larry Bird in the final of the NCAA tournament, the building on the University of Utah campus was called the Special Events Center.

There have been other milestone events in college basketball, like when Texas Western’s all-black starting five defeated Kentucky’s all-white team for the 1966 championship and quickened the pace of integration at Southern schools.

Michigan State-Indiana State was different because it changed the face of the sport at two levels, ushering in an era of prosperity for the NCAA and the NBA. When Larry met Magic, it brought people to their television sets in record numbers. The 24.1 rating and 38 share for that game remain the highest for a college basketball telecast. It was the sporting equivalent of Neil Armstrong’s setting foot on the moon.

“For maybe the first time in history, the media and the entire nation was kind of captivated, by the Bird Man and the Magic Man,” former Michigan State coach Jud Heathcote said.

That catapulted the Final Four and the NCAA tournament into the elite circle of sporting events, and initiated the Bird-Magic/Celtic-Laker rivalry that made the NBA the hottest professional league of the 1980s.

“That was the game that everybody looked forward to,” said Rod Thorn, NBA vice president of basketball operations. “That game was a spectacle. To have two players who played in that game continue the rivalry with two storied franchises gave a real impetus to the NBA.”

By today’s standards, the coverage of that game March 26, 1979, might seem like a bunch of guys using telegraph keys. ESPN’s first telecast was a little more than five months away. There were no up-to-the-minute updates on the Internet, since there was no Internet.

“You have to put it in relative terms,” said Hank Nichols, who officiated the game. “At the time, it was as much hype as you could get. All the sports pages around the country were writing about it.”

All over what Johnson called, “Two Midwest guys. Two guys who loved to play and loved to win.”

Top-ranked Indiana State was 33-0 and Bird was the nation’s second-leading scorer, averaging 28.6 points a game. Third-ranked Michigan State had dropped five Big Ten games, but was cresting in the tournament, and Johnson, a 6-foot-9 point guard, was unlike anything the game had ever seen.

There wasn’t much opportunity for folks at home to see these teams before the tournament. Michigan State played only a couple of nationally televised games, and Indiana State wasn’t on national TV until the last game of the regular season.

For the previous 15 years--which were dominated by UCLA--the NCAA tournament had offered little in the way of dream matchups. Now there was one, after Indiana State had beaten DePaul and Michigan State had beaten Penn in the semifinals.

“You only had a short period to build up the final game,” Heathcote said. “But it seemed like everyone in the world had already written a comparison [between Bird and Magic.]”

Back then, there was nothing to talk about except the game. There weren’t any “fan jam” interactive festivals or corporate booths.

The interest generated by the Bird-Magic matchup started the transformation of the NCAA tournament from a sporting event into a cultural phenomenon. In the years since, the tournament expanded from 40 teams to a 64-team field. The Final Four has outgrown arenas the size of the 15,000-seat Huntsman Center, now plays exclusively in domes and has drawn up to 65,000 people.

Eight of the nine others among the 10 highest-rated college basketball telecasts were shown after the 1979 title game. That’s why CBS paid $1.725 billion for the exclusive broadcast rights to the tournament.

Bob Heaton played on that 1978-79 Indiana State team, and he has witnessed the event’s growth by attending three of the past four Final Fours as a fan.

“I think today, with all the hype, with all the hoopla, it’s very exciting just to get into the tournament,” Heaton said. “Twenty years ago it was, ‘OK, who are we going to play?’ ”

For all of the impact of Magic vs. Bird, there’s one thing that often goes overlooked: The game itself really wasn’t that good.

“It wasn’t played well by either team, in my judgment,” Nichols said. “A lot of missed shots, a lot of errors.”

Heathcote used a defense that kept two defenders in Bird’s face the entire game, and he shot seven for 21 and finished with 19 points.

“I didn’t have a good game,” Bird said. “I didn’t shoot the ball well. I didn’t have a lot of good looks. They defended me very well. They had guys surrounding me at all times. Still, that’s no excuse. I missed a lot of tough shots underneath.”

Johnson led all scorers with 24 points and Greg Kelser chipped in 19. The Spartans led by nine at halftime and went up 44-28 before Kelser picked up his fourth foul with 17:22 left in the game. The Sycamores got it down to 52-46 before Kelser returned and found Magic for a dunk, plus a foul. Indiana State never recovered and the Spartans won, 75-64.

As the game ended, Johnson and Kelser embraced and Bird sat on the bench, weeping into a towel. Although it wound up being the last college game for both Bird and Johnson, it was merely the first chapter in their rivalry.

“I knew our paths would cross again,” Bird said.

Johnson said, “When I saw him after that game, crying and mad--what I would have done if they had beat us--I knew this guy had a passion for the game and a passion for winning. I said, ‘Oh boy. I’m going to have to see this guy a lot more.’ ”

Bird, a senior, had been drafted the previous year by the Boston Celtics under a now-extinct rule. Johnson, a sophomore, decided he was ready for the pros.

Through a trade, the Lakers had the first-round draft pick of the then-New Orleans Jazz. The league had a coin flip to determine whether the Lakers or the Chicago Bulls would get the No. 1 pick. Thorn, the general manager of the Bulls at the time, called heads on a conference call with Commissioner Larry O’Brien. It came up tails. The Lakers took Johnson with the No. 1 pick, setting the Showtime era in motion.

(The Bulls took UCLA’s David Greenwood with the No. 2 pick. Five years later, fate came back around to Chicago and the Bulls landed Michael Jordan with the No. 3 pick. “It was a long five years, let me say that,” Thorn said.)

Johnson and Bird joined an NBA that was a weak sibling to pro football and baseball. When Johnson and the Lakers won the NBA championship in his rookie season--he had a 42-point performance in Game 6--against the Philadelphia 76ers, it was shown on tape delay. CBS didn’t want to bump “Dallas.” The Laker-76er series drew an average rating of 8.0.

Bird and Magic dueled from afar in the early years. Their teams met twice a year in the regular season, then they took turns watching each other win championships. When they finally squared off in the 1984 finals, they drew an average rating of 12.2 for their series, which Boston won in seven games. Johnson beat Bird the next two times they met in the finals.

Had it not been for Magic and Bird, no one would have cared about Jordan, let alone wanted to be like Mike. In the first year after NBC acquired the NBA network rights from CBS, they got a 15.8 average rating for the matchup between Jordan’s Bulls and the Lakers. Last year, Jordan’s quest for his sixth championship drew an average rating of 18.7, an NBA record. Higher ratings translate into higher TV rights fees, which means more money all around. The league’s average salary for the 1979-80 season was $170,000. The average salary today is $2.6 million, more than two-thirds of the salary cap for an entire team in 1984-85.

Johnson and Bird helped change more than the economics of the sport. On their way to winning a combined eight championships, they brought a new understanding of how the game should be played.

“It wasn’t about us scoring a lot of points to look spectacular,” Johnson said. “It was about us winning. When it came down to making the big play, we were always a part of it, one way or another. Whether it was a pass, a rebound or scoring a basket. We had a will to win.”

And if there was an undercurrent of race to their rivalry--with black people dismissing Bird as the product of the league’s need for a white superstar and white people viewing Magic as a overly flashy player who couldn’t shoot--the two helped change those narrow perceptions as well.

“It was definitely out there,” Johnson said. “But the funny thing is, Larry proved to black people that he could play, and I proved to whites that I can play.

“You’d go back to the neighborhood and it would be like, ‘Man, can he really play?’ You’d go back later, and they’d say, ‘I’m Larry Bird! That’s my boy! I don’t care what none of you guys say.’

“The same thing with me, passing to white fans, [who were] saying ‘I’m Magic Johnson.’ ”

You look at the current state of affairs--how a black man with an engaging smile could win the hearts of fans and corporate America, how a hick from French Lick, Ind., could win the respect of the fellas in the ‘hood, how college and professional basketball have reaped billions of dollars over the last 20 years--and realize that 1979 championship game wasn’t about just two teams playing. There aren’t too many basketball games with the winners far outnumbering the losers.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

March 26, 1979

MICHIGAN ST. 75; INDIANA ST. 64

How the two fared in the NCAA championship game:

*--*

MAGIC CATEGORY BIRD 35 Minutes 40 24 Points 19 5 Assists 2 7 Rebounds 13 8-15 Field goals 7-21 8-10 Free throws 5-8

*--*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

SHARED HISTORY

MAGIC AND BIRD, LINKED FOREVER

THE GAME

MICHIGAN STATE 75, INDIANA STATE 64

March 26, 1979 at Salt Lake City

MICHIGAN STATE (75)

*--*

FG-A FT-A R A P T Brkovich 1-2 3-7 4 1 1 5 Kelser 7-13 5-6 8 9 4 19 Charles 3-3 1-2 7 0 5 7 Donnelly 5-5 5-6 4 0 2 15 Johnson 8-15 8-10 7 5 3 24 Vincent 2-5 1-2 2 0 4 5 Gonzalez 0-0 0-0 0 0 0 0 Longaker 0-0 0-0 0 0 0 0 Totals 26-43 23-33 34 15 19 75

*--*

Shooting: Field goals, 60.5%; free throws, 69.7%.

Team rebounds: 2.

****

INDIANA STATE (64)

*--*

FG-A FT-A R A P T Miley 0-0 0-1 3 0 1 0 Gilbert 2-3 0-4 4 0 4 4 Bird 7-21 5-8 13 2 3 19 Nicks 7-14 3-6 2 4 5 17 Reed 4-9 0-0 0 9 4 8 Heaton 4-14 2-2 6 2 2 10 Staley 2-2 0-1 3 0 2 4 Nemcek 1-1 0-0 0 1 3 2 Totals 27-64 10-22 34 18 24 64

*--*

Shooting: Field goals, 42.2%; free throws, 45.5%.

Team rebounds: 3.

Michigan State: 37 38--75

Indiana State: 28 36--64

A--15,410. O--Nichols, Muncy, Wirtz.

THEIR CAREERS

*--*

MAGIC COLLEGE BIRD 2 Years 3 62 Games 94 .463 FG% .533 .816 FT% .822 7.6 Reb. per game 13.3 7.9 Assists per game 4.6 17.1 Points per game 30.3 1 NCAA titles 0

*--*

****

*--*

MAGIC PRO REGULAR SEASON BIRD 13 Years 13 906 Games 897 .520 FG% .496 .848 FT% .886 7.2 Rebounds per game 10.0 11.2 Assists per game 6.3 19.5 Points per game 24.3 .303 3-pt FG% .376 0 NBA rookie of the year 1 3 NBA MVP 3 9 All-NBA first team 9

*--*

****

*--*

MAGIC PLAYOFFS BIRD 13 Years 12 190 Games 164 .506 FG% .472 .838 FT% .890 7.7 Rebounds per game 10.3 12.3 Assists per game 6.5 19.5 Points per game 23.8 .241 3-pt. FG% .321 5 NBA titles 3 3 NBA finals MVP awards 2

*--*

****

*--*

MAGIC COACHING* BIRD 1 Years 1 5-11 Record 58-24 0-0 Playoff record 10-6

*--*

* Through 1997-98 season

Five highest-rated NCAA tournament championship games:

1979

Michigan State: 75

Indiana State: 64

Rating: 24.1 (NBC)

1985