Phil Markham was there that night, and he's never forgotten the images seared into his brain by the game that transformed college basketball.
Check that. It wasn't the game itself that gripped college ball by the seams and rotated it through air and hoop to an elevated place. It was the promise of the game, which wasn't quite the equal of real, live, thrilling action, but it still was a length-of-the-court pass from cheap hype.
Section L, Row 4, Seat 2.
That's the exact vantage point in the University of Utah's Special Events Center -- now known as the Huntsman Center -- from which Markham watched Magic Johnson's Michigan State Spartans beat down on Larry Bird's Indiana State Sycamores in the 1979 NCAA Tournament's championship game, the most watched basketball game of all time, and, maybe, the most important.
Bob Knight sat just across the aisle. Digger Phelps, whose Notre Dame team had been stopped short of the Final Four a week earlier by Michigan State, was a few seats down. Faces made famous by college basketball were all around. But the biggest dog in the building that night, the one that filled every seat, wasn't an icon. It was an emotion, a condition: anticipation.
"It was surreal," says Markham, now an operations manager for West Valley City public works and then a recent graduate at Utah. "I knew it was an extraordinary occasion. Everybody had started following Bird and Indiana State, the school that came from nowhere. He was this gangly white guy with blond hair and a bad moustache who could do all these things on the basketball court. I wondered how he could be so good and end up at a place like that. And there was Magic. Everybody had heard of him, too. We wanted to see what would happen."
Much of America wanted to see what would happen, and so, 30 years ago this week, a record number of viewers -- the game drew an astounding 24.1 rating -- tuned their televisions and turned their eyes to Salt Lake City on a Monday night in late March to find out.
"The buildup was unbelievable," says Jud Heathcote, Michigan State's coach. "I had been to other Final Fours and they were just games and this one, the media just descended on Salt Lake. Everybody wanted to watch me coach, is what I say."
A 'booster rocket' for basketball
Basketball, prior to that time, had not yet climbed to its pinnacle. The NCAA Tournament wasn't the national happening -- with pools in every office -- that it is today. The NBA sagged below the college game in ratings, its championship series not even broadcast on live television.
Bird-Magic changed all that, on both levels.
"It was the booster rocket that took college basketball to the stratosphere," says Dick Enberg, who called the title game on NBC, alongside Al McGuire and Billy Packer.
Heathcote guessed back then that Magic and Bird would go on to be "two of the best pros in the history of the game."
"I said it in jest," he says. "But now I think, 'What a great prophet I would have been!'"
The college game already had lifted off and headed for space on the thrust of John Wooden's UCLA dynasty of the 1960s and '70s. There had been earlier draws, such as Lew Alcindor's Bruins vs. Elvin Hayes' Houston Cougars, played in the Astrodome in 1968 on national television.
But this title match of Bird and Johnson, two extraordinary talents -- one white, one black -- with expansive games from schools that traditionally hadn't done much, continued the move upward.
"The two teams involved made it what it was," says Bird, adding that people still talk to him about the game. "Not just about the game, but the team I was on and how we got there. Winning 29 [regular-season] games that year, and the run we had and the players I played with, that is what I remember most. As for the [title] game, I don't like to talk about that."
Bird averaged 30.3 points during his college career, but he also loved to pass, as did Johnson. Magic's combo-pack of size and dexterity had never before been seen in a point guard.
French Lick vs. Hollywood
Talent, though, was only part of the fuel for the new flight.
The country, which at that time got only relative glimpses at emerging stars, was hungry to know more about two seemingly divergent schoolboys who dominated opponents -- without hogging the ball.
What they had in common: "They had two things others didn't have," Heathcote says. "Great hands and great court vision." How they differed: One was a flamboyant magician, the other an insecure hick.
Magic was Hollywood, long before he played for the Lakers. As early as his high school days in Lansing, Mich., he loved and lived for the spotlight, almost always looking for opportunities to be seen and heard.
Bird was French Lick, an often-silent countrified kid who fished and hunted and embraced his rural existence. He dropped out of Indiana University before practices even started his freshman season in 1974, and, thereafter, found great pleasure in working as a general maintenance man in his hometown. Bird was, as Enberg says it, "a dolt, a funny looking farm kid who had a great game, but you wondered if he knew his middle name."
A shot at fulfilling his promise in basketball eventually lured him to Indiana State, a Missouri Valley school in Terre Haute. He had felt isolated in the crowds at Indiana. At State, he found a zone of comfort, on and off the court.
Game by game, as the Sycamores gathered wins in '78-'79, going 33-0 before the NCAA Final, fascination about "Larry Bird and four chemistry majors," as Enberg jokingly called them, grew.
They were ranked No. 1 heading into the national tournament.
Many, however, thought Earvin Johnson's Spartans were better, despite having dropped too many games during an uneven season in which roles on the team were sometimes uncertain. In Seth Davis' book, When March Went Mad , the author retells the story of Heathcote, after a disappointing loss to Northwestern, saying on his weekly television show that he had received only one letter requesting his resignation: "Unfortunately," Heathcote said, "it was signed by 10,000 people."
The stage is set
By the night of March 26, those roles were firm, the requests diminished.
In the tournament, ISU had defeated Virginia Tech, Oklahoma, Arkansas and DePaul, the last two victories coming by just two points. MSU crushed every team in its path: Lamar, LSU, Notre Dame and Penn.
As the host city of the Final Four, Salt Lake City, at that time a modest burg, suddenly found itself the stage of basketball's biggest showdown in basketball's biggest event in basketball's entire history.
"We had people staying in Brigham City and in Park City, all the way down I-15," says Arnie Ferrin, Utah's athletic director at the time. "It was a big boost for the state of Utah, but it really went on without incident."
That's not exactly true.
In the run-up to the Final Four, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir put on a special performance for fans from the schools, and mistakenly played "The Victors" instead of Michigan State's fight song. "We got all kinds of letters from [Spartan] fans wanting to know why they sang the Michigan fight song," Ferrin says.
Accommodations at the 15,410-seat Special Events Center were cramped -- for fans and for the national media. Names had to be drawn for ticket applicants and many media requests were denied.
Michigan State stayed at a hotel by the airport, and Indiana State made the old Hotel Utah its headquarters, which might have been a better experience for the Sycamores had the Spartan band not been staying, and playing late through the night, at the same hotel.
"At that time, that was accepted as part of the hoopla," says Bill Hodges, ISU's coach.
Bird says he enjoyed Salt Lake City: "I remember thinking, 'Man, this place is beautiful.' Every time I go there, I think that. I still remember that city and how it sat below the mountains and thinking, 'This is an awesome place.' There were so many people when we arrived, all our fans were there and people were in the streets. Everywhere, it seemed like there was a sea of blue or green."
Packer recalls the intimate setting and the fans: "The confines of the arena were great. It was a knowledgeable crowd."
Coin flip for history
In the heart of it was Markham, who lucked into getting a primo seat because one of his father's work associates had secured a ticket and, then, couldn't attend. He flipped a coin with his brother to see who would go to Monday night's championship game.
Markham won the flip.
He, like a lot of Utahns, wanted Indiana State to take the title because of its small-time, Cinderella status.
"We liked to cast ourselves as underdogs out here," he says. "And so, we wanted Indiana State to prove they could do it."
Michigan State had slaughtered Penn in the first semifinal, leading at one point 50-17. The Sycamores barely got past DePaul.
The night before the final game, Heathcote chucked his curfew out the window and told his players to enjoy the ride: "I figured they couldn't find any trouble in Salt Lake anyway," he says. "Gregory [Kelser] said, 'Coach, we're all exhausted. We're just going to go back and sleep.'"
By game time the following night, everyone was awake and alert; endorphins were popping at the Special Events Center.
But early in the game, it became clear that Bird and his chemistry majors couldn't stay with Magic's Spartans. Michigan State was too tall, too talented for the Sycamores. Johnson got 24 points. Kelser added 19.
Larry Legend, on that night, was unable to live up to his billing, nor to his coming legacy. Davis wrote in his book that Bird told a teammate before the game even began that he wasn't feeling it, and Bird was right.
Against Heathcote's matchup zone, which hassled him nonstop with two men, Bird made just seven of 21 shots, scoring 19 points and totaling only two assists. His worst college game came at the worst time, leaving him devastated. He buried his face in a towel following the final buzzer, and, as was often his custom, he refused to talk to reporters afterward.
"I got frustrated because my shots weren't falling," he says. "Once that game started, in the first 10 minutes, I knew it was going to be different. They were geared to stopping me. ... It was different than any game we'd played before."
Michigan State easily won, 75-64.
"Bird couldn't get anything going," says Packer. "If it had been the last game of his life, nobody would have remembered his name. Of all the Final Fours, this was one of the least impressive I've watched."
Adds Heathcote: "The game didn't live up to its billing. It wasn't a classic."
It reflected more the essence of real life: lots of hope, flows of excitement, ebbs of disappointment, and, at the end, recovery in order to move on.
"We've all been guilty of making it into something bigger than it was," Enberg says.
But its impact was big. The fact that nearly one-quarter of the television sets in America were dialed onto that game that night in Salt Lake City linked Bird and Magic "together forever," as Johnson once told a TV reporter, and turboed the NCAA Tournament toward the phenomenon it has become.
And for those who were there, on the court and in the stands that Monday night in March, the game lives on.
"When it comes to March, I hardly ever go through a day when someone doesn't mention that game way back when," Heathcote says. "You would have thought it would dim over time, but it hasn't."
"Seems like it was yesterday," says Markham. "It made me a college basketball fan for life."
