The Legacy of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird’s NCAA Championship Showdown, 40 Years Later

During a March weekend in 1978, Bob Ryan covered what was, in retrospect, the most prophetic back-to-back of his decadeslong writing career. This came three months before the Boston Celtics would use the sixth pick in that June’s NBA draft to select a forward from a state university in Indiana, and 15 months before the Los Angeles Lakers would use the first pick in the following year’s draft on a guard from a state university in Michigan. And it came a year before those two players would converge in the 1979 NCAA championship game, a moment that would forever alter the trajectory of college basketball, the NBA, and America’s cultural and racial fabric.

There is, of course, no earthly way that Ryan could have contemporaneously grasped the full context of what he was about to witness during those two days. He was merely a Boston Globe journalist on assignment, headed to Indianapolis to cover Providence’s first-round NCAA tournament matchup against Michigan State and its ebullient point guard, Earvin “Magic” Johnson. That game was on a Saturday, but Ryan decided to fly to Indiana on Friday, rent a car with a pair of colleagues, and drive the roughly 75 minutes down Interstate 70 to Terre Haute to catch another game featuring a young prospect who had been gathering buzz despite having never appeared on national television. That night, not long after Ryan took his seat for Indiana State’s first-round NIT game against Illinois State, a lanky forward named Larry Joe Bird rebounded an Illinois State miss, dribbled to half court, cocked his right hand, and seamlessly whipped a 45-foot bullet pass to a teammate streaking to the basket for a layup.

It was in that instant that Ryan first became an evangelist, the one, he says, who was “beating the drums” for the Celtics to draft Bird, who finished that night with 27 points, 10 rebounds, and seven assists. The next day, Ryan watched Johnson put up 14 points, seven assists, and seven rebounds in Michigan State’s 77-63 victory over Providence. Ryan could not have known then that he would spend a large portion of his career chronicling the interplay between these two men; he could not have known, either, that he would watch them go head-to-head in Salt Lake City for the national title a year later. But after watching Bird make that pass, Ryan felt—for the first time, but not for the last—like he was witnessing something almost supernaturally ordained.

“Oh my god,” he exclaimed.

Forty years later, that 1979 NCAA championship game, with all of its narrative threads and lasting mythology, feels more like the starting point of a Great American Novel than a real-life occurrence. The funny thing is that the game itself was an unmitigated dud: Michigan State led virtually the entire way and defeated Indiana State, 75-64. Johnson played very well, scoring 24 points, and Bird shot uncharacteristically poorly, going 7-of-21 from the field and finishing with 19. But the game stands as perhaps the greatest historic convergence in college basketball history, an origin story of Marvelesque proportions that affected everything that came after.

Here was the first meeting between two players whose careers would soon become intertwined—as nemeses (and later friends), as stylistic mirrors, and as avatars of America’s racial obsessions. Here was the moment when the NCAA tournament graduated into something larger than life, and here was the moment when the NBA, without even realizing it, first bore witness to the path that would lead to its own resurrection in the midst of declining ratings and fan interest—much of it driven by the open discussions among both fans and executives about the lack of star white players like Bird and the lack of passing-driven guards like Magic. “In the late 1970s, the NBA was in trouble,” says former Chicago Tribune columnist David Israel. “And the reason why people decided it was in trouble was because they had too many black players.”

By the time Magic and Bird reached that title game, they were already burgeoning celebrities and potential avatars of basketball’s future; their names alone, says former Washington Post columnist Dave Kindred, “suggesting flight and sleight of hand,” felt as if they’d always been destined to meet. “It was Phantom of the Opera and Gone With the Wind and the Olympics all in one,” former NBC commentator Al McGuire, whose network televised the game, told the Los Angeles Times a decade later.

It’s almost impossible to overstate how much that Michigan State–Indiana State game came to mean, both within the basketball world and outside it, particularly as the Bird-Magic rivalry blossomed into the go-to cultural metaphor for writers, filmmakers, academics, and even playwrights in the 1980s and beyond. And it’s difficult to imagine that anything like it could happen again—not just because, given the fractured nature of our modern viewing habits, its 24.1 television rating (which translated to roughly 20 million viewers) is unlikely to ever be eclipsed by any other basketball game. It’s difficult to imagine that game being replicated because both levels of the sport, college and the NBA, have completely changed since, as has our sense of basketball’s place in society.

“It was like this big tower rising in the middle of a cornfield,” says longtime basketball writer Mike Lopresti, who was working for a small newspaper in Indiana at the time. That cornfield reference, Lopresti tells me, is both literal (in the case of Bird’s hometown) and metaphorical, but the larger implication is clear: These days, the landscape is more crowded. “Now you can be a big deal,” Lopresti says, “but you’re just part of the skyline.”

There is so much about the story of Magic and Bird’s convergence that could never be replicated in the modern age, from their interactions (or lack thereof) with reporters to their interplay on the court to outside perceptions of their style. As the game recedes into history, so, too, have the distinctive circumstances that built this game into something so utterly unique. It was a flashpoint in the evolution of American culture. And that moment is gone forever. “It would be very hard to imagine seeing anything quite like it,” Lopresti says. “And it may very well be impossible.”

College basketball moved at a more protracted pace back then, devoid of one-and-dones and not as firmly tethered to the professional ranks. This meant the media narrative that built up Magic and Bird as contrasting superstars had time to grow over multiple NCAA seasons. Bird actually posed for his first major national photo shoot in 1977, ahead of his junior season, appearing on an awkward Sports Illustrated cover with a pair of Indiana State cheerleaders. At the time, only the outlines of his story were known: He had transferred out of Indiana University after a few weeks of his freshman year, spent some time working on a garbage truck near his minuscule southern Indiana hometown of French Lick, and then was convinced by the Sycamores’ coaching staff to play ball at Indiana State. But even those few details were enough to turn him into a folk hero long before he ever played a basketball game in front of a national audience.

Still, there were so many questions: How good was Larry Bird, really? What could we really know about him, given the level of competition he played against in the Missouri Valley Conference? Indiana State had never made the NCAA tournament before Bird showed up; the program was best known as the place where John Wooden coached in the 1940s before he left for UCLA. As Ryan and his colleagues drove back from that Indiana State game in 1978—and as they got pulled over for speeding by a sympathetic state trooper who let them pass once they told him that Indiana State had won the game—at least one of Ryan’s colleagues remained skeptical that Bird was really the athlete he appeared to be.

There are no quotes from Bird in that SI cover story; in fact, the story isn’t really about Bird at all, but rather the shooting improvements in college basketball as a whole. This is, at least in part, because Bird showed little to no interest in speaking to the media unless coerced. And because NBA rules at the time allowed players to come back to school even if they got drafted, Bird’s coaches at Indiana State agreed to shield him from reporters as a condition for returning to play his senior season rather than joining the Celtics right after Boston selected him in 1978. “That was [Larry’s] choice to avoid the spotlight,” says Bill Hodges, who took over for Indiana State coach Bob King after King fell ill before Bird’s senior season. Says Ryan: “Let’s just say Larry would not have done well with social media in his youth. He was very sensitive.”

Then, of course, there was Magic. He was only a sophomore during the 1978-79 season, but had been a sensation since high school—so much so that when he held a press conference in his hometown of Lansing to announce his college choice of Michigan State over Michigan, virtually every local television station covered it. Magic was a natural with the media; he almost seemed born for the spotlight that would later attend to him in Los Angeles. When Magic posed for an SI photo shoot in November 1978, the magazine’s photographer, Lane Stewart, told his assistant, “If we could sign that kid to a personal contract, we’d be millionaires.”

Bird and Magic’s dealings with the media formed the first threads of their ongoing narrative. Bird was a mystery; Magic was an open book. We know now that this was a facile reduction: that Bird might have played the naive hayseed, but he was actually remarkably perceptive; that behind Magic’s exuberance lay a competitive spirit that was as fierce as Bird’s. But in an era that predated the saturation and skepticism of the internet, few bothered to question that story line—even if the underlying racial subtext was already making itself clear to at least one sportswriter.

“I remember I wrote something back then that I stand by to this day,” Israel says. “If a black player with a black coach had refused to be interviewed like that, everybody would have screamed bloody murder. But because it was a Hick from French Lick”—a nickname Bird essentially bestowed on himself—“with a white coach, and it was a little school that nobody had really paid attention to in the past, he was getting a pass.”

Mostly, Israel’s column succeeded in angering Bird and the Indiana State contingent. But in 1979, those kinds of counterintuitive notions were largely ignored. The overarching idea, in that moment, of Magic and Bird as contrasting forces was too great to be derailed.

“College basketball, with its mythology of ‘student-athlete’ innocence, dominated the winters,” Kindred says. “[Magic and Bird] were great stories in a media world that was at once smaller than today’s and yet, because of its tight focus, more powerful.”

Indiana State went undefeated throughout the 1978-79 regular season, winning games largely because Bird’s less-talented teammates appeared to channel his sheer force of will. Still, few people truly knew what to make of the team—or of Bird—and several pundits, including NBC’s Billy Packer, spent much of the season arguing that the Sycamores were overrated. Michigan State, meanwhile, struggled through parts of that regular season but found its groove during the tournament. While a number of observers contended that Magic’s teammate, Greg Kelser, was just as promising a prospect as Magic himself, that may have been because Magic so utterly defied the positional norms of basketball. So did Bird, a forward who could shoot and pass like a guard.

This is yet another reason why the buildup to the 1979 NCAA championship game was so powerful: Because for all their obvious contrasts, Magic and Bird—both 6-foot-9, both driven by fundamentally sound decision-making more than by pure athleticism—heralded a future generation of players who would defy the positional rigidity that had defined basketball up to that point. Nowadays, a 7-footer who can sink 25-foot jump shots no longer surprises us; back then, a point guard the size of a big man who could play every position on the floor felt like a revelation. “They were both enormous for their positions. Five years earlier, they might have been playing center,” Israel says. “They were exceptions to the rule.”

The NCAA tournament had itself been undergoing a period of rapid growth thanks to television; in the spring of 1979, it expanded from 32 teams to 40. And to sportswriters like Kindred, a championship game featuring Bird and Magic would be a natural extension of that growth. Bird versus Magic was such an organically great story that it utterly dominated one of the most compelling Final Fours in history: DePaul, which nearly upended Indiana State in the national semifinal, was led by aging coach Ray Meyer, who hadn’t coached in a Final Four since the tournament had an eight-team field in 1943. And Penn, which lost to Michigan State, is still the only Ivy League team to make a Final Four since 1965.

All of that was overshadowed by the two stars on either end of the bracket. “I, who had seen everything, begged god for Magic and Bird,” Kindred says.

That’s because the dichotomies they represented—“urban and rural, a joyous kid and an earnest craftsman, the big-time team against the nobodies,” Kindred says—were so engrossing, and because they shared a grudging respect for each other as rivals, dating back to when they’d played on a college All-Star team together in the summer of 1978. And it’s because, even 40 years later, there are still myriad ways to interpret and argue what they meant to each other, and to us. Their legacies are so inseparable—and they’ve both come to graceful terms with this fact in retirement—that it’s almost possible to forget that this began as a story rooted in their inherent differences.

“I sort of disagree with the mainstream narrative that’s developed about Magic and Bird,” says Todd Boyd, a University of Southern California professor who has written extensively about basketball and race. “There’s been this desire to make this into something like a buddy-cop movie. People say, ‘Look at the similarities,’ and I completely disagree with that. I don’t think they played alike at all.”

This, to Boyd, is why that original Bird-Magic game remains so important: Because it came along at a moment when people were engaged in a debate about the style of basketball being played across all levels of the sport. And underlying that debate—up until roughly the late 1980s, when Bird and Magic’s influence began to wane and Michael Jordan took over as the standard-bearer for the league—was a conversation about race.

Those discussions often rose straight to the surface: When Sports Illustrated’s Bruce Newman wrote the magazine’s first true profile of Bird in the weeks before the 1979 tournament, he quoted both 76ers vice president and general manager Pat Williams and Warriors scout Pete Newell about the struggling league’s desire for a transcendent white player to draw in more white fans. “There are so few outstanding white players in our league,” Williams said. “And that makes Bird an asset.”

The Bird-Magic narrative allowed people to discuss these tensions through the lens of basketball; it was, Boyd and colleague Kenneth Shropshire once wrote, “the late twentieth century’s version of an acceptable race war.” At the time of the Michigan State–Indiana State title game, basketball was still “about 50-50 black and white,” Boyd says—and the conversations about black players gaining a bigger foothold in the sport, according to Boyd, echoed the tone of those about white flight from the inner cities.

And yet, Boyd says, the popular notion that Bird and Magic’s similarities actually served as a bridge amid that race war—that their buddy-cop movie relationship was entirely symbiotic—ignores what he saw as the contrast that mattered. You either identified with Bird’s “toned-down” approach, as Boyd puts it, or Magic’s freewheeling style. And how you leaned wasn’t solely a reflection of sport.

By the late 1980s, the larger idea Bird represented—of the stubborn search for a Great White Hope in sports—had become muted, Boyd says, at least when it came to basketball. “The NBA became a black league,” Boyd says. (Now, he tells me, the Great White Hope has become a political concept.) In that way, you can argue that Bird and Magic came along at just the right moment, in just the right game, under just the right television spotlight, to spark a conversation that would propel us through a decade—and signify the inevitable changes that were coming to the sport. In 1992, when Ryan wrote about the end of the Bird-Magic rivalry, he identified Bird as “undeniably white” and Magic as “undeniably black.”

“Does this matter?” Ryan wrote. “Hell, yes. It’s part of the fun.” But four decades after that NCAA championship, the story has changed, because basketball as we know it has changed too.

When I ask Lopresti, who’s covered the Final Four for four decades, if he can think of an individual college basketball rivalry that even approached the scope of that 1979 Magic and Bird game, he brings up just one: Patrick Ewing’s Georgetown team playing Hakeem Olajuwon and Houston in the 1984 championship. Yet even that matchup didn’t carry the same weight; over the years, the tournament has generally become a showcase for either great teams devoid of a single star or great individual players who arise almost in a vacuum.

The question now is not whether anything as impactful as Bird-Magic could come again in college basketball, but whether college basketball, beyond the three-week fascination of the NCAA tournament, could ever feel as socially resonant as it did in that moment. In 1979, the NBA was plagued by problems and college basketball was ascendant; now, the situation is reversed. “College basketball,” Boyd says, “is not nearly as interesting to me as it was back then. You knew the players because you spent more time with them.”

The one player who seemingly transcended the NCAA tournament this year, Duke’s Zion Williamson, was knocked out of the field by Magic Johnson’s former school in the Elite Eight. And even the conversation about Williamson isn’t centered on a rivalry, but on what his one season in college means for his future NBA career—and whether athletes of his caliber should even bother playing college basketball in the first place, and how they should be compensated if they do.

That’s the thing: In 1979, the conversations about Bird and Magic, for all of their subtext, still largely revolved around the happenings on the basketball court. These days, those discussions have moved beyond basketball and into larger (metaphorical) arenas, and are often more explicit and more institutionally focused than they once were; there are, for instance, dialogues to be had about social advancement in college basketball, Boyd says, including one about the continuing dearth of black coaches, athletic directors, and conference commissioners. You could argue that the Bird-Magic rivalry helped push those arguments forward; you might even say that the debate their rivalry engendered was the bridge to the new (and equally vexing) complexities of modern-day discourse. But it feels like a throwback now. To imagine a narrative centered on two players who signified so much, both within and outside of their sport? That feels nearly impossible.

“You can’t manufacture this shit,” Bob Ryan tells me. “It’s organic. When Larry Bird came along, I was 10 years into covering the NBA. And it was as if I signed up for an art course and I didn’t know who the teacher was going to be. And then in walks the teacher. And it’s Michelangelo.”

And who then, I ask him, was Magic Johnson? “Oh,” Ryan says, without hesitating. “Da Vinci.”