Presented by BACON BOISE.
This Day In Sports…March 26, 1979:
The night that is generally considered to be responsible for making the NCAA Tournament what it is today. It was sophomore Magic Johnson against senior Larry Bird, as the fast-breaking Michigan State Spartans snapped Indiana State’s 33-game winning streak to claim the national title with a 75-64 victory. Magic scored 24 points with seven rebounds on his way to the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player honor. He would then declare for the NBA Draft. Bird put up 19 points and added 13 boards, but he went just 7-for-21 from the field.
What made that first Magic-Bird showdown so attractive? “Because we played the game the right way,” Johnson said years later at NCAA.com. “We didn’t play it for ourselves, we played it for our teams. We were two unique guys being over 6-8, being able to handle the ball, being able to score inside, outside, being able to make the right pass to our teammates. Because we didn’t’ really care about scoring, we cared about winning. And then you have one player black, one player white, one player smiling, one player who don’t.”
The much-anticipated matchup drew the biggest audience in college basketball history, reaching 35.1 million viewers with a rating of 24.1, catapulting March Madness into the mainstream. At the time, the NCAA was toying with the idea of expanding the tournament from 40 teams. The magical night in Salt Lake City all but sealed the deal. By the time Boise hosted the first and second rounds four years later, there were 52 teams in the field. The event then expanded to 64 teams in 1985.
The Magic-Bird rivalry continued the following season in the NBA, with Johnson playing for the L.A. Lakers and Bird for the Boston Celtics. They faced each other 37 times as pros—18 in the regular season and 19 in the NBA Finals. Magic and the Lakers won 11 of the regular season matchups, as well as two of the three series in the Finals. The Celtics beat L.A. for the title in 1984 (in what Bird called the highlight of his career), and the Lakers countered with Finals triumphs over Boston in 1985 and 1987.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
