Finding Mudville: Larry and Magic | Sports | Berkeley Independent

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Finding Mudville: Larry and Magic

Published Tuesday, March 16, 2010 11:47 AM

By Dan Brown
Berkeley Independent

Dan BrownHBO finally paid off on Friday night.

Channel 250 on your cable remote was number one in my heart as it saved me from a night of wretched TV where I’d be forced to watch an out-of-work actor masquerade as a culinary expert whose only claim to fame is that he can polish off a seven-pound hamburger in under an hour. And that would be the best thing on.

But when I hit HBO I discovered they were seven minutes into a Spike Jonez documentary about Larry and Magic.

I could stop right now and not go any further and you’d know exactly about whom I’m talking and what I’m going to say.

Larry Bird and Ervin “Magic” Johnson, these are the guys who saved the NBA.

“Michael Jordan didn’t save the NBA, Larry and Magic saved the NBA,” says Bryant Gumball with the inclusion of a colorful adjective because, after all, this was HBO and it was okay to use colorful adjectives here.

Back in the late 70s the NBA had been mired in a malaise of fan indifference. Wilt Chamberlain, Willis Reed, Jerry West, Oscar Robertson and John Havlichek had all retired.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar may have still been in his prime, but how exciting is a Sky Hook?

Back then, in 1979, the NBA Finals were shown on a tape-delayed basis, and even then nobody watched.

The NBA needed a shot in the arm.

That shot in the arm was currently running through the NCAA regular season by way of Terre Haute, Indiana and Lansing, Michigan, where a tall, skinny white kid, “The Hick from French Lick,” was dazzling college arenas in ways that hadn’t been seen since Pete Maravich, and a poor black kid from Lansing ran amok through the stoic Big Ten.

I saw Larry Bird play when he was a senior at Indiana State.

Ball State was win Number 12 on ISU’s perfect 32-0 record going into the National Championship Game with Michigan State.

Back then Ball State’s basketball team trudged through the lower tier of the Mid American Conference using a rag-tag bunch of second and third tiered high school basketball players from around Indiana, many of which were friends of mine that I played high school basketball against.

When Ball State recruited and signed 7’2” Jeff Parker from Bloomington, Indiana and crowed because they “stole the big center” out from under Bobby Knight’s nose, you knew the minute Jeff stepped onto the basketball floor and bumped his head on a low-hanging crossbar on the basketball goal apparatus that Ball State stole nothing from under anybody’s nose, especially Bobby Knight’s.

Jeff was one of those kids who had a hard time walking and chewing gum at the same time. He was just too big. It took too long for all those neuron synapses to get from Point A to Point B.

Ball State scored the first two points of the game on a breakaway slam dunk off the opening tip, and the full house of nearly 6,000 Cardinal fans there only to see Larry Bird play went nuts.

Ninety minutes later, the final seconds ticked off the clock and the Sycamores won by 19, and Bird finished the afternoon with 33 points, his number.

But I saw him. I can say that all these years later. I saw Larry Bird play.

As for the documentary, if you have HBO, watch it.

It is an amazing story about two guys who truly didn’t like each other because they were rivals. They really kicked it Old School.

Which is the way the game was meant to be played.

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