Enberg, Packer The Pins To Our MSU/ISU Balloon

Shame on Dick Enberg. He's a Michigan born-and-reared kid. He ought to know better than to rain on our parade in this state.

And here I thought that the 1979 Michigan State-Indiana State NCAA Final -- aka Magic Johnson vs. Larry Bird -- was some good television.

But now here's Enberg, trying to spoil the fun just as MSU is set to take on Kansas in a regional semifinal tonight.

"It's almost sacrosanct to refer to it as one of the great games of all time," Enberg, who called the game for NBC and who now works for CBS, told USA Today.

Well, nuts.

Enberg didn't stop there. Not only should we stop holding the game in such high regard, he said, and not only wasn't it one of the greatest finals ever, it was downright...bad.

"But had Magic and Bird been NBA busts, I don't think we'd look back on it as a great game. It was not a great final. As I left, I had the same feeling as after Super Bowl blowouts -- that it wasn't very exciting."

Hmph.

Enberg's sour puss was joined with that of broadcast partner Billy Packer, who echoed the downer words of CMU grad Enberg.

"It was one of the poorer finals games I ever broadcast," Packer said. "What Bird-Magic eventually became made that game, not the other way around."

Well, now that last statement of Packer's, I can swallow.

I won't quarrel that Magic and Bird's NBA careers certainly added to the image of the '79 Final, when MSU met the Indiana State Sycamores. The Spartans had breezed -- as much as a team can "breeze" thru an NCAA tourney -- thru the brackets, and waiting for them were Bird and his flock, who were 33-0.

But take it from me, who's old enough to still recall the game (I was 15): the game wasn't a dud.

Maybe I'm looking at it through too much of a local prism, but I seem to remember that, although the Spartans led most of the way, it was never a blowout, and Bird did his best to make sure it would never be such.

I'm perplexed and a little disappointed to hear such wet blanket words from Enberg and Packer, because it's not like Magic and Bird weren't already superstars -- at the college level. NBC, I'm sure, enjoyed terrific ratings that night -- the only time Magic and Bird met in college.

In other words, these guys weren't chopped liver who became NBA Hall of Famers. They were already damn good, and that's why the MSU-ISU game was looked forward to with so much anticipation.

Maybe Enberg and Packer expected TOO much.

But we fans expected a lot, too, and I simply don't remember being disappointed. MSU won, 75-64, but it wasn't until the final minutes that you could, as a Spartan fan, relax. As long as Bird lurked, no lead felt truly safe.

I've wondered for years if the outcome would have been different had the three-point shot been made available to Bird in 1979.

I don't know what Enberg and Packer were hoping for, but to broadcast a college game with two high-profile studs like Magic and Bird in it, squaring off...well, unless the game was a complete dog, you'd think you'd have a little more respect for its memory than what they told USA Today.

Yes, the game has grown in legend in 30 years. And yes, much of that -- if not all of it -- is because of what the two players did in the NBA. But doesn't every good-to-great game's stock grow over time?

If we're going to start telling tales out of school, then I'll throw one back into Enberg's face, who was about my 1979 age when it happened: the 1958 NFL Championship between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants. You know, the "Greatest game of all time"?

Not so much, really. Had it not been the first (and only) overtime game in NFL Championship/Super Bowl history, I don't know that it would be known as the greatest game.

Oh, it was close -- no doubt about that. But there were turnovers and dropped passes and it lacked a big game from any of the very talented skill players that both teams employed at the time.

So there. Two can play at this game.

Don't get me wrong; I love Dick Enberg. He's been a rock in the business. I still get chills thinking about his game show, "Sports Challenge", which aired in the mid-1970s to early-1980s. And his voice was the one calling all the plays on my Talking Football game. For those who don't know, Talking Football was played with two people. You selected an offensive play, which was a tiny recorded disc, and dropped it into the disc player. Your opponent spun the disc to match up with the defense he was calling. Then you plunged the disc down, and the player described the play.

My favorite was, "A LEAPING interception....he's going to go...all the way!! TOUCHDOWN!"

So Dick Enberg is OK in my book. Not so much Billy Packer, but there you go. But my man Enberg's memory might be the one that's not so good.

It's OK to keep lauding MSU-ISU from 1979. You have my permission.

Spartans Have Real Shot At Making 30th Anniversary Of '79 Team Truly Memorable

It's almost enough to make the old-timers (like yours truly) choke on their spittle, but it's been thirty years, incredibly. Thirty years since the Michigan State Spartans captured the NCAA basketball title in a matchup that they're still talking about, and as well they should.

Because it really wasn't MSU vs. Indiana State University, as nice of a thought as that was. It was Magic vs. Bird.

Earvin "Magic" Johnson, the Spartan sophomore, was to go up against Larry Bird, "The hick from French Lick (Ind)" -- and it was perhaps the most anticipated NCAA final in history. The Spartans had made mincemeat of just about every opponent in the tourney, but here were the Sycamores, led by Bird, who were undefeated at 33-0.

NBC, televisers of the Final Four, stumbled all over themselves, fawning over the impending battle between the flashy, smiling Magic Johnson and the more staid, blue collar Bird. It was the first made-for-television NCAA Final. Maybe the first true reality show to ever appear on NBC's airwaves.

For there were no writers -- this was unscripted stuff.

Magic, along with his second banana, Gregory Kelser, worked the Sycamores inside/out, as they had with the poor, helpless opponents leading up to the Final. Bird, working more solo than Magic, kept ISU in the game with his patented, slashing drives to the hoop and his dead-eye outside shooting.

NBC beamed the basketball drama into the tens of millions of homes whose occupants were transfixed by it. Those same living room folks had seen Bill Walton and UCLA have their way with hapless Final foes. They had seen, just two years earlier, Marquette University give their retiring head coach, Al McGuire, the best going away present of them all: a National Championship, as McGuire wept on the sidelines in the closing seconds, the TV cameras recording every teardrop.

Now McGuire was courtside again, but wearing a headset and gabbing into a microphone. He had done the usual coach's thing, post-career: begin a new one as a television talking head.

But never before had the people in TV land seen an NCAA basketball Final this rich in individual star power. Maybe they haven't, since. But that's another debate for another time.

Magic vs. Bird. The start of a beautiful rivalry, carried over big time, into the NBA.


The '79 Final: in the end, it was Bird who needed to be picked up by Magic


It says here that today's Spartans, thirty years later, have an excellent chance to duplicate the results of Magic and Greg Kelser -- but with considerably less star power, of course.

I'm sure it hasn't been lost on Tom Izzo's squad that they plan on playing this year's Final Four right smack downtown -- Detroit, Michigan, USA. It amounts to a home court advantage, which is more than Magic's Spartans had, for sure.

But today's Spartans aren't two players and three extras, as Magic's team had been in '79. So vast was the talent possessed by Magic Johnson and Gregory Kelser, so well-oiled their inside/outside game, that coach Jud Heathcote could have put Larry, Moe, and Curly on the court, and MSU would still have won a boatload of games.

Izzo's team, in 2009, doesn't have that "one guy" who totally overshadows his teammates. But it doesn't mean that the Spartans can't be national champs for the first time since 2000.

MSU won the Big Ten title, outright, and they really weren't challenged for it all season. Occasionally their lead was sliced to one game, but no worries. Of course, there were some hiccups along the way; an occasional stinker played on a foreign court, and even a couple at the Breslin Center. But not enough to derail Izzo and his kids.

The only derailment that can happen now is on the journey to Detroit's Final Four. Even an early-round upset in the Big Ten tournament won't be enough to keep the Spartans from receiving an at-large bid to March Madness.

Funny things have happened to (some would say) more talented Izzo teams in the NCAA Tourney. It seems it's either one and done, or a Final Four berth -- nothing in between -- when it comes to Tom Izzo-coached teams in the NCAA "Big Dance".

I won't predict a Spartan National Championship, because that's just so hard to pull off, even for the most elite teams. And I know some say (Big Al, for one) that just making the Final Four -- because it's in Detroit -- somehow gives MSU a backstage pass into the championship game, as if it doesn't have to be earned anymore, at that point. But I will admit this: if the Spartans can somehow win four games and be one of the Final Four, then they will indeed have a distinct advantage over the other three teams, because of the geography. And that's as far as I'll go.

The 2000 Spartans, led by guard Mateen Cleaves and the "Flintstones", missed the 20th anniversary of that 1979 team by one year in winning their national title. Now, nine years later, the 2009 Spartans have a chance to make it a nice, round number again: winning the whole enchilada 30 years since the school's first-ever National Basketball Championship.

I know Magic Johnson, for one, would simply eat it up.

Magic, Bird Took NCAA Tourney To New Heights

Where I get my haircut, there’s sports memorabilia strewn all over the walls, from top to bottom. It’s enough to ask for some extra clipping time as the chair spins you around, so you can get as much as you can of the photos within your line of vision (and in the mirror).

What’s striking is a display directly in front of the chairs, which is a series of framed, enlarged front pages from the Detroit Free Press, heralding championships from our teams in recent years gone by.

“NOT BAD, BOYS!”

“STANLEYTOWN”

“HAIL TO THE VICTORS”

The headlines are, what they used to call in the journalism business, in Armageddon type. Bold, black letters, several inches in height. And with an accompanying photo that extends to the bottom of the page. It put things like a Red Wings Stanley Cup on the same order as President Kennedy being assassinated. That’s progress for you.

But over on the right, devoid of color, is a front page from a sports section – not a Front Page. It’s from March, 1979. And the headline is far from Armageddon-like. In fact, if you weren’t looking for it, it might not be the first thing you read on the page.

“Spartans No. 1 in the Land.”

That’s it. Oh – and with a modest, black-and-white photo of Greg Kelser and an Indiana State player, battling for a rebound.

That’s how we read of Michigan State’s victory over ISU in the ’79 final. “Spartans No. 1 in the Land.” Today, a regular season game gets almost the whole darn front sports page. That 1979 sports page had enough room for some Tigers spring training news and a couple other stories.

So it’s ironic, to me, that the framed headline with the least fanfare at my barber’s just happened to be documenting the one event that, by itself, had more impact on its sport than the other five or six combined.

Bird ended up the one being down and out after the final buzzer in '79; but the tables would turn -- and turn, and turn

Michigan State beat Indiana State, yes, for the 1979 college basketball championship. They were, indeed, No. 1 in the land. But there was much more to it – oh, so much more.

It was the last college game for Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, for starters. Magic, of MSU, and Bird of ISU only faced each other once in college, and it was for all the marbles in 1979. Then both would enter the NBA and carry their rivalry into the pro game – forever changing the face of the league. Magic’s Los Angeles Lakers and Bird’s Boston Celtics tended to pass the NBA trophy back and forth in the 1980s – often playing each other in the Finals. But more than that, the NBA before Magic and Bird was still primarily a bush league – showing its Finals series at times on late-night tape-delay, if you can imagine such a thing. It was a league of under-publicized, under-appreciated stars, played in hoops Meccas like Buffalo and Kansas City and Baltimore and Cincinnati. The New Yorks and Philadelphias and Los Angeleses – and even Bostons – weren’t enough to sustain prolonged interest across the country.

The NBA was, to put it in more easily understood terms, kind of like how the NHL is today, with the latter’s pipsqueak TV contract and ill-advised expansion.

Magic and Bird changed all that. They joined Julius Erving, who was working wonders in Philly, and gave Dr. J help, forming a trio that ushered in pizzazz, trash talk, and – how about this – INTEREST. From 1980, when the rookie Magic’s Lakers won the title, to 1988, either the Lakers, Celtics, or 76ers won the whole shebang. The league thrived like never before.

Bird and Magic's rivalry lasted throughout the 1980s

But let’s go back to school.

That ’79 NCAA title game did some terrific stuff for the college game, too. Bird’s ISU team was undefeated when it played Michigan State. Magic, as a freshman, had led MSU into the tourney the year before, but couldn’t get past the Sweet 16. Now, as a wily sophomore, Magic went up against the “hick from French Lick (Ind.)”, Bird and his team from tiny Indiana State. It was a match made for TV heaven, and for a tournament that, like the NBA, needed a jolt. Interest waned in the years after UCLA dominated the tournament. No school was taking the baton with any regularity or competence. It’s one reason why news of MSU’s victory was barely heralded, even in the supposed hometown papers.

MSU-ISU was really Magic vs. Bird, and normally it might be considered off-putting to classify a team sport that way. Yet the nation thirsted for such a depiction. Ratings for the game soared. The NCAA tournament suddenly became must-see TV. Even the two stars’ promotion to the NBA didn’t stop the momentum that their epic battle in March 1979 had started.

You think I aggrandize too much? In a country where the common folks forecast the tournament with such fervor that we’ve spawned a new word, this “bracketology”? Where news of a presidential candidate’s (Barack Obama’s) tourney picks jostle for top billing with REAL news headlines?

You can thank Magic and Bird for a lot of that, too. Honest.

What they did was bring the spotlight back onto college basketball. Their pro careers simply added to that aura, because that proved them to be no flashes-in-the-pan; no “college-only” stars who flickered out when they began to get paid for their services. It said that, yes, great college players can not only be pro superstars, but also basketball ambassadors. Everyone wanted to know when the next Magic and Bird was going to arrive on campus. They practically demanded it, once those dudes turned pro.

Even if the Free Press didn’t know it at the time, nor accorded the NCAA Final the hype that it deserved, back in 1979.