How a remarkable, rarely discussed game set the course of Bird’s career—and gave rise to March Madness itself
How a remarkable, rarely discussed game set the course of Bird’s career—and gave rise to March Madness itself
Amid the chaos of the moment and the madness of the sold-out crowd—the largest to ever watch a basketball game in Las Cruces, New Mexico—the television cameras missed the incident in the stands. They were following the action on the floor, and the action was moving in the other direction, up the court, as the New Mexico State Aggies tried to score in transition. But Jose Lopez, a student photographer assigned to work the game that night, didn’t care about the action. As he sat courtside, Lopez reminded himself again and again that he was there to shoot only one person: Larry Bird.
Lopez and Bird were both college seniors at the time, and they each came from humble beginnings: Bird from the edge of poverty, in a little house next to the railroad tracks in French Lick, Indiana, and Lopez from a working-class Latino home in Santa Fe. But that’s where the similarities ended. On the night of the incident—February 1, 1979—Lopez was just trying to make it, and he was happy to work for $10 a photograph, while Bird was months away from signing a $3 million contract and was the star of a team that was capturing the imaginations of college basketball fans across the country.
The previously unheralded Indiana State Sycamores were in the midst of one of the most unlikely seasons in sports history. They landed in Las Cruces with a record of 18-0. Among major colleges, they were the only undefeated team left in the nation. That was good enough to earn them the no. 2 ranking in the AP poll, just behind in-state rival Notre Dame and just in front of perennial basketball power UCLA. For the first time, reporters from national media outlets, like The New York Times and the New York Post, were flying to Terre Haute, Indiana, in the middle of a dark and snowy winter to cover the team.
These trips did not go well. Bird refused to talk, upset that out-of-town reporters seemed intent on writing about his personal life—“things that don’t even pertain to basketball,” he complained. These “things” included at least three sensitive subjects that local reporters knew about but refused to touch: his father’s suicide, his brief marriage to his high school sweetheart, and his daughter from that marriage. As Indiana State flew west to Las Cruces, The Boston Globe had just published a Sunday story about the suicide, and Sports Illustrated was ready to break the news about Bird’s daughter—a choice that would infuriate Indiana State head coach Bill Hodges. He didn’t believe that the media was entitled to know everything about his star player. He also didn’t want distractions. Hodges was worried that a single loss would break Indiana State’s magical spell and send the Sycamores spiraling back into irrelevance.
That’s what had happened the previous season. Bird’s Sycamores had started 13-0, then lost and kept losing. They finished 23-9, losing their conference title game to Creighton and missing the NCAA tournament entirely. And this epic collapse was one reason why NBC, the NCAA’s broadcast partner in those days, wasn’t ready to buy into Indiana State. In Bird’s entire college career, the network had never once put him on national TV.
Now, with that record crowd packed into the arena in Las Cruces and Lopez sitting courtside with his Nikon cradled in his hand, it was all about to come to a head for Bird, the people around him, and college basketball itself. With 7:30 to go in the first half, Bird rumbled up the court on a fast break. But he was running too fast, out of control. He missed his layup and tumbled into the stands beneath the basket. In the mayhem that followed, he got tangled up with a clutch of New Mexico State fans. That’s when the shutter on Lopez’s camera began to fire, capturing what happened frame by frame.
I have been blessed with good news instincts, and I knew Larry Bird was the story.
Jose Lopez
Bird was wading into the crowd. Bird was reaching back with his left hand.
Bird was about to punch a fan.
There is a story we have been telling ourselves for almost 50 years about the birth of March Madness. We’ve told it so often, in fact, that the elements feel almost fated—like they were destined to happen this way. In late March 1979, Bird played Magic Johnson in the NCAA championship game. This game, featuring two future Hall of Famers, was watched by more than 50 million people, the largest television audience in American basketball history up to that point. Viewers fell in love with Bird and Magic. The seeds of March Madness took root, and so too did the seeds of a generational rivalry that defined the 1980s and helped save the NBA.
But there was nothing fated about it at all. It took wild luck, happenstance, and a series of miracles to put Bird and Magic on that stage in 1979, and the greatest of these miracles happened seven weeks earlier in that game against New Mexico State. Compared to the Bird-Magic game, hardly anyone saw it, yet its impact might’ve been just as important. Without that game, the Bird-Magic showdown might have never happened. Without that game, Larry Bird might not have become Larry Bird.
Larry Bird rushes into the stands and hits a fan during the Aggies-Sycamores game on February 1, 1979
Jose Lopez
Bird and his fellow Indiana State players hated traveling to Las Cruces, and the New Mexico State players felt the same about going to Terre Haute. There was no direct route between the cities, forcing the away team in the biannual Missouri Valley Conference battle to make its longest road trip of the season. To get to Las Cruces that week, the Sycamores had to bus three hours west to St. Louis, board a plane to Dallas, change planes to get to El Paso, and then take another bus deep into the Mesilla Valley. It required a full day of travel, and the team arrived in Las Cruces feeling tired and a bit anxious.
The Aggies had beaten the Sycamores 83-82 in Las Cruces the year before, and they had nearly defeated them just two weeks earlier in Terre Haute before losing 73-69. And they weren’t afraid of Bird at all. Ken Hayes, New Mexico State’s head coach, believed the referees had jobbed the Aggies out of a win in the most recent matchup. He had filed a complaint with conference officials afterward, and his players were motivated to win the rematch. On February 1, a record crowd of 13,684 people packed into the Pan American Center on campus. Aggies guard Greg Webb hoped they would end the night with a celebration. Bob Heaton, Indiana State’s sixth man and Bird’s roommate, spent the hours before tipoff in his hotel room, reading the Bible to calm his nerves.
Given the stakes, editors at the AP bureau in Dallas wanted a photographer to cover the game, and they knew just whom to call. Though Lopez was just 21 years old and still 10 months away from graduation, he always seemed to deliver for the AP if there was news to cover in southern New Mexico. Among other things, Lopez had covered the U.S. military’s detonation of massive bombs in the desert. “We could always count on him,” says Peter Leabo, a photographer who was working out of the Dallas bureau at the time. “New Mexico State was not known as a photojournalism powerhouse university. … But boy, Jose was a standout.”
Lopez didn’t just react to what he was seeing, Leabo explains; he thought about the next day’s headlines in advance and then tried to find the shot that would best illustrate them. “He was a real thinking photographer,” Leabo says. And so, while Heaton prayed before the game, Lopez crafted a plan. Follow Larry Bird. Follow Bird wherever he goes.
“I have been blessed with good news instincts,” Lopez tells me, “and I knew Larry Bird was the story.”
In the early goings that night, Lopez had plenty to shoot. With that record crowd on its feet, the Aggies came out tight while the Sycamores took the floor looking like a finely tuned machine dressed in powder blue. Bird’s teammates—Carl Nicks, Alex Gilbert, Steve Reed, and Brad Miley—all scored in the opening minutes. Bird hit shots from the deep corners and made passes that no one else could, including a behind-the-back no-look dish that hit Nicks in stride 60 feet down the court for an easy basket. The Sycamores built a 14-point lead, and Hayes called a timeout to prevent his team from getting run out of its own gym.
In an era that was pre-internet, pre–social media, and even pre-ESPN, Heaton’s shot managed to do the impossible: It went viral.
But the Sycamores kept the Aggies in the game with a series of mistakes. Nicks and Gilbert got into foul trouble, and Hodges gave significant minutes to Indiana State’s eighth man, Rich Nemcek, who had once quit basketball to work in an Indiana steel mill. Then, with 7:30 to go in the first half, Bird made the biggest error of all.
Bird declined an interview for this story, and he also declined to speak to reporters that night. He’s never spoken publicly about the incident. But multiple sources—including the courtside commentators for the live television broadcasts on WTHI-TV, out of Terre Haute, and KOB-TV, out of Albuquerque; reporters at The Albuquerque Tribune; and Lopez—chronicled what happened, blow by blow.
According to these accounts, Bird landed on his back in the stands after he missed the layup. As he tried to return to the floor, things got messy. One WTHI broadcaster said on the air that “a couple of fans put the grab on him.” Amid this tangle of bodies, one fan threw a game program at Bird. It hit him in the face, Lopez recalls, and that’s when Bird went back into the stands. He pushed one fan, who was sitting in the front row, clear across an aisle. He straddled a second man and then threw a left hook at a third person, clipping him just above his left eye.
Courtesy of WTHI-TV
It was the second time in a year that Bird had struck an opposing fan. The previous March, he had bloodied a student at Rutgers, striking him square in the face as fans stormed the court after a win over Indiana State. Later, witnesses at the Rutgers game wouldn’t be able to tell whether the man touched Bird or just taunted him. But one thing was clear: Bird had badly injured the man. Hollis Copeland, a Rutgers player who was standing near Bird at the time, told me that he could still remember the details decades later. “Bird lets him have it—*pow!*” recalls Copeland. “And before I knew it, the fan was on the floor. Blood was everywhere. His glasses split. You look down, you think the guy is dead, to tell you quite frankly, because he’s not moving.”
The basketball press barely covered the Rutgers altercation, and the Indiana newspapers buried it entirely. The Terre Haute Tribune described the incident in vague terms, calling it “a ruckus,” and The Terre Haute Star was equally thin on details. The Star called it “a postgame confusion” in which “Bird or someone else among the Sycamores” might have struck a fan. It was like it didn’t happen at all. And Copeland, a Black player, believed he knew why. He thought Bird got a pass because he was white. “The Great White Hope,” Hollis called him.
Now Bird had drawn blood again. The New Mexico State fan was bleeding from his forehead, and he would continue to bleed as officials walked him over to the Aggies’ bench for brief medical attention. And maybe most troubling for Bird, Lopez was on the move, too. He knew he had what he needed—he had the shots—so he left the game to get to the darkroom and the AP transmitter over in Milton Hall as quickly as possible. “My reaction was, OK, I’ve got it,” Lopez says. “*Let’s get the hell out of here and go process this film.*”
While Lopez hustled half a mile across campus at the wheel of his little Datsun, boos rained down from the rafters. Bird had become the villain, and the game had begun to turn. A 14-point Sycamore lead evaporated in a matter of minutes. The arena became so loud that the players could no longer hear the referees’ whistles. “Everybody’s standing at the Pan American Center in Las Cruces, New Mexico!” KOB-TV’s play-by-play man cried.
Down the stretch, everything that could go wrong for Indiana State did. With 2:12 to go, the Aggies claimed their first lead of the night. With 14 seconds left, Bird blew a chance to tie the game when he missed the front end of a one-and-one. Burning with frustration, he then fouled out for the first—and only—time in his collegiate career. Without Bird, the Sycamores missed another chance to tie it, committed another foul, and finally put Greg Webb on the line to ice the game with three seconds to go. By this point, it didn’t seem to matter whether Webb made his free throws or not. With New Mexico State leading 83-81—and the 3-point shot yet to be introduced to college basketball—this game was all but over.
“It don’t make a whole lot of difference,” said the KOB color analyst as Hayes called a timeout to discuss the late-game scenario with his players. “I believe this game belongs to the New Mexico State Aggies.”
Reflecting on the Bird-Magic Rivalry
Reflecting on the Bird-Magic Rivalry
It was the outcome that Hodges had dreaded. “A defeat,” he said that season, “might knock the wind out of us.” And it was the outcome with the most damaging consequences for Bird. As Webb prepared to go to the line to win the game for New Mexico State, newspaper editors on deadline in the Eastern and Central time zones ran with the biggest story they had: Bird attacking that fan. One newspaper in Ohio stripped a triptych of Lopez’s photos of the punch across the top of its sports section. The Wichita Beacon, the home paper of another Missouri Valley Conference rival, went with this headline, big and bold, above the fold on its sports page: “LARRY BIRD CHARGES STANDS, HITS SPECTATOR.”
Back in the New Mexico State huddle, Webb was ready to party. And in hindsight, Hayes was a little too confident as well. He instructed his team not to play defense at all if Webb missed the front end of the one-and-one. The only way the Aggies could lose with just three seconds to go, Hayes figured, was if they fouled the Sycamores. Meanwhile, in the Indiana State huddle, Hodges was still coaching the two starters who hadn’t fouled out, plus Heaton and two other bench players who would take the floor for the final play.
But Heaton wasn’t listening. When he stepped on the court a moment later, he didn’t know where he was supposed to stand or what he was supposed to do. All he could hear was the crowd, shouting and chanting.
“18-1.”
“18-1.”
“18-1.”
One year earlier, Webb had defeated Bird in this building, at this foul line, in the waning seconds of a close game. He knew how to handle pressure. But this time, Webb was distracted. He missed the front end of that one-and-one. The rebound fell into the hands of Miley. Unlike others, Miley had been listening in the Indiana State huddle, and he knew just what to do. He made a long pass to Heaton, who was standing a few feet behind midcourt, and Heaton unleashed a 50-foot shot.
As he let it go, Heaton was certain that he had just taken the worst shot of his life. He believed the ball was going to clear everything—the rim, the backboard, the student section, the arena—and land somewhere out in the brush of the Mesilla Valley. But the ball found the backboard, ricocheted hard off the glass, caromed off the front of the rim, circled the cylinder one time, danced around, and fell through—good.
Courtesy of WTHI-TV
Heaton had tied it at the buzzer. The game was going to overtime, and everyone in the building knew how it would end. When Indiana State won 91-89 in the extra period, the Sycamores players hoisted Hodges on their shoulders and carried him off the floor.
Magic Johnson and Bird line up for a foul shot during the 1979 NCAA national championship game
Getty Images
In an instant, everything changed. Reporters at the game were no longer writing about the punch that Bird had thrown or the fan that he had bloodied; they were writing instead about a miracle they had witnessed in the desert. In an era that was pre-internet, pre–social media, and even pre-ESPN, Heaton’s shot managed to do the impossible: It went viral.
By the time Indiana State landed in Oklahoma the next day, for a game against Tulsa, Heaton was watching highlights of himself on a television in the hotel lobby. NBC producers couldn’t ignore what was happening in Terre Haute anymore. They had to get there and beam the story of Bird’s underdog team to living rooms across America. In the days to come, NBC brokered a deal to tweak Indiana State's schedule to get the Sycamores on the air, and in that nationally televised game against the Wichita State Shockers in late February, the Sycamores kept rolling. NBC broadcasters Jim Simpson and Al McGuire had to shout to be heard over the din of the sold-out crowd in Terre Haute. Bird scored 49 points, a school record. Indiana State throttled the overmatched Shockers 109-84. The Sycamores remained undefeated at 24-0, and NBC began actively rooting for this team from the press box, cognizant of how it might appeal to viewers.
Simpson penned a note to a university official, praising the team. “I just want them—and you—to know that even ‘veteran’ broadcasters get a big ‘kick’ out of this kind of sports happening,” Simpson wrote. McGuire became Bird’s biggest fan and didn’t try to hide it. He advised Red Auerbach, the general manager of the Boston Celtics, to do anything he could to sign Bird. “Red Auerbach better live down here the next couple of months,” McGuire declared on the air after seeing Bird in person. The Sycamores became America’s darling, and the sliding door that opened when Bob Heaton hit his half-court miracle shot ushered the characters on the floor that night into a reality that might not have existed otherwise.
Thanks to his shot against New Mexico State, Heaton was no longer just Bird’s roommate in a little rental house on South 11th Street in Terre Haute; he was the “Miracle Man.” When the team returned from its road trip, a crowd of 2,000 students greeted Heaton with an impromptu pep rally, and the student government named a day in his honor. For decades, people in western Indiana recognized Heaton at the grocery store or the gas station. “Hey, Miracle Man!” they’d shout. Heaton parlayed his fame into a career in state politics.
Webb, who now works as an assistant principal at a middle school in Oklahoma City, eventually got over his disappointment for missing the foul shot that would have sealed the game and ended the Sycamores’ undefeated season. And when he did, he realized that he deserves at least some credit for starting March Madness. If he had made his free throw, he believes, everything would be different. “If there’s a chink in Indiana State’s armor at that point in time,” says Webb, “I think that it turns into a big dent.” Thinking about that game almost 50 years later, he adds, “I believe things happen for a reason, and I believe that night happened for a reason.”
That night changed Lopez’s life, too. The AP was so impressed with his photos of the punch that the Albuquerque bureau chief called Lopez the next day. A few months later, this man offered Lopez his first full-time job in journalism, and Lopez didn’t squander the opportunity. He worked his way up in the news business, moved from post to post, and ultimately landed at The New York Times, where he stayed for three decades and won a Pulitzer Prize as a member of the team that covered 9/11—an unlikely arc that can be traced back to those images of Bird.
“The pictures,” Lopez says, “speak for themselves.”
But no one benefited more than Larry Bird himself. In the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years after his pal Bob Heaton hit that shot in Las Cruces, almost no one thought of Bird as a villain, and hardly anyone remembered the punch that he had thrown at a fan.
It was like that moment hadn’t happened at all.
[Keith O’Brien
Keith O’Brien](https://www.theringer.com/creator/keith-obrien)Keith O’Brien is the author of ‘Heartland: A Forgotten Place, an Impossible Dream, and the Miracle of Larry Bird,’ new from Atria Books.