1977-78 Indiana State Sycamores
096 · 2026-03-24 · easy
If you were born in the palindrome vortex between '68 and '86 – and if you're still reading TMM in the year-of-our-lord 2026, you absolutely were – then everything you know about the 1979 NCAA Division I basketball championship comes from secondhand sources. If you've only read one basketball book in your entire life, and Seth Davis wrote that one book, what happened in Salt Lake City on that March Monday night was "Bird-Magic," forty minutes of action that changed hoops forever. It's right there in the damn subtitle: The Game That Transformed Basketball. Did you know that Larry Bird and Earvin Johnson had different skin colors, just like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese do these days, and that those two went on to rescue and define the National Basketball Association for the next decade? Wow! Were you aware that it all started with that one single game? Super neat-o! March 26, 1979 was indeed a day when millions of casual fans – including a substantial number of plain-daylight racists – discovered college basketball for the very first time. But simplifying the narrative into an ESL Wikipedia article sidesteps a far more compelling set of questions: why did Indiana State, how, and huh? That story took almost five decades to make it into proper print. Keith O'Brien, who was six years old in 1979 and might have bought one of my books once (it's a common enough name for a middle initial), scoured the archives and talked to over 200 Terre Hauters for his brand-new Heartland. I received an early galley last month, and only finished it last weekend because of Olympic Mode™. I'll fully dig into its primary small-town throughline in the next Blogletter; just know that O'Brien spends only a few perfunctories on That Game, and a full quarter of the 350-page text on examining the season beforehand – one year in the shadow of that SI cover shoot, which makes for one of the book's best chapters. The 1977-78 Sycamores were the "Harry and Larry Show", with 6-7 dynamo Larry Morgan accumulating 1,000 points over two seasons before being drafted by San Antonio and then... disappearing into the ether. This was Indiana State's first season in the MVC, a very different Valley than the one depicted in One Beautiful Season, which included an annual hell trip out to New Mexico State for zero apparent reason. Bird's junior year ended in the NIT at Rutgers, where he split a fan's nose open "like a ketchup bottle" with his elbow during the court storm. Magic wouldn't even qualify for Best Supporting Actor in these pages; there are enough books out there about him, and not nearly enough about DeCarsta Webster. Heartland is an Instant Pantheon Classic, and it's what you should be reading this week if you're bummed about "mid-majors" or whatever. No affiliate link, no paid review, just go buy it right away.
