Heartland – Keith OBrien

In East Lansing, the day of the shoot, Lane walked into Jenison Field House at Michigan State, set his eyes on one of the basketball hoops, and made it his studio for the day. He strung up a massive white backdrop behind the hoop. He tested the lighting for hours, and once he thought he was ready, he walked into the Spartans locker room with a black tuxedo for Magic, and some instructions.

Lane wanted Magic to come out onto the floor in the tuxedo, complete with dress shoes and a top hat. He wanted him to dunk the ball in front of that white backdrop with his coattails flying, and he wanted him to do it while he looked into the lens of Lane’s Hasselblad camera and conveyed the feeling that had been missing with Bird the year before in Chicago. “Joie de vivre,” Lane said. A short time later, Magic emerged in his tuxedo, as instructed, and made it easy for Lane, while his teammates watched.

Magic smiled his smile, dunked his dunk, and created a cover that Lane Stewart loved—and fans did, too. In November 1978, when the magazine hit newsstands, people in Lansing snapped up all 3,000 copies in two hours, enjoying Lane’s photos and perusing the content that mattered most: the magazine’s preseason poll. Duke, an emerging powerhouse, was ranked No. 1. Notre Dame, a team led by media-friendly head coach Digger Phelps and six future NBA players, came in at No. 2.

UCLA, the best college program of the past two decades, with seven future NBA players on its roster, was inserted at No. 3. And then came Magic Johnson’s team, Michigan State. The Sycamores weren’t mentioned at all. The poll seemed to support Stan Evans’s view of the team. Maybe he wasn’t crazy to quit. But that didn’t make it any less sad for Craig McKee when Evans finally moved out of the athletic offices for good one night about two weeks after Hodges took over.

McKee helped Evans carry his stuff out to his car, and as Evans drove off, McKee went back inside to erase the final traces of Stan Evans. He took his posters off the walls and his calendar off his desk. If they were starting over, McKee thought, at least they were starting fresh.

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You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. OceanofPDF.com OceanofPDF.com For Mark Price, in memoriam For Andrew Bauer, who reads it all and for Golch, Wenner, Voegele, and Patel, who will complain if they aren’t mentioned here OceanofPDF.com “Larry Bird, distilled, is a very private person who was thrust into a very public place. And that was hard. It was hard for him and it was hard for the people who were trying to support him.” —CRAIG MCKEE, FORMER ASSISTANT SPORTS INFORMATION DIRECTOR, INDIANA STATE UNIVERSITY “If Bill Hodges hadn’t been as persistent as he had been, Larry Bird might never have existed in any of our minds.

I believe that with all my heart.” —JACKIE MACMULLAN, FORMER BOSTON GLOBE REPORTER “I like to tell people that we hit the lotto. We were in the right place, at the right time, with the right person: Larry Bird.” —RICH NEMCEK, BACKUP GUARD, INDIANA STATE OceanofPDF.com AUTHOR’S NOTE THIS STORY IS A work of nonfiction, built with the help of diaries and journals, television footage and radio archives, thousands of newspaper and magazine articles, court records, military records, genealogical research, memoirs penned closer to the moment, and more than two hundred hours of interviews with the people who lived it—the players, the coaches, their families and friends, and the reporters covering the story at the time.

Almost everyone participated, except Larry Bird, who elected not to be interviewed. The narrative takes no license with facts, characters, scenes, or chronologies. If something appears in quotes here, it means it is verified—taken directly from a memoir, a recorded interview, television footage, or a press account, or, in rare instances, confirmed by reliable sources who were there. Every effort has been made to portray the events as they occurred, to depict emotions as they were felt at the time, and to document them as accurately as possible for history.

OceanofPDF.com INTRODUCTION Piscataway, New Jersey March 14, 1978 LATER, WITNESSES WOULDN’T BE able to decide if Larry Bird threw an elbow or a punch. All they knew for sure was this: A fan was down, blood was everywhere, the guy was headed to the hospital, the season was over, and security couldn’t get Bird off the floor fast enough. They needed to save him from himself. That it was ending like this—in chaos, in New Jersey—was hard for people back home to imagine.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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• Title: –
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