Heartland, p.1
Heartland, page 1
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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
“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
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.
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. Bird had started the season on the cover of Sports Illustrated, a lightning-bolt moment for him and all of western Indiana. He had finished the year as a first-team All-American, and in between, he had pulled off the impossible: He’d made Indiana State relevant. The long-forgotten Sycamores—in the overlooked city of Terre Haute, at the crossroads of America, and on the way to nowhere—became part of the national sports conversation for the first time ever. They proceeded to win their first 13 games. By mid-January 1978, they had climbed all the way to No. 4 in the basketball polls. They were better than Bobby Knight’s Hoosiers—the standard that mattered most in Indiana—and the only person who wasn’t surprised was the Sycamores’ head coach, Bob King.
King, who was prematurely old with achy knees, white hair, and a heart that was getting weaker by the day, had logged enough miles over the years on little propeller planes and crowded charter buses to know that what he had in this team was special. In addition to Bird, King had two seven-footers under the basket, a senior point guard with experience, a bench filled with young players willing to do anything, and an athlete from Anderson, Indiana, who complemented Bird in every way: Harry Morgan. Harry was Black while Larry was white, was fast while Larry was slow, could jump while Larry couldn’t, and loved to talk while Larry didn’t, and together they were a show. “The Harry and Larry Show,” reporters called them, and Harry liked to point out that his name came first on that marquee, even if it was Larry who had appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and not him.
But since mid-January and the No. 4 ranking, the feel-good story of Indiana State had crumbled into dust in a way that Bobby Knight never would have tolerated. King sabotaged himself again and again with strategic errors and poor decisions. His assistant coaches argued with each other. Players lost confidence in themselves, and Bird lost one of the few things that mattered to him: his privacy. He recoiled from the spotlight that season, like a spider seeking safety in the shadows. Bird didn’t want to talk to reporters about himself, his life, his family, or his past. He wanted to dodge all of it. He said he just wanted to play basketball.
At this exact moment, the Sycamores stopped winning. They lost five in a row, then six of seven, then seven of ten, and the losing streak almost ensured their banishment to Piscataway, New Jersey, on this Tuesday night in mid-March 1978. Instead of playing on national television in the NCAA tournament against the best teams in the country, Indiana State was playing Rutgers in the NIT—the “Not Important Tournament,” reporters joked. The game was airing on local TV and cable channels, if viewers could find them on their dials. And it was ending in typical fashion for Larry Bird and the Sycamores: They were blowing this game, too.
With 3:42 to go, the Sycamores had the ball and the lead, 56–53. They just needed to avoid mistakes against the Scarlet Knights in the final minutes and they would be staying on the East Coast, advancing to the NIT semifinals, and salvaging their season by playing that weekend in basketball’s most hallowed hall: Madison Square Garden. But on the next two possessions, the Sycamores turned the ball over. The Knights scored both times to take a one-point lead. King froze on the bench—paralyzed, it seemed, with indecision. Larry Bird failed to get off a shot in the waning seconds. The Knights won the game, 57–56, and their fans stormed the floor to celebrate, jumping around Bird—and then jumping on him.
“Birdshit!” one fan shouted as he pounced on Bird’s back. And that’s when Bird threw the elbow or the punch—the incident that nobody wanted to talk about after the game, but that everyone saw with their eyes wide open. Rick Shaw, the team’s beefy manager, who had been tasked over the season with protecting Bird from the media, tried to get there in time to stop it from happening. But he was too late.
“The guy’s nose exploded like a ketchup bottle,” Shaw recalled. “Blood went everywhere.”
* * *
Paramedics moved in to carry the fan away, a blood-soaked bandage wrapped around his head, but no one was coming to help the Sycamores. After the game, in the belly of the arena, the players sat in silence, pondering everything they had just lost and were still about to lose.
Both seven-footers, and the starting point guard, would be gone before next season. Harry Morgan would be gone, too—headed, he hoped, for the NBA. Some underclassmen weren’t sure if they were coming back. Bob King and his two assistants would never sit on the bench together again. By the fall, one of them would be rushed to a hospital. Another would quit in disgust. And no one knew what was going to happen with Larry Bird now that the season was over. Maybe he’d leave school one year early and jump to the NBA with Harry Morgan. Or maybe Bird would disappear. Again.
He had vanished before, after all. In some ways, he was vanishing even then, shrinking from the moment at the arena in New Jersey. Bird was there, but he wasn’t. He was hiding from reporters who had questions about the incident on the floor at the end of the game.
“What happened?” the press shouted as Bird walked to the bus sometime later.
“Huh?” Bird replied.
“You were there—what happened in the end?”
“I don’t know.”
That night, the players managed to acquire some beer and sneak it into their hotel rooms in New Jersey. A few of them drank too much, washing off the Rutgers loss, and the flight home the next day out of Newark was a hard one. One player vomited several times in the plane’s tiny bathroom while others stared out the windows on takeoff, looking down at New York City in the distance. They’d probably never be back.
But this wasn’t the end; it was the beginning. The characters had assembled. The cast was all there. The people who would write one of the greatest American sports stories of all time—an underdog basketball tale for the ages—were on that plane. They were in that quiet locker room in New Jersey. They were on campus that spring in Terre Haute and they were about to achieve the rarest thing in sports: immortality. People in western Indiana would soon be writing songs about them, lining the streets for them, filling arenas for them, building statues for them, opening museums for them, and crying for them, because they loved them.
It’s a narrative that’s almost impossible to imagine today in an era when college basketball players jump from school to school, leave through the transfer portal in the middle of March, play for the highest bidder, chase lucrative deals funded with name, image, and likeness money, live on campus as millionaires, cash in, check out, and rarely stay in one place long enough to leave any legacy at all. In the spring of 2025 alone, more than a thousand college basketball players entered the portal after the NCAA tournament—enough players to create rosters that would fill an entire 68-team bracket and then some. The games were over, but t he real madness had just begun. Young athletes were on the move. Coaches were scrambling to sign them, and booster clubs in charge of doling out the cash stood at the ready, their checkbooks open.
It’s a flawed system that has created a new world. As one booster club president put it, “The day of the retired number is gone.” But it would be wrong to believe that Larry Bird and his Indiana State teammates played in an innocent time. The professionalization of college sports had begun years before Bird and his teammates ever showed up on campus. By the early 1970s, college coaches had turned recruiting into a pseudoscience. College boosters were bending rules to land the best players. Network executives were leveraging America’s growing interest in sports to give viewers more college basketball, in better time slots. NBC started airing NCAA tournament games in prime time. Ratings soared. Three separate times in the first half of the decade—in 1972, ’73, and again in ’75—NCAA tournament games set viewership records for the most-watched game. University presidents began to take notice, realizing there was money to be made. And one other cohort of people turned out in droves to chronicle—and contribute to—this craze: sportswriters. Flush with expense accounts financed by advertising dollars, reporters at the biggest newspapers and magazines started to travel the country, hoping to discover the next great basketball hero. Put simply: Larry Bird didn’t create the wave; he rode it.
Like most waves, this one started small. It was just a ripple in the darkness, at first. Anyone could have missed it, and Bird himself nearly did. Basketball fans might have never known his name. But within five years, this wave rolled across the landscape, picking up everything in its wake: Bird, his teammates, his coaches, and sometimes even his opponents. Each of them would be forever defined by what happened in this little window of time. Each of them would not be able to forget, especially later on cool nights in March, and each of them would be stunned by the final result in 1979. At the end of that year, Indiana State would play in front of the largest audience in American basketball history and capture the hearts of a nation.
It’s an epic story that no one saw coming, least of all the people on that plane, flying out of Newark one year earlier in 1978. The Sycamores had blown the game against Rutgers. They had squandered their one chance. They were tired and broken and they were returning home to the only place that wanted them at the time, the only place that cared.
They were going back home to Indiana.
Part I THE BOY ON THE BOULEVARD
1
IN THE BEGINNING, THE boy didn’t like basketball as much as he seemed to like just being with his brothers. Larry Bird would spill out of his home in West Baden Springs and tumble down the hill with his older brothers, Mike and Mark, to shoot hoops at the small, yellow-brick water plant on the edge of the Lost River.
It was a rudimentary setup. The Emmons family, who ran the water pumps and lived upstairs, had drilled a telephone pole into the ground near the settling basin and then attached a backboard to it at roughly regulation height. There was no pavement to make a court. The kids played on grass, beating it down with their sneakers. And if someone threw up a bad shot, the ball could carom off the hoop and roll down the hill to a low point, where the rains pooled after a storm.
But to the local kids, maybe the Birds most of all, the hoop was a miracle. It gave them a place to gather and a reason to get out of the house. Sometimes the boys even played there when it snowed. Butch Emmons, who was the oldest of the group by far, would grab a shovel, clear the court, and they’d play in the cold. The only problem was, they didn’t always have a roster spot for Larry. In the schoolyard picks at the water plant, Larry would get left out because he was significantly younger than the other boys. He was small, and anyway, Mark Bird was better—the best shooter, inside of 15 feet, that some locals had ever seen.
Later, the Birds would move out of West Baden and into French Lick, a short trip about two miles down State Road 56—the boulevard, as locals called it. After that, the Birds didn’t come by the water plant much anymore. But Butch Emmons would never forget how upset Larry would get when he didn’t get picked in the games out there. Larry seemed to take it personally, like it disgusted him, and it wouldn’t be the last time that Emmons saw Larry have his boyhood dreams get crushed on a basketball court.
In the years ahead, Emmons graduated from college, returned to French Lick to work as a teacher, got the job as the seventh-grade basketball coach in town, and was on the floor the night his friend, eighth-grade coach Roger Fisher, had to let young Larry go. Larry had made Fisher’s team; he was good enough to play. He just wasn’t coming to practice, Emmons said, and Fisher finally made the difficult choice to send Larry away, even though the school, the coaches, and everyone else in French Lick knew what Larry was facing at home.
2
LARRY’S FATHER, JOEY BIRD, had blue eyes, ruddy skin, and a pleasant demeanor. People liked him. But he had been making poor choices since at least the early 1940s.
Joey never finished eighth grade in West Baden. He didn’t go to high school, and in the spring of 1944, Joey, still just 17 years old, walked away from the best job a kid from rural Indiana with a seventh-grade education could ever hope to get. He was employed that spring as an ammunition loader at a federal munitions plant—a sprawling, newly built center 25 miles away that would manufacture American bombs for decades to come. It was the sort of job that savvy locals kept forever, riding the plant’s steady wages and federal benefits straight to the middle class. But not Joey. In late April 1944, five months before his 18th birthday, he had his father sign the paperwork to send him off to war.
It probably sounded romantic. At the moment that Joey enlisted, the local newspaper, the Springs Valley Herald, was filled with exciting dispatches of West Baden and French Lick boys fighting the enemy overseas, winning medals for bravery, surviving firefights with Germans, taking command of naval warships, dying with honor in Saipan, and running into their brothers and classmates at the front. But there was nothing romantic about enlisting as an apprentice seaman with the US Naval Reserve, as Joey Bird did that April. He wasn’t going to be a hero; he was going to be swabbing decks. And according to his military record, he got into trouble almost immediately.
That summer, while still at basic training in Illinois, Joey went AWOL from his base and faced punishment as a result. The following spring, while in port in South Carolina, he was caught drinking liquor on his ship, and again faced consequences. And once at sea in the summer of 1945, steaming into the Pacific, Joey seemingly did little to excel. He earned no weapons qualifications. He didn’t learn to scuba dive and couldn’t salvage anything if it sank to the ocean floor. He was a “crew messman”—a job that typically entailed serving food and clearing dishes in the mess hall belowdecks.
Joey was still young then; he had time to get things right. But his problems continued after he returned to the US in June 1946. His ship landed in California on a Saturday and docked at Treasure Island, in the heart of San Francisco Bay. With the city beckoning across the water, Joey secured a weekend pass and promptly lost all his personal belongings for reasons unknown. He returned to West Baden, still mourning his lost stuff, and worked in a shoe factory over in Paoli for a while. There he met a nice girl, Georgia Kerns.
Georgia was tall and fair, from the hills outside of French Lick, and sweet on Joey. But bad luck struck Joey Bird yet again. Georgia left the shoe factory for a job at the paper cup plant in French Lick. The young couple lost touch, and Joey quickly moved on, too. In 1949 he found himself reenlisting to go to Korea.
This time he wasn’t going to be serving food on a ship. He was a foot soldier in the 25th Infantry Division, a grunt in the thick of the fight, shivering in a foxhole in the cold Korean winter, waiting for the Chinese to attack in the dark, dodging their bullets, and retreating at dawn as dead bodies piled up in the snow. The experience shook Joey so much that he wrote a story about his long and dreadful winter fighting the communists. In early 1951, his account landed in the hands of the editors at the Springs Valley Herald, and in March of that year, they printed Joey Bird’s first-person tale of valor and bravery on the front page for everyone to read.
