2025 Hall of Fame Class: Mike Heckman
1/30/2025
A long time coming, better late than never, those seem to be popular ways to describe Mike Heckman’s Hall of Fame induction, but the member of the charter class at UC Irvine and the first Anteater basketball team is right where he belongs as part of this 2025 Hall of Fame class.
A native of Glendale and a Glendale High School student was new to basketball getting pulled out of gym class by the coach and future UCI coach, Dick Davis, to teach him about the game. “I didn't even know the difference between a guard and a forward” Heckman noted of his early basketball days. Soon, basketball was in the mix with his time running track, playing squash, and his top sport at the time – football, throughout high school. Even so, he found himself being heavily recruited for basketball his senior year with UCLA, USC, and the Naval Academy coming knocking, but the fledgling UCI program had the ace up their sleeve.
“I really loved the beaches at Newport a lot”.
Heckman was as well-versed on a beach as he was on the hardwood frequenting them from Malibu down to Laguna growing up, and Newport Beach called to him. He began on the freshman team with a familiar face as his high school coach, Dick Davis, came along to coach the Anteater freshman squad and later on was the head coach later in Heckman’s career.
As Heckman stepped onto campus, there were only about 1,800 students, Aldrich Park was one-third the size as it is now. There were only a handful of buildings including the basketball gym, the swimming pool, and a couple trailers across the street that were the bookstore and the bank, which Heckman noted burned down shortly after going up.
That freshman year and season doesn’t show up on the box scores with freshman not permitted to play on the varsity team in those days, and that included every freshman. Heckman and the rest of the freshmen had a landmark moment to start their collegiate careers – opening up UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion.
“We opened when I was a freshman at Pauley Pavilion. It was brand new, and I’ll never forget taking the court and the place was packed and the band was playing the new theme from Batman. I was fired up.” When the lights went up, Heckman looked across the line at UCLA’s freshman center, Lew Alcindor, better known today as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. “I never had my hook shot ever blocked until then when I played Kareem. I think I still had 20 points and 10 rebounds, but he was a monster and I think finished with 37 points and 21 rebounds.”
The next step for Heckman and the squad were proving they belonged and, at times, even recognized.
“Nobody knew who we were. When we first went up to Las Vegas to play there, I will never forget that the marquee when we arrived said – ‘Welcome USC of Irving’.”
The ‘Eaters needed to make waves and make a name for themselves, and what better class than the one that started it all. Current Hall of Famers like Mark Nelson, Jeff Cunningham, and Charlie Brande along with Heckman helped the program to winning records in the first two seasons with some notable results. Even a double overtime battle with the vaunted UNLV squad that ended in a loss to open the 1966-67 season.
“Nobody knew if we were very good, but we started picking up some notoriety my junior year because we started winning. I like to believe I helped put UC Irvine on the map. We won 20 games that year. We just worked hard and had a really close-knit team. We all knew what each other could do.”
Heckman made a note that some of the best teams he was on growing up with the ones that gelled and were close-knit, and for the 6-foot-7 center, toughness and strength were important.
“There was Nick Sanden shooting 60% from the top of the key. If you get him the ball there, it was good. If you get it to me from outside with a center on me, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, I could score on anybody that was my size or bigger because I was quicker, a good shooter, a good driver, to go with the rebounding and defense.”
Heckman was proving himself an All-American level player and the Anteaters as worthy adversaries. His junior season, the Anteaters posted 20 wins taking down Long Beach State, Rhode Island, and splitting the season series with UNLV, all toward the program’s first postseason berth that began with a win over San Diego State before a third meeting with UNLV. “They squeaked by… they were a real good team”.
Heckman’s senior season was again an Anteater coming-out party with 19 wins, Heckman taking home Southern California Collegiate Player of the Week honors from the LA Times, MVP of the UCI Invitational despite a loss in the final against LBSU with Heckman unable to sink the winning shot in overtime, to his consternation. But again, the season ended in the postseason, going toe-to-toe with the notable San Francisco State squad in the opener, and ending on a victory over UC Davis.
All the while, Heckman was making it happen in the classroom – Academic All-American, Graduate Fellowship for a Doctorate in Mathematics, he was on track to get a Ph.D. but had to give the NBA a shot after hearing his name called in the drafted by the then-San Diego Rockets.
“I got drafted and I tried that. I wasn’t going to get that far in the pros, I wanted to get back in school and get some degrees and get out and start working”. Heckman got into teaching for a bit teaching math and coaching basketball at his high school before diving into real estate development and general contracting where he made his money in that industry for about 40 years building over 2,500 homes and properties that were part of subdivisions.
After all those years and life events, the UC Irvine Athletics Hall of Fame was still a sizable, unchecked box on his list. And how can you blame him with all the accolades mentioned already for a brand new program to go with the statistics he put up:
- 20th on the all-time scoring list with 1,244 career points
- Career 18.3 scoring average, third-best among UCI’s 32 1,000-point scorers
- 7th on the all-time rebounds list with 768
- Career 9.7 rebounding average, third-best among UCI’s 25 500-rebounders
- 1 of 2 Anteaters (Kevin Magee) to average a double-double in a season in 1967-68 with 19.5 PPG and 11.5 RPG
The resume speaks for itself, and now his rightful place in the Anteater pantheon has been realized. Through it all, it’s the guys he feels the closest connection to from his Irvine times. The few still around that were able to give him the good, long-awaited news like Charlie Brande, Hall of Fame coach Tim Tift who was keeping things loose as the assistant coach for Heckman’s teams, coach Danny Rogers that gave him the scholarship, Sanden, Charlie Howenstein, even the first athletic director, Wayne Crawford, all still front and center for Heckman after all these years.
“There was a lot of good times.”
