Remembering Al McGuire
1/26/2001 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Jan. 26, 2001
By HAL BOCK
AP Sports Writer
Al McGuire was a New York guy, fast-talking, quick with a quip, his basketball roots firmly planted in the concrete courts of the city playgrounds. The game took him all over the place as a player, coach and broadcaster, even the Hall of Fame, but it never could erase his New York frame of mind.
Just before the start of March Madness, I'd often call him to talk about the NCAA tournament, the teams, the brackets, whatever came to mind. Sometimes the conversation was stream of consciousness, McGuire fracturing syntax with incomplete and run-on sentences, sounding like a basketball Casey Stengel. My notes would be a jumble with words like aircraft carrier, cupcake and tap city scribbled all over the place.
Then the coach would say, "You going to the Final Four?"
"Yeah, I am."
"Good," he said. "Bring your credit card."
I did and it was worth it.
Always.
McGuire, who died on Friday at the age of 72, was one of the most wonderful story tellers I've ever come across. And his best stories were the ones about recruiting. He knew where to find players.
He would venture into the worst neighborhoods of the inner cities, Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York, the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, projects where other coaches might send an assistant. He didn't mind getting his hands dirty.
"My rule was I wouldn't recruit a kid if he had grass in front of his house," McGuire once told me. "That's not my world. My world was a cracked sidewalk."
George Thompson was his first major recruit for Marquette, signed out of Brooklyn, N.Y., a prime shopping area for McGuire.
"He said I was the only coach who came to see him in Bed-Stuy," McGuire said. "The others all wanted to meet him outside."
That's how he got Butch Lee to Marquette. And Bo Ellis. And Jerome Whitehead. And in 1977, they won the NCAA tournament, beating North Carolina 67-59 in the championship game at the Omni in Atlanta.
As the clock wound down, McGuire sat on the bench and buried his head in his hands, crying.
It would be his last game as a coach.
There were opportunities to get back in, other schools attracted by his charisma and style but McGuire never gave them serious consideration. That, he said, would be wedging, taking advantage of a situation. McGuire didn't wedge.
One of the things that annoyed him about colleges was the way administrators chose to communicate.
"In academia, they send memos," he said. "A guy would be two doors away, maybe one floor away and he'd send a memo. Come and knock on my door. I'll talk to you. Don't send me a memo."
McGuire was not afraid to bump heads with the people in charge. That was why Marquette went to the NIT instead of the NCAA tournament in 1970, an option schools no longer enjoy. Now if they're invited to the NCAA, they go to the NCAA. Call it the McGuire Rule.
The tournament committee wanted to move Marquette out of the Midwest region in 1970 so that Notre Dame could stay there. McGuire was having none of that
"We were better than Notre Dame," he said. "We belonged in our own area. They wanted to send me to Texas someplace. I said, 'Are you kidding? I'll pass.'
"Next, I hear from the (Marquette) president's office. His assistant says, 'I think we should go to the NCAA.' I told him, 'Father, I don't hear confession and you don't coach this team.' Twenty minutes later, the priest called back and said, 'You're right.'
"In those days the NCAA and NIT were like two elephants. You've got to be careful when you're between them. The only thing that gets hurt is the grass and I was the grass."
So Marquette went to the NIT, McGuire marching proudly into Madison Square Garden, leading one of the top three teams in the nation into his hometown tournament, where he would win his first championship.
"We fly in and our first game is against Massachusetts," McGuire said. "I think, hey, they're a cupcake, a patsy. You know, Napoleon said God is on the side of the large battalions."
Marquette's battalions were struggling that night, though.
"The game is 17 minutes in and we can't shake them," the coach said. "It's 23-22 or something and they've got one kid holding us off. I turned to (then-assistant coach) Hank Raymonds and said, 'Who is that guy?' "
And that's how Al McGuire first met Julius Erving.
