Ability to Score Never Was Issue

Let me tell you my favorite Mark Aguirre story. Mark is the newest member of the Clipper basketball family and I have been watching him do his thing since high school. I covered every game of his final year of college, when he was as highly entertaining and wildly unpredictable as any grown-up kid bouncing a ball could be.

A few days after the new 1981 calendars went on the wall, the team had a road date in that coldbed of college basketball, Bangor, Me. Don’t go asking how or why the urban, under-the-train-track university of DePaul made an appointment to shoot hoops at some outpost colder than the north side of Chicago on a bleak night in January, but be assured that none of us--Aguirre in particular--were looking forward to snapping icicles off our sideburns.

The University of Maine was in a much greater state of excitement. DePaul’s record at the time was 12-1 and the team, with Aguirre and Terry Cummings in the front line, was ranked right at the top of the national polls. When we eventually made it to Bangor, we found a campus decorated with drifts of snow as prettily as a greeting-card scene from Currier and Ives, and standing guard at the door to the arena was a 50-foot statue of Paul Bunyan, plaid shirt, ax, everything but the ox.

About that trip, though.

Before getting his DePaul team on a bus to the airport, the coach, Ray Meyer, whose first name as far as anyone from Chicago is concerned is Coach, called the players together for an informal workout. Partway through it, Aguirre, who was a dynamo in actual games but had a reputation for shirking at practice, suddenly yelped out in pain and sat on the floor, clutching his ankle.

Now, what you have to appreciate is that at the time, Mark Aguirre’s stature in the city of Chicago, and in collegiate circles elsewhere, approximated that of Michael Jordan’s later on. Aguirre was the name of the game. As much as one kid could matter, his recruitment and play had lifted DePaul out of the doldrums and restored it to prominence. NBC practically set up shop there Saturday afternoons. Even the new arena, the Rosemont Horizon, which enabled the team to abandon its cracker-box gymnasium on campus, came quite fairly to be regarded as The House That Aguirre Built.

So, an injury to Aguirre was news. It could make or break DePaul’s chances of winning a national championship. It was Aguirre who, as a freshman in 1979, took a flat-footed shot from three-point range at the horn that grazed the rim, permitting Larry Bird and Indiana State to advance to an NCAA title game against Magic Johnson and Michigan State that never would have existed had Aguirre’s rainbow arched an inch or two farther.

What a shooter he was. There were times I would have bet a buck on Mark hitting the mark had somebody blindfolded and spun him three times. It was difficult to believe that he was the same neighborhood nerd Isiah Thomas used to tell me about, that he and the other kids mocked as “Laundry Bag” and “Pillsbury Doughboy” because of his chubby build. Nobody then suspected that old droopy drawers could shoot the lights out of any YMCA, Boys’ Club or church-basement gym.

The hands. They were his advantage. Coach Meyer drew a word picture as vivid as possible when he described young Aguirre as having “hands like toilet seats.” They were so large, he could squeeze a basketball in one palm as though it were a grapefruit. He wasn’t tall, wasn’t fast, couldn’t jump, but in an Adrian Dantley kind of way, there was one thing Mark Aguirre could do and that was get that basketball into that basket.

But oh, did he make people crazy. For every magnificent swoop to the hoop, there was a mental lapse or a moment of untimely hotdoggery. Aguirre’s high school coach, Frank Lollino, who nicknamed him Ziggy the Elephant, once sat courtside, flashing homemade posters as his former pupil lollygagged by, cardboard signs bearing messages like: “Not Impressed.” Mark was a dude of moods, capable of great highs and lows, the latter including that afternoon in 1980 when UCLA ousted DePaul from the national tournament and left an emotional Aguirre standing outside a Tempe, Ariz., arena, weeping into a cactus.

He was a cool customer who breezed around campus in a blue ’79 Lincoln Continental so long it should have been captained by Gavin MacLeod. He was also so hotblooded that after DePaul lost his very last game to St. Joseph’s of Philadelphia in a gigantic upset, Aguirre peeled off his jersey, hurled it to the floor, donned a hooded sweat shirt and stereo headphones and took off walking down a highway in Dayton, Ohio, leaving his teammates behind.

And that trip to Maine. Well, Mark made it, bum ankle and all. It hurt so much, he had to skip practice. It hurt so much, a teammate pushed him in a wheelchair through Boston’s airport on the way to the connecting flight to Bangor. It hurt so much, there was grave doubt whether Mark Aguirre could stand on his own two feet for the big Maine event, much less dress for the game and play basketball.

He scored 47 points.