NCAA SOUTHEAST REGIONAL : At Marquette, He Can’t Escape Ghosts of McGuire’s Past

The shadow knows Kevin O’Neill. Worse than that, it never leaves him alone. It is there when he wakes, it is there when he goes to work, it is there when he walks into a crowded room and total strangers get in his face and demand, “Why can’t you be more like Al?”

The shadow is cast by an old, revered, retired basketball coach, from another time, growing larger with each tick of the clock, and after five years of uneasy co-habitation, O’Neill has learned there are only so many ways to deal with it.

You can lose your first-round NCAA tournament game to Tulsa and all but drown in the shadow. Anybody out there want to throw Jim Harrick a line?

You can win your first-round NCAA tournament game, and your second, toppling Kentucky in the process, and confront the shadow head on, spawning hometown headlines that read Warriors Turn Back The Clock and Happy Days Return .

You can run away from the shadow, jumping at the first coaching vacancy that comes your way, an option O’Neill is currently mulling. O’Neill arrived in Knoxville, Tenn., for today’s Southeast Regional semifinals amid heavy speculation that he is about to be offered the Tennessee job, rumors O’Neill doesn’t try to deny or discourage.

“It’s flattering,” he says, hoping that the posse that has circled the Marquette basketball program in Milwaukee catches wind.

There’s only one thing you can’t do, O’Neill says, and that is shadow box.

“Everybody tries to fight that stuff--’After Al’ and all that,” O’Neill says. “You can’t fight that. Hey, Al McGuire is the most colorful coach who ever lived. If you try to fight it, you’re going to die, because everybody out there loves him.”

If John Wooden is the Wizard of college basketball, Al McGuire is its Absent-Minded Professor. McGuire’s stream-of-unconsciousness coaching style brought Marquette to two NCAA finals during the 1970s, including the 1977 championship, but it is how he did it--two laughs for every basket--that still warms the cockles of every old Warrior’s heart 17 years after the fact.

O’Neill doesn’t want to say that Marquette fans are obsessed, but he claims to have seen at least a snippet of the 1977 championship game tape at every alumni function he attends.

“ Every function,” he says wearily. “There are 38 (Marquette) alumni clubs in the country and this is no lie: I have been to each of them at least once and I have never been at one where they haven’t had the ’77 championship tape.”

O’Neill shrugs.

“That’s what you do. You grab onto your best moment. I understand it. I don’t like it, but I understand it.”

O’Neill has lost most of his hairline because of it. After a 15-14 debut in 1989-90, he has taken the Warriors from 11-18 in 1990-91 to the school’s first NCAA appearance in a decade in 1993 to 24-8 and a date against Duke in tonight’s third round of the Southeast Regionals.

When last Sunday’s 75-63 upset of Kentucky deposited the Warriors here, the reaction around Marquette was a glance down at the fingernails and a huffy “About time.”

“The bad thing about this,” O’Neill frets, “is that people at Marquette expect this every year.”

So Marquette won the Great Midwest Conference regular-season title this season. So? Marquette also lost to Cincinnati in the first round of the conference tournament, settling for an at-large NCAA bid, a No. 6 seeding and a first-round trip to St. Petersburg, Fla. “They put us out in the boonies,” point guard Tony Miller grumbles.

So Marquette beat Southwest Louisiana and Kentucky in St. Petersburg, moving into the Sweet 16 for the first time since--there’s that number again--1977. So? The Warriors don’t ram and jam, don’t tear down rims or anything fun like that. They bore teams to death. They lead the nation in two statistical categories--team field-goal defense and blocked shots by an individual player, 7-foot-1 center Jim McIlvaine.

This isn’t the way Al did it, O’Neill keeps hearing. When Al coached, everybody laughed, nobody yawned.

“The young Marquette people are actually excited we’re in the final 16,” O’Neill says. “The old Marquette people, the ones from Missouri, they’re not going to be real fired up until they get another national championship. And then it wouldn’t be enough. Because it would have been more fun with Al.”

That’s just the way it is, O’Neill says. He repeats: No sense fighting it.

So he makes sure to mention to reporters here that “I like Al. We have a very father-son type of relationship. . . . He comes by the office, makes phone calls, hangs out. He’s a good friend to our program.”

McGuire will always be there, for whomever coaches at Marquette. Hank Raymonds, Rick Majerus and Bob Dukiet have already come and gone, and O’Neill could be next out the door, as soon as the Warriors play their last game in this tournament and Tennessee gets the contract drawn.

O’Neill insists none of this will distract his team against Duke tonight, but then, what else can he say?

“This has been going on for two weeks, three weeks, a month,” he says. “If anything, we’ve been joking about it. We get off the bus today and (forward Roney) Eford, says, ‘Oh, so this is the University of Tennessee? Nice place.’

“Eford would probably be glad if I left. He’d feel the shackles would be off him. That’s the only thing slowing him down from going out and getting 45 points a game.”

A hand shoots up from the audience and a reporter asks about the rumors, calling them “the biggest thing to hit these parts since Kefauver.”

“Who’s Kefauver?” O’Neill wants to know.

If you have to ask. . . .

The name is Estes Kefauver. Tennessee graduate, former U.S. Senator, running mate to Adlai Stevenson in 1956. A big name around here, mister, as big as that McGuire guy back there in Wisconsin.

Chances are, O’Neill will get to do some brushing up soon. He will be pleased to learn that Kefauver only played football at Tennessee. Never coached any basketball.

Southeast Regional Notes

Marquette and Duke (25-5) play in tonight’s first game, the schools’ first meeting since the first round of the 1990 preseason NIT at Durham, N.C. Duke won, 87-74. Marquette forward Damon Key remembers: “Jim (McIlvaine), Rob (Logterman) and myself were all coming in as freshmen at the time and it was exciting, playing Duke in our first college game. I thought we were the three best players in the state in high school and we were going to come in and dominate. Duke put us into reality right away.”

Top-seeded Purdue (28-4) and No. 4 Kansas (27-7) meet in the second game. “Glenn Robinson is extremely talented, maybe the best college player of the last three or four years,” Kansas Coach Roy Williams said. “He may not be in a class by himself, but if he isn’t, it doesn’t take long to take roll call.” . . . Robinson is averaging 30.4 points a game, including 33 in Purdue’s 83-73 second-round victory over Alabama, a game in which no other Boilermaker scored more than 11 points.