‘We’ve truly lost one of a kind’

Al McGuire, basketball coach and showman, philosopher and promoter, died Friday in suburban Milwaukee, surprising many who had assumed he’d live forever. He was 72.

Larger than life in life, “the Fox,” as his coterie called him, now gets to put one of his axioms to the personal test: “The size of your funeral depends on the weather.”

And McGuire, certainly no stranger to controversy in life, carried it over into death. He had been in a hospice since last summer and it was widely understood that he was being treated for leukemia. His family, however, said that he had died of another, unspecified, blood disorder. Marquette University, the school he’d coached for, mentioned no cause of death in a statement.

McGuire, in his typical fashion, reversed a cliche in becoming one of the most successful, best-known--certainly the most widely quoted--college basketball coaches of his era, perhaps any era. People go to New York to seek fame and fortune. McGuire found those things in Milwaukee, after leaving New York.

And, as is the case with many who rise above their peers, it wasn’t so much what he did--although it was considerable--as the way he did it.

Describing himself as “part clown, part wild man,” the Hall of Fame coach did it his way. And his way was like no other.

Can you imagine John Wooden getting decked by one of his players? Can you imagine Bob Knight turning an NCAA eligibility investigation at tournament time into a promotional triumph?

McGuire did those things at Marquette. And much more. He feuded with Kentucky Coach Adolph Rupp when Rupp was as close to a king as ever there was in sports. He carried on a running argument with the NCAA, with periodic outbursts that were both bitter and funny. And, taking over a stagnant program in a city that never was quite sure what to make of him, he won. He won big.

Along the way, he became the unofficial national spokesman for coaches’ rights, worked hard to see that his players graduated and publicly urged other coaches to do the same.

“Use basketball,” he told his players. “Don’t let basketball use you.”

He thought he’d quit once, before the big wheel had really begun to turn, to become coach of the expansion Milwaukee Bucks in the NBA, but a stubborn Jesuit, Father John Raynor, school president, held him to his contract. McGuire apologized, went back to work and soon, with the possible exception of Wooden, was the most talked-about basketball coach in the country.

In his 13 years at Marquette, the Warriors were 295-80. Playing as an independent, Marquette had no conference championships to win, but there were tournaments, the NIT and the NCAA. McGuire and his misfits won them both.

In the spring of 1970, McGuire spurned a bid to the NCAA tournament because the NCAA had had the colossal nerve to invite the Warriors to the “wrong” regional, took his troops back to New York and won the NIT, still a big deal in those days of a 25-team NCAA tournament. On the way to the final against St. John’s, McGuire’s alma mater, Marquette beat Massachusetts with Julius Erving and Louisiana State with Pete Maravich.

Then in 1977, having begun the season by announcing that it would be his last, McGuire led the Warriors to the national championship, beating North Carolina and Coach Dean Smith’s four-corners offense in the title game.

Marquette had also been to the national title game in ‘74, losing to North Carolina State in the final after McGuire had been whistled for two technical fouls--one really was on the team chaplain but McGuire took the heat--in the second half.

At the end, then, McGuire had proved what he’d set out to prove when he took over the program in the fall of 1964: “Marquette’s no cupcake and my guys ain’t no pineapples.”

In between, he ran the most unorthodox basketball program in the country and always, well, nearly always, left ‘em laughing.

At the ’74 Final Four in Greensboro, N.C., for instance, the other coaches--Norm Sloan of North Carolina State, Wooden of UCLA and Ted Owens of Kansas--showed up for a news conference in coachly attire, suits or sport coats and ties. McGuire, just off the golf course, wore yellow slacks, a ratty tan sweater over a brown shirt, and sneakers with no socks.

They talked about strategy and such. He told how he’d been aiming his drives at his caddie, imagining him to be N.C. State’s David Thompson.

He told his players, when success beckoned, “We’ll all go uptown together.” He told friends, “I’ll give you the coat off my back, the shoes off my feet, but [if] I don’t know you, I wouldn’t give you a strawr hat in a blizzard.”

He told irritating referees--and coaches he didn’t like--exactly what he thought of them. He sneered at hypocrites, or those he saw as hypocrites, “Don’t con a conner.”

And he told the world, “If I were the president of Marquette University, I wouldn’t hire me.”

He said, “We reach for the stars as we rush to our graves,” and that winning was important only in war and surgery. But he also said, “If winning’s not important, why are they keeping score?”

He would caution newspapermen, who had scant hope of ever seeing one, to always carry a $100 bill because, “you never know,” then, on the road, would send the team manager to those same newspaper guys to borrow a razor.

In McGuire’s world, there were “dance hall players,” he was one of those; “thoroughbreds,” his brother Dick was one of those, and “aircraft carriers,” the kind of big man a coach builds his team around.

McGuire didn’t set out to be a coach, although he had grown up with basketball in Rockaway Beach at the southern end of Queens, where his parents ran a resort hotel and bar. Al followed older brother Dick into basketball--John, another older brother, favored football--playing for the Catholic Youth Organization and Police Athletic League in grade school. Al played football and basketball at St. John’s Prep, then, after graduating with an economics degree from St. John’s University in 1951, where he’d played hard-nosed defensive basketball for the similarly named but unrelated Frank McGuire, he joined Dick with the Knicks in the NBA’s formative years.

Dick was on his way to becoming a star. Al wasn’t, but he had his moments. In one early-season game, he guarded Bob Cousy when the Boston Celtic star was having an off-night.

“I own Cousy,” McGuire said with an airy wave of his hand when reporters asked about his defense. Of course, Cousy killed him whenever they played again.

McGuire played three seasons with the Knicks, then was traded to the old Baltimore Bullets, who folded 14 games into the 1954-55 season. Most of the Baltimore players were picked up by other teams. McGuire wasn’t and, out of a job, contemplated a career as a New York City cop.

“It was steady work and they paid a pension,” he said. “My mother liked that. She told me to take the test.”

He was saved from a life of crime fighting when Walter Brown, owner of the Celtics, recommended him for the assistant coaching job at Dartmouth. Think of that, Al McGuire in the Ivy league.

Nevertheless, he took the job and while he was there he learned two things:

* When you’re a coach, you can impress your players by throwing in a hook shot from the corner, then crowing, “Hey, what’d yez expect? I was a pro.”

* Good defense makes up for a multitude of sins.

If he’d had a mantra, it would have been, “Defense! Defense! Defense!” He stressed it at Belmont Abbey in Belmont, N.C., where he had his first head-coaching job, and he stressed it at Marquette, where he had his second and last.

“All you have to do is play hard on defense,” he always said. “You can’t count on offense. One night the basket is a washtub, the next night it’s a teacup.”

So McGuire’s teams, especially his early teams at Marquette, played lots of defense.

“We stop all stars,” he bragged.

And pretty much, they did, playing “off the shoulder, no French pastry” man-to-man, and all the zones, straight and gimmick. For a couple of seasons at Marquette, before the recruiting pipeline to New York was running full bore, McGuire had a unit of “defensive specialists” who went in to run around, foul and generally disrupt the other team. He called them his “scrambled eggs.”

Said Jack Gardner after Marquette had beaten his Utah team in the NIT, “Marquette fouled us real well. They get in your hair, clawing, biting, kicking and scratching.” It might have been McGuire’s proudest moment.

He played down his talents as a coach, saying often, “I’m just the cocktail waitress. Hank [assistant Hank Raymonds] does the real coaching.”

Not on game night. There might have been others more skilled at teaching the Xs and O’s, although he was far better at that than he let on, but there were few in his class as a game coach. That kind of seat-of-the-pants stuff was McGuire’s bread and butter.

“Anyone can win with talent,” he said.

Of course, he changed his tune once he got some. Even then, however, he went his own way.

“I don’t think too much about coaching,” he said. “I do that by instinct. I like to work upstairs, in the boy’s mind.”

He liked to work in everybody’s mind.

McGuire saw it as a major part of his job to promote the product, which he did with great zeal. There was no point in winning a game if nobody was there to see it.

“When I walk in just before tip-off, I always look at the corner seats, way up under the rafters,” he said. “If they’re full, then we’ve got a full house. Now, let’s play.”

There was little McGuire wouldn’t do to gain attention, for himself and his team. Personal attention was justified, of course, because, “A team is an extension of its coach.”

So when a rival coach suggested that Marquette’s Pat Smith, one of McGuire’s first New York imports--he rebounded and played strong defense but couldn’t shoot because he couldn’t see--couldn’t hit the ocean from a rowboat, McGuire, with proper photographic accompaniment, rowed Smith a few yards out onto Lake Michigan and had him throw a basketball in, gleefully explaining that Lake Michigan was a much harder shot because it was smaller than the ocean.

McGuire characterized himself as a yelling coach and there was no exaggeration there. In fact, that hardly scratched the surface. His yelling sometimes drove his players to near rebellion.

When he told writers after a Final Four victory over Kansas at Greensboro in ’74 that one of his players had been ready to leave at halftime, most thought he was kidding. He wasn’t.

After berating the Warriors at the top of his voice in a halftime harangue, he invited anyone who didn’t want to play the second half to get dressed and go home.

Guard Lloyd Walton took exception to that, saying, “We didn’t get here because of you, we got here on heart,” and started to get dressed.

“I tackled him,” McGuire said.

Earlier that season, at a fairly typical Marquette practice, guard Dave Delsman had punched fellow guard Marcus in the face.

“Hey, Dels,” McGuire yelled, “if you want to hit somebody, hit me.”

Delsman took him at his word and knocked McGuire down.

“Can you imagine that little squirt putting me on the floor?” McGuire marveled. “I should have just hit him on top of the head and been done with it.”

Most coaches talk about “focus” as if it solves all problems and view “distractions” as the things that get in the way of focus. Not McGuire. He once talked of falsetto-singing, ukulele-playing Tiny Tim in a postgame discourse. And he cultivated controversy. If there was nothing happening, he made something happen.

On a Saturday morning in 1972 at Knoxville, Tenn., where the Warriors were to play Ohio U. in a first-round regional game later that day, the NCAA advised Marquette officials that forward Bob Lackey was under investigation. Lackey, they were told, might have hired an agent. Other players at other schools were under the same cloud but all, the NCAA said, could be cleared by answering a 15-point questionnaire and signing an affidavit.

The others did so quickly. Lackey denied involvement with an agent and said he was willing to comply. McGuire wasn’t, and therefore Marquette wasn’t. Charges flew, lawyers were brought in and for 72 hours the arguments raged, the NCAA suspending Marquette from further tournament play until the proper documents were executed.

They were, finally, the crisis was averted and Marquette continued in the tournament--only to lose to Kentucky in the next game.

Later, Lackey told other students that McGuire had orchestrated Marquette’s response for its publicity value. And, of course, to irritate the NCAA.

Brash as he was, when he finally won the national championship, McGuire was overwhelmed. The guy who had strode off many a court after victory with hands raised, yelling at antagonistic crowds, smiling at the home folks, buried his head in a towel and cried.

Later, having finally reached the ultimate in the world of “seashells and balloons,” he rode off on his motorcycle, became a TV analyst and quickly built a new fan following, one in which spectators no longer screamed, “Hey, Dipstick, why don’t you slide across the floor on your hair!” He worked most of last season, then quit in March to go see about the fatigue that was bothering him.

Funeral services are scheduled Monday night at Gesu church on the Marquette campus. The Fox, no doubt, has ordered beautiful weather.

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Al McGuire at a Glance

* Age: 72 (Born Sept. 7, 1928. Died Jan. 26, 2001).

* Alma mater: St. John’s.

* NBA playing career: New York Knicks (1951-54); Baltimore Bullets (1954-55).

* Coaching career: Dartmouth (assistant, 1954-56); Belmont Abbey (head coach, 1957-64); Marquette (head coach, 1964-77). Retired from coaching after winning NCAA championship in his last game (March 28, 1977). Overall record of 404-144.

* TV analyst: 1977-2000.

* Honors: Named coach of the year by The Associated Press, United Press International, The Sporting News and the United States Basketball Writers Assn. (1971). Named coach of the year by Medalist Sports Education (1974). Elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass. (1992).

COACHING RECORD

*--*

Year School W L Pct. 1957-58 Belmont Abbey 24 3 .889 1958-59 Belmont Abbey 21 2 .913 1959-60 Belmont Abbey 19 6 .760 1960-61 Belmont Abbey 17 7 .708 1961-62 Belmont Abbey 16 9 .640 1962-63 Belmont Abbey 6 19 .240 1963-64 Belmont Abbey 6 18 .250 1964-65 Marquette 8 18 .308 1965-66 Marquette 14 12 .538 1966-67 Marquette 21 9 .700 1967-68 Marquette 23 6 .793 1968-69 Marquette 24 5 .828 1969-70 Marquette-x 26 3 .897 1970-71 Marquette 28 1 .966 1971-72 Marquette 25 4 .862 1972-73 Marquette 25 4 .862 1973-74 Marquette 26 5 .839 1974-75 Marquette 23 4 .852 1975-76 Marquette 27 2 .931 1976-77 Marquette-y 25 7 .781 Totals 404 144 .737

*--*

x-NIT champion; y-NCAA champion