Emotional Memories of McGuire

Al McGuire made it OK to cry about sports. Al McGuire made it OK to laugh about sports.

A man who can make you cry about a game and laugh about a game. It doesn’t get better than that.

Al McGuire’s funeral will be today in Milwaukee. There will be tears. There will be laughter. Some people will mix their laughter with their tears.

When McGuire broke down with heaving sobs as his Marquette Warriors killed the last minute of the only NCAA championship game he would win, as he cried and cried, men and women, boys and girls at the Omni in Atlanta cried with him.

I cried. Less than a year out of Marquette, working my first sports writing job in Columbus, Ga., clutching my scalper-bought ticket that placed me high in the arena and sitting next to another scalper customer who was wearing Carolina blue, I tried to hide my tears. But the man in Carolina blue was crying too. And not because the Tar Heels were going to lose. We both said, at almost the same moment, through our tears, “Al is so cool.”

Al McGuire made it OK to laugh about sports.

The year before that 1977 national championship, McGuire brought another Marquette team into Cincinnati to play Xavier. It was the second time in the season Marquette was playing the Musketeers. The Warriors had already received their NCAA bid and McGuire had sent his assistants--Rick Majerus and Hank Raymonds--off to scout potential tournament opponents.

The Xavier sports information director, Dan Weber, my husband now, was summoned off the court by McGuire about 10 minutes before the game. McGuire asked Weber to bring a Xavier media guide with him.

“It has pictures of the players, right?” McGuire needed to know.

Into the Marquette locker room Weber went. McGuire gathered his players--stars like Bo Ellis, Jerome Whitehead and Butch Lee--and asked Weber to hold up the media guide. Look at the player pictures, McGuire said. Look closely at the faces. Find one you recognize, McGuire said. Find the one you guarded in that last game against Xavier. Guard that guy again.

There it was, so ingeniously simple. The defensive game plan. All courtesy of a Xavier SID who couldn’t believe Al had roped him into helping out and could only hope the Xavier coaches never discovered the reason for his occasional giggles during his team’s season-ending loss.

McGuire couldn’t coach now. Not because he wouldn’t be good enough. But because we seem so seldom to want to laugh or cry about sports any more.

We whine and complain about our teams and athletes. We resent their humongous salaries and we dismiss as cheapskates the owners who won’t pay those salaries.

We don’t find moments worth crying over because we can’t invest much of ourselves in players and teams who don’t seem to care about the game as much as about the money.

But McGuire, he cared. He cared enough to walk away at age 48, at the top of his career. He quit coaching because he could see what we couldn’t. He could see that a coach who cried and who laughed wasn’t going to fit in much longer.

We have heard so many stories about McGuire since he died Friday of a blood disorder. We have heard about all the goofy phrases he invented to describe basketball games. We have heard about how he’d ride his Harley. He’d be wearing a $1,000 suit and carrying a $10 backpack. Was this a day to turn left out of the parking lot, or right? Nobody ever knew.

We’ve heard stories about the Marquette practices where punches were thrown as often as basketballs. How was it, somebody asked, that McGuire could get away with hitting players when Bob Knight was demonized for it?

There is an easy answer. McGuire’s players were allowed to strike back. McGuire could take a punch as well as give one and if that’s not how you like your coach to act, if you want to become self-righteous and say that is no way to set an example, then you are someone who probably doesn’t laugh or cry at sports either.

Here is another McGuire story. I’m stealing this one from a friend, Mary Schmitt-Boyer, who is a sportswriter in Cleveland. She went to Marquette and was the first woman to cover the Warriors for the student paper.

Schmitt-Boyer was nervous about going into the locker room. It hadn’t been done. What, she asked McGuire, would he like her to do?

“Come in with everybody else,” McGuire said. As if there were any other way to do it.

Years later, Schmitt-Boyer wrote McGuire a note. She thanked him for his answer that day. If he had been different, Schmitt-Boyer said, if the situation had been uncomfortable, she probably would have ended up being a nurse. That had been her original life plan.

Recently a friend handed Schmitt-Boyer a little box. It was a gift from McGuire. Schmitt-Boyer expected it to be one of the toy soldiers. McGuire collected them. But when she opened it, Schmitt-Boyer didn’t find a soldier.

She found a tiny figurine . . . of a nurse.

Schmitt-Boyer laughed. And cried.

When McGuire and Marquette won that national championship, it was the first time I cried at a sporting event. There have been others.

When Dan Jansen finally won his Olympic gold medal and pointed up at the sky, acknowledging the sister who had died of leukemia, that was one time. When Michelle Kwan skated with ethereal perfection at the 1998 Olympic trials. When Michael Jordan made that final 20-footer to beat Utah. When Jennifer Capriati finally won her first Grand Slam tennis tournament last week.

Thanks, Al, for making it OK to cry. And giving us so many reasons to laugh.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com