A Guy Named Al Offers You a Few Words of Advice

Marquette is back at the Final Four, but Al McGuire isn’t.

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More important, what happened to the audio?

McGuire, the last man to coach Marquette to the Final Four, in 1977, when he won the championship, died two years before the Golden Eagles found their way back. Dick Enberg, McGuire’s longtime friend and broadcast partner, says McGuire “would have loved” this surprising run by Marquette because it resembles his own unlikely ride to the title 26 years earlier.

Except current Coach Tom Crean’s motivational repertoire probably doesn’t include punching a player.

“The year he won the championship, he hit Bernard Toone at halftime,” Enberg said.

“One of the early games, they came off the court, they’d had a bad half and Toone, who was very talented but not very disciplined, at least in Al’s eyes, was walking down the hallway to the locker room and Toone comes up to Al and says, ‘Coach, you said you were going to play me more! You promised you were going to play me!’

“Al says, ‘I never promised you nothing.’

“Bernard says, ‘Yeah, you broke your word, you promised!’

“So Al said, ‘So I hit him.’ ”

Not quite fodder for the “One Shining Moment” montage, but Enberg says McGuire told him, “That’s how I won the championship. After that, we cruised. That was the key to the championship. I had to show who was the boss. I loved them, and that’s how I sometimes had to show them I loved them.”

That was McGuire. A street fighter turned loose on an arena sideline, a “street genius,” according to Enberg, who remembers how McGuire made plans for his final confession while nearing the end of a struggle with a long illness.

McGuire told Enberg, “I’m going to go out in the country and get me a deaf priest. Because I’ve got stuff I don’t want anybody to hear.”

Enberg: “And he found one. He had an expression for purgatory. He said, ‘I got to avoid the holding tank.’ ”

McGuire also had a lot of stuff Enberg believes everyone should hear, which prompted Enberg to write a one-man play called, simply, “McGuire,” culled from anecdotes and observations during their 25-year friendship.

“I just thought that Al was such a special street genius and saw life so much differently than the rest of us,” Enberg said. “He’s the smartest guy I’ve ever been around, other than my own father. I just felt I should write down all the things, all the life lessons that I’ve learned from Al and trying to organize it. If nothing else, it will be a big chapter in my book one day.”

Enberg ran through a few highlights from the script, which, he said, remains a work in progress.

McGuire and the Fountain of All Knowledge

When Enberg and McGuire arrived at a college to prepare for a broadcast, McGuire would quickly seek out the team manager for the inside scoop.

Enberg: “Al would say, ‘If you want to find out what’s going on in a school, where would you got for the information?’ I said, ‘Well, logic says you go to the principal or the superintendent.’

“He said, ‘You couldn’t be farther from the truth. The person who knows most about what’s happening at the school is the custodian.’

“He said, ‘Let me tell you something. In a business or a school, everyone on the ladder is trying to improve their position ....If you’re on the bottom rung, you know everything that’s going on above you. Because you want to pass them. And the people above you aren’t paying much attention to you because they’re trying to pass them.

“ ‘And so, you get all the way to the top and they’re not trying to pass anyone -- they’re trying to save their jobs. They’re more concerned about other issues. Many of them don’t even know who’s working for them.’

“And that’s so true, it’s frightening ....So Al would go to the student manager. Everybody else would say, ‘Why would you go there? He’s at the bottom of the ladder.’ But as Al put it, he knows more about the team and what’s going on than anybody.”

McGuire, Restaurant Guide

Enberg: “He had little silly sayings, like, ‘If you’re looking for a place to eat at night, never go to a restaurant that has linen napkins. You got to go to a place with paper napkins.’

“He said, ‘First of all, Dicksie, you know how much it costs to launder those linen napkins? Fifteen cents apiece! You know who’s paying for that? You’re paying for it!’

“The other rule is: ‘Either Mom or Pop has to be in the restaurant -- in the kitchen, or out in front. If they’re there, I guarantee you, you’re going to have a good meal. You don’t have to go to a fancy French place where they burn everything up and stuff a plate in front of your nose. You’re just paying for that.

“ ‘Just go to a Mom and Pop place where there’s paper napkins on the table. Now you’ll get a good meal.’ ”

McGuire and the

Pressure Cooker

Enberg and McGuire were assigned to cover regional doubleheaders, one Saturday and Sunday during the 1979 tournament.

Enberg got laryngitis on Saturday and was down to “barely a whisper” by the tipoff of Sunday’s first game.

Enberg struggled through the first game, but midway through the second, during a commercial break, he told McGuire, “Al, I can’t make it. Here’s what I’ll do: I know you don’t know the players, so here’s my spotting board. I’ll point to the guys in the game and I’ll write down the statistics and the numbers. I’ll give you all the information, but I can’t go on.”

McGuire looked at his partner and replied, “Dicksie, if you’re going, I’m going.”

Enberg: “He was smart enough to know he wasn’t going to be put in a position where he’d look foolish. I had to battle on, and I got through to the end of the game. But it was a miserable day.”

McGuire and the

Perfect Meal

Enberg: “His idea of the perfect meal was white bread and a fresh onion. An onion sandwich, on white. He said, ‘That’ll make your stomach angry, and you’re ready to go.’

“I can hear him now, ‘And fella! Hey fella! Make sure that’s a thick piece of onion on that, huh? Don’t be short-changin’ me.’ ”

McGuire and the

Secret of Life

Enberg: “Al always felt he was obligated to take one right-hand turn once a month. And that meant, physically, when he left his home in Brookfield, Wis., on his way into Milwaukee for a Marquette practice, if and when he attended practice, he’d get to a two-way stop. And if he took a left-hand turn, he went into Milwaukee. If he took a right-hand turn, he would go out into the beautiful Wisconsin countryside.

“He felt that if he didn’t have to check in, call in, announce he wasn’t going to go in, he felt that once a month, he could take a right-hand turn and let life come to him and not have the whole day planned out. And he said, ‘Sometimes I wouldn’t decide to take the right-hand turn until I got to that two-way stop.’ ”

Once, while Enberg was in Milwaukee on an Angel trip, McGuire took him along on a right-hand turn.

“He showed up in this rat-eaten old Plymouth,” Enberg recalled. “Even his wife said you could get ptomaine poisoning just sitting in the back seat. And he picked me up and we started driving.

“And I said, ‘What are we going to do, Al?’ He said, ‘What do you mean what are we gonna do? We’re gonna go on a right-hand turn! You don’t have agendas. You see something you want to do, we’ll stop and do it.’ ”

Before the afternoon was through, Enberg said, he and McGuire had stopped at a pick-your-own strawberry stand (“40 cents a basket”), browsed through an antique store, taken a walk in a park and enjoyed a leisurely lunch.

“By the time I got back at 5 o’clock and it was time to go out for batting practice,” Enberg said, “I realized what a thoroughly delightful, meaningful, rich day that he had given me. And that was his taking a right turn.

“Now, you and I can’t just take a day off. But we probably have had more opportunities in our lives than we realize to take a right turn, but we just don’t take it.”

So who plays the role of McGuire in the play?

Enberg said he had his agent send the script to Billy Crystal.

“Although Billy is not the height of Al, he would be a perfect Al McGuire [because] he would play it so big,” Enberg said. “But I haven’t heard back ....

“Maybe nothing will happen. If nothing else, if I write a book about the crazy characters and wonderful characters with whom I’ve worked through these 50 years next year in broadcasting, he’ll get the biggest chapter. I always knew that.”