Seashells and balloons

Sporting News, The, Feb 12, 2001 by Dave Kindred

It's December 21, 1974. We're in Milwaukee, and it's snowing. The coach is late for practice because his car was stuck in the snow and the arena door was locked. Now he's standing at midcourt, aggrieved.

"This is the fourth straight time this has happened, that I can't get in this place," he says. "Why wasn't there any manager to let me in the back door?"

It's 26 winters ago, and Al McGuire is young and vital. His hair is a frizzy mess, as if answering to electricity, and his voice is the only sound heard in the old basketball arena. And what a voice it is, pure New York City, larded with sarcasm, insult, expletive and other tools of the coach's trade used to wake up young men, as in ...

"Earl, either you're hurt or you're not hurt," McGuire says to Earl Tatum, a player he had described as a black Jerry West. "If you're not hurt, get out here, will you? If you're hurt, get hurt bad. Get a broken leg."

On this winter's day, fast breaks flow around the coach at midcourt, the coach with no whistle, needing only his voice, that voice distinctive, authoritative, the voice of a coach whose team lost the national championship game the season before, a coach who now sees something he doesn't like and says ...

"Wait a MINUTE, hold IT, this is is un-be-LIEVABLE."

Everyone stops.

The coach's team had won three straight games before losing by seven points, and McGuire says, "Nobody is playing. Stop feeling sorry for yourselves. You guys are living on a reputation you don't deserve. You guys aren't playing."

They're listening.

"Do you know," the coach says, "that we haven't had a facial cut all year? UN-BE-LIEVABLE. We haven't had an eye cut all year. We got 20 guys playing for 10 weeks and not one facial injury. How is that possible?"

They're listening, and now they're catching on, now they know it's Al McGuire being Al McGuire, now they know he's begging them, in that wonderful voice, to please start bleeding for him, and a player named Lloyd Walton can't help but laugh as McGuire says ...

"Pretty boys, that's what you're playing like. A bunch of pretty boys. You're all handsome fellas, but we can't be beautiful and cool and win ballgames here in America. Belly, you're showing belly, you're getting soft, you ain't in condition to play. UN-BE-LIEVABLE.

"Nobody's playing the game. Earl only jumps when nobody touches him. Lloyd drives to the basket, and he hasn't been spun out yet. Why doesn't somebody spin him out? Play the game. Fall on the floor, will you?

"Everybody that plays us, a ball goes on the floor, they get it. Why? A broken nose ain't gonna hurt you. If you want to play a marshmallow game, go back to the community center in Harlem where it's 116-112. Here we're playing my game."

Two weeks ago, Al McGuire died.

He was 72 years old.

McGuire's game was cracked sidewalks and asphalt playgrounds ribboned in barbed-wire. The night his Marquette University team won the 1977 NCAA championship--two months after he had announced his retirement--he wept on the bench and said, "I've always been an alley fighter. I don't usually get into these silk lace situations."

A whiff of larceny moved with this loopy genius who came from the Irish-Catholic milieu of New York and St. John's University in the late 1940s when gamblers, thieves and other lowlifes made basketball their toy.

"If it's important enough for me to put on my business suit, it's valuable enough to justify getting a load of money," he said. "Free ain't me."

The columnist Tom Callahan once dialed up Marquette's basketball office and asked to speak to Coach McGuire only to hear, "What's stopping you?" McGuire answered his own phone. "Al was the Artful Dodger, straight out of Dickens," says Callahan, who quotes the coach on New York bar-fight etiquette. "Al said, `You know when an Irishman is ready to fight? When he takes off his wristwatch, you better get your glasses off.'"

If ever a man were consistently, comically and eccentrically brilliant, that man was Alfred E. McGuire. "The American idea is to win, unless you're playing against your grandmother," he said. "But even then you should try to win--unless you're mentioned in the will."

He gave the X's and O's credit to assistant coach Hank Raymonds.

"Hank built the car, I sold it." During years when not every coach rushed to be inclusive, the Irish alley fighter at a Jesuit university recruited black players from the worst circumstances. When one of his stars, Jimmy Chones, debated leaving school early for the pros, McGuire said, "Look in my refrigerator, it's full. Look in yours, it's empty. You gotta go."

His patois was inimitable. In 20 years as a television broadcaster, McGuire delighted us with stream-of-consciousness soliloquies that, however odd, wound up making a sweetheart's great good sense. "Dance hall players" didn't get much done, but "thoroughbreds" did. Big men with no ability became "space heaters" while big men who could play were "aircraft carriers." Disastrous games were "Dunkirks." University bosses became "memos and pipes." He decried the unnecessary flair of "French pastry" and waxed rhapsodic about anyone good enough to "go downtown."