Frank's boys did it right

Sporting News, The, Oct 24, 1994 by Dave Kindred

His smile was as bright as dawn and it marked Frank McGuire for what he was, a man delighted to be Frank McGuire.

The 13th child of an Irish immigrant who walked a cop's beat in New York City during the Depression, he was a star athlete in three sports and good enough to be a professional basketball player.

To say Frank McGuire later became a basketball coach is to say Ted Williams became a hitter. McGuire was one of the best there ever was. As much as anyone and more than most, he made college basketball a national game.

The curtain up, McGuire commanded center stage with a showman's charm and rascality. He came with the gift of good looks: a square and dimpled chin, wavy hair the color of fire engines, wide-set eyes that invited you in. The young men whose lives he touched were mightily proud to be "Frank's Boys."

"He had an aura about him," one said, "like if you were in the company of Sinatra, Elvis or even God."

Always he had the smile, even when events called for it to be a covering act, as when arranged over clenched teeth while he dressed down a referee in language that would "melt butter at 60 paces and wilt roses in neighboring states," to quote a blistered auditor.

A Frank McGuire dressing down was a work of the con man's art, for he delivered his remarks not only under cover of that famous smile but while preening in stylish suits, silk ties and shimmering white shirts.

He would shoot a cuff. With a finger and a thumb, as he lifted his chin a click, the cop's 13th child would with a dandy's delicate touch adjust the position of the knot in his tie. Simultaneously he would lay down a fusillade of oratory from which no referee ever escaped whole.

Not that McGuire always wanted the purblind zebras to pretend deafness as well. He sought the punishment of technical fouls to enliven his team, a tactic so effective that Marquette's Al McGuire, losing to Frank one night, begged referees, "Stop calling technicals against him -- you're ruining us."

If you don't know, you should: North Carolina was a football state until Frank McGuire turned Tobacco Road into a basketball super-highway.

He went to Chapel Hill in 1952 after coaching his alma mater, St. John's, to the NCAA championship game, where it lost to Kansas, 80-63. The winners' giant center, Clyde Lovellette, scored 33 points.

Back then, North Carolina had lost 15 consecutive times to N.C. State and its coach, Everett Case. McGuire said, "I am declaring war on Everett Case."

Theater helps, but McGuire knew victory sold tickets. So one night he heard his assistant, Buck Freeman, say, "Frank, they're killing us. What are we going to do?" And McGuire answered, "Get better players."

He got them from the streets and Catholic churches of New York, the fertile grounds that sent him hustlers named Lou Carnesecca and Mario Cuomo.

"Coach started that 'underground railroad,'" said Bobby Cremins, a McGuire guard now Georgia Tech's coach. "A lot of people got on that train: Larry Brown, Dough Moe, Billy Cunningham, John Roche, Kevin Joyce, Mike Dunleavy."

Five city kids started for McGuire's undefeated North Carolina team, whic was 31-0 going into the 1957 NCAA championship game against Kansas and its latest giant, Wilt Chamberlain.

Remembering Lovellette's domination, McGuire used the same defense against Chamberlain -- three defenders at his elbows -- but also ordered a deliberate offense to keep the ball out of his hands. He scored 23 points. In three overtimes, North Carolina won, 54-53. Joy was on the land.

Charlotte Observer columnist Ron Green said, "To complete an undefeated season and win the national championship in triple overtime against Wilt Chamberlain -- no game ever played in the Carolinas had more of a lasting impace, a lasting glow."

McGuire would beat Everett Case in eight of their last nine meetings, once when Carolina trailed by a point at N.C. State with 10 seconds to play and the nation's No. 1 ranking at stake.

Moe, a Carolina star and later an NBA coach, remembers a timeout at that moment: "Coach said, 'Look at those guys down there, they're sitting there thinking they're going to win. I don't care what you do. Just go out there and score and let's get the heck out of here.'"

No grand strategy. Just grand belief in Frank's Boys.

They scored. They got out of there.

McGuire left North Carolina in 1961, his program on NCAA probation for recruiting violations and under siege for a player's tangential connection to that year's college gambling scandals. He was succeeded by a bright young coach he had hired: Dean Smith.

Smith would perfect McGuire's creation and on the death of the coach would say, "Anything I am or hope to be, I owe to him."

After a year coaching in the NBA and two years out of basketball, McGuire came back at the University of South Carolina. For 16 seasons, he again breathed life where there had been no life.

In his fourth season, after beating Duke and North Carolina, 10,000 people came to the airport at midnight -- in tuxedos and gowns, pajamas and bathrobes -- to carry McGuire to the terminal, the coach smiling in delight. Soon enough the children of South Carolina, be they Baptist or Methodist, came to make the Catholic's sign of the cross before shooting free throws.