Quote of the Day (Mike Lupica, on the Knicks’ Dick McGuire)

“Dick McGuire was the city game when it started with a good pass, with a good passer changing everything. He was the old 69th Regiment Armory on Saturday nights, the old Garden, he was Garden doubleheaders, college and pro. He was St. John's, Class of '49. Mostly he was a gentleman of his time in pro basketball, someone who worked for the New York Knicks for only 53 years.”—Mike Lupica, “Dick McGuire Was a True New Yorker and Knick Until the End,” New York Daily News, Feb. 4, 2010

Columnist Mike Lupica is at his best in this tribute to a virtual lifer at Madison Square Garden, a player, coach, scout and, at his death this week, senior consultant at the cathedral of basketball.

I’ve given up on the Knicks during this last lost decade of front-office mismanagement, coaching embarrassments, and player indifference that matched their bloated salaries. In contrast, the reserved Dick McGuire represents, as Lupica puts it, “the old kind of grace in sports, the best kind, the kind of grace where the top guys don't have to thump their chest and tell you all about it.”

A song called “When New York Was Irish” paid tribute to the Celtic impact on Gotham’s construction, politics and public safety. For what seems now like a brief, shining moment, Dick and Al McGuire—the only brothers in the Basketball Hall of Fame—made the city game Irish, too.

Al, with that Cagneyesque confidence and verbal energy, did it courtside with Marquette and in the broadcast booth, while Dick did so on the court, with precision passing and an unselfish style of play that led the Knicks to three successive NBA finals in the 1950s.

When his playing and coaching days were done, he continued to scout. He was responsible for the Knicks picking one of the building blocks of their Seventies championship teams, Clyde Frazier, as well as a point guard who eventually passed him among the team’s leaders in assists, Mark Jackson.

These days, when the Garden feels like a tomb, raise your eyes to the ceiling, where you’ll spot McGuire’s retired #15 (later worn by Earl Monroe), and hold in your mind, for as long as you can, the game at its best.