Quote of the Day (Digger Phelps, on Al McGuire)

''I learned defense from Bobby Knight and psychology from Al McGuire. People need to be refreshed on what Al McGuire was. He was a rock. He was the best. He did for Milwaukee in college basketball what Vince Lombardi did for Green Bay in pro football.''—Former Notre Dame basketball coach Digger Phelps, on rival and friend Al McGuire, quoted in Frank Litsky, “Al McGuire, 72, Coach, TV Analyst and Character, Dies,” The New York Times, January 27, 2001

I have a confession to make: I’ve not only paid virtually no attention to March Madness this year, but in decades. The last time I did was in the Bird-and-Magic show back in ’79. But if you want to know the truth, the time I felt a truly powerful tug to the NCAA finals was two years before that. 

For nearly a decade, Al McGuire had been making a run of it in either the NCAA or the NIT: shouting, gesticulating, cajoling, ref-baiting, anything to bring his Marquette team to the Promised Land. It had been a Sisyphean struggle: going 26-0 in the regular season in ’71, only to lose in the regional semi-finals when star Dean Meminger fouled out; in 1972, in the second round, exiting at the hands of McGuire’s old nemesis, Kentucky; in 1974, after reaching the Final Four, losing largely because of two technical fouls levied on the coach; and in 1976, falling before Bobby Knight’s unbeaten Indiana. 

But, on this date in 1977, victory was finally McGuire’s. It came in dramatic fashion: Marquette had tied the game when North Carolina’s Dean Smith put on his four-corners delay offense, which had frustrated other opponents. Then Marquette got the ball and it was their turn to slow down the tempo. It worked, and against a strong squad that included Walter Davis, Phil Ford and Mike O’Koren, Marquette pulled it out, 67-59.

And then, on the baseline of the court, occurred one of the most unforgettable moments in sports history: as the realization sank in that, at last, he had won the long-elusive prize, in what was to be his last game, McGuire, overcome by memories dating back, he recalled in this YouTube video, to "Belmont Avenue," wept despite himself. 

I couldn’t help but identify with the scrappy coach now letting his heart out for all to see. To start with, he was, in a phrase my Irish-American family might say, “one of ours,” having grown up working in his family’s saloon in Rockaway, N.Y., “the Irish Riviera.” He was “one of ours” in a way that Jack Kennedy—aristocratic, cool, finally unapproachable—couldn’t be. I always thought  of him as up from the city streets. If that last phrase means anything to you, you might hear the echo of New York Governor Alfred Emanuel Smith, who bore the same first and middle name of the coach and whose run for the Presidency occurred the same year as his birth. It was, simply, a thrill that “one of ours” was a master of the city game.

Last year, on the brink of Chris Mullin’s induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame, his St. John’s coach, Lou Carnesecca, told The New York Times’ Harvey Araton, “He was born inside a basketball—you know what I’m trying to say?” McGuire would have, because he was the same type: a gym rat. Oh, he might not have had the talent of his brother Dick (who would join him a year later in the Hall of Fame, and who I discussed in this earlier post), but he lived for the smell of the arena and the sound of that ball bouncing on the court.

I don’t think many people realized at the time—I sure didn’t—what McGuire’s triumph meant for college basketball fans. He walked away—and stayed away—from a game that had meant so much to him—consumed him, really. He left on top of the game, sparing us scandals involving recruiting (a task he loathed); hanging around for too long, after your personal style has become an anachronism; or, in its way worse, retiring, only to come back a year or two later, batteries recharged, to another school or even pro team, with a fatter contract this time, and his old school university left behind.

When he stepped away from his coach’s perch, McGuire gave fans another gift: a brash, funny lingo, as a sportscaster for NBC and CBS, that led The New York Times to term him "the James Joyce of the airwaves" before the 1995 NCAA tournament. Some of the lines are true, out there for all to see (“I think the world is run by C students”); but more often, it was a term that sharply defined a player or a moment. Think of it: “white knuckler,” “aircraft carrier,” “sand fights,” “French pastry,” or the one he had come to know intimately at Marquette, “The Big Dance.” 

On the court, and even more so in the broadcast booth, McGuire embodied a different kind of Irish archetype: not Paddy but what the novelist Peter Quinn, in the title essay of his collection Looking for Jimmy, terms "Jimmy," a melding of Jimmy Cagney and Jimmy Walker, gifted with a "blend of musicality and menace, of nattiness and charm, of verbal agility and ironic sensibility, of what today is known as 'street smarts.'"

The average raw skill and ability of college players may be higher than in McGuire’s time, but I doubt if I’m missing much by not watching March Madness lately. After all, with the great coach and announcer gone, the carnival gates are closed. There isn’t a show that could top it.