Al McGuire: Portrait of a Maverick Basketball Coach
AL McGUIRE was a maverick — a stubborn, funny, fiery, good-hearted, street-smart Irish guy from Queens, New York who from 1964–1977 coached the Marquette University basketball team, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He yelled and laughed, delighted in riding a motorcycle, and won 79% of his games over 13 interesting seasons at Marquette.
In 1970, his Marquette team won the NIT. In 1974, they went to the NCAA Final Four. And in his last season, 1977, they won it all, sending him into coaching retirement in storybook style.
McGuire was a world-class talker, interesting on any topic not only because he noticed a lot, and liked to enter the subject of discussion by a side door, but because he had speech patterns and a vocabulary all his own. Al knew how to find the right restaurant: “If the waitress has dirty ankles, the chili is good.”
To Al McGuire, close games were “white knucklers.” Kids from rough parts of town were “cracked sidewalk guys.” Showy moves were “French pastry.” Brawlers of limited talent were “dancehall guys.” College professors he called “pipes,” and administrators were “memos.” A big center was an “aircraft carrier” and athletic forwards were “ballerinas in the sky.” Easy opponents were “cupcakes.” The happiness of winning was “seashells and balloons.”
One of the appealing things about McGuire was that he knew what he was good at, and what he wasn’t. He didn’t watch a lot of game film or pretend to be an x’s and o’s guy, who could draw up complex offensive plays and defensive rotations. He hired a very competent strategist named Hank Raymond for that. Hank Raymond went to Mass every morning, and had the trust of the players. Al let Hank Raymond do his thing, Al did Al’s thing, and they never competed.
Al also didn’t do much recruiting; he left that to his second assistant coach Rick Majerus. (Though when conversation turned to how much money various college stars had gotten under the table to sign, Al would proudly say “I got Maurice Lucas for a slice of pizza.)
Al had good advice for recruiters. ‘Get Mama alone in the kitchen. That’s who you’re recruiting: Mama.’
Al always made sure he had at least one aircraft carrier on his team, and a couple of ballerinas in the sky. He made sure to schedule a few cupcakes in the regular season, but some great teams too, so Marquette would have some white knucklers before tournament time. He figured: ‘Get yourself a tough point guard, don’t let the memos and pipes interfere with the program, and you’ll be fine.’
Al ended up with a lot of New York guys on his teams: Dean Meminger from Harlem, Butch Lee from the Bronx, Bernard Toone from Yonkers. They were young African-Americans and he was an old white guy — but they had New York in common, and a passion for basketball.
Al was terrible with names. Rick Majerus joked: “The guy needed name tags for his own family.” But McGuire was a superb bench coach. He had a great feel for the game, which match-ups favored Marquette and which did not, when to let his players sort things out themselves on the floor and when a timeout was needed, how to get one kid to relax on the floor and another kid to bear down a little harder. He was a master motivator, both at getting young men to compete, and getting them to play as a unit.
Al even had a great sense for when to get a technical foul or two. If his team was sluggish, Al might charge onto the court, berate the refs, get thrown out of the game — and his team would suddenly show some fire. They wanted to prove that THEY won the games, not their well-known coach.
He admired coaches who developed intricate strategies for every game — but he used to warn young coaches at clinics that if you get 10 minutes into a game and your team’s getting whipped, you have to be willing to throw out the game plan you worked on so long and hard, and find something to get you through THAT particular game.
A favorite defense of Al’s, especially in pressure situations, was a Triangle-and-Two defense where the Marquette center, power forward and small forward were in a triangle zone, with both Marquette guards playing man to man, steering their opponents into the triangle. Since guards run the offense, and the opposing team’s guards were being guarded man-to-man, they often failed to realize that Marquette’s big men were in a zone defense.
Al told everyone that 1977 was his last year as a coach. (“The merry-go-round will stop. I get off.”) When friends asked him what he would do without a team to coach, Al would say “I might go to New Zealand.”
The best team in the Final Four that year seemed to be the University of North Carolina, coached by the great Dean Smith. But Al coached a great game against UNC, noticing that Carolina seemed more than usually bothered by a 2–3 zone, and so Marquette played much more of that zone than usual, and they beat Carolina.
Al didn’t despise losing the way most big-time coaches do. When his coaching pal Bob Knight had his Indiana Hoosiers undefeated after seven or eight games, Al told Coach Knight, “It’ll be good for you to get beat.” Knight hated hearing that, but Al meant it. He felt that losses early in the season got the players’ attention, made them play harder and listen more closely to the head coach.
Because Al was not afraid to lose, it made him harder to coach against. He might pull something out in the last few minutes of a big game that Marquette hadn’t done all year. Coaching against Al McGuire, you didn’t know what was coming; you just knew he was fearless.
Al liked to point out that nothing lasts for long. He admired anyone who knew how to live in the moment, and liked to say: “Congratulate the temporary.”
In 1977, as the last seconds ticked away and he knew he was going to win a national title in the last game he ever coached, Al McGuire began crying on the bench. He said later “I’m not afraid to cry. All I can think about is ‘Why me?’ After all the jocks and socks. All the odor in the locker room. All the fights in the gyms. Just the wildness of it all. And to have it end like this…”
Al came from a close family but he joked that he only paid his mother a visit twice a year because “if I don’t get back every four or five months, my brother John knocks me out of the will.”
McGuire had been quite a player in his own day, first at St. John’s Prep and then at St. John’s, where he’d captained the 1951 team that went 26–5, and won third place at the NIT. But his playing was overshadowed by his coaching success.
He liked to tell a story about the time he boasted he was going to hold the great Bob Cousy to 10 points. (“And I did; Cousy had exactly 10 points when I fouled out in the first quarter.”)
Al McGuire believed in honesty back and forth between player and coach. If that meant screaming matches, so be it. He used to say: “Your team should be an extension of the coach’s personality — and mine is obnoxious and arrogant.” Then he’d break out into his big smile.
Part of the tension came because Al was firm about building the offense around the seniors, getting them a lot of touches, a lot of shots. Gifted sophomores didn’t like this; they wanted to shoot the ball more. But Al felt that his seniors deserved a chance at the NBA, and to get that they needed to do well in their senior season. He told the sophomores to wait their turn.
He often said that the problem with a middle-aged man coaching 20-year-olds is that, to a 20-year-old, a single basketball season is an eternity, whereas the middle-aged coach sees two years as a short period of time.
When he turned down an NCAA Tournament bid in 1970, a priest in the President’s Office at Marquette called him, and questioned his logic. McGuire said flatly: “I don’t hear confession and you don’t coach this team!”
Later, the priest apologized for meddling.
Another time, the Milwaukee Bucks were interested in hiring McGuire and he liked how much money they were offering. But Marquette wouldn’t let McGuire out of his contract — nor would they sweeten his deal. Al said “The priests at Marquette take a vow of poverty — and they expect YOU to abide by it.”
Al McGuire was a Catholic himself — not highly religious but respectful of the church and fond of the rituals. He’d started off coaching at a little Catholic school in North Carolina called Belmont Abbey, and once said “They put a stained glass window in me.”
On the other hand, Al was sort a wise guy about religion as it was actually practiced. He once called his guard Dean Meminger “quicker than 11:15 mass at a seaside resort.”
He always had a soft spot for Catholic schools. (“You can always tell Catholic schools by the length of the cheerleaders’ skirts.”)
After he retired from coaching, McGuire had a whole other career as a college basketball broadcaster. He was full of mangled syntax, and there were non-sequiturs, but the language was colorful and sharp, and as he had as a coach, Al McGuire the broadcaster could tell the TV viewers just when the momentum was shifting, and why.
Just as his coaching success had overshadowed his fine playing career, so his broadcasting career overshadowed his extraordinary coaching. When a game was ending, Al was always happy for the winners. When one team had secured the victory, Al would pronounce: “It’s curtains. The carnival gates are closed.” It was time for the winners to “go barefoot in the wet grass.”
None of this was said with bombast — it was almost matter-of-fact. Al was your street-smart Irish uncle who’d played, coached or called 10,000 basketball games and was just explaining how things were. Losing wasn’t the end of the world — “except in war and surgery.”
Death was a serious thing to Al but he used to say, “For my final confession, I’m going to need a deaf priest.”
His broadcasting partner Dick Enberg loved McGuire so much that he later wrote a one-act play about McGuire so that thousands of people who never knew Al McGuire could spend an evening with him.
Al had suffered from anemia for many years, and in 1999, at age 71, he walked away from broadcasting. He died of leukemia in 2001. His legacy is as a very fine player, an even better coach, a one-of-a-kind broadcaster, and a pretty good human being. He liked to say “God didn’t miss any of us” and he had more sympathy than most basketball coaches for the down-and-out.
He also said, “My personal style is not negotiable. That’s how I fly. If you don’t like my onion sandwiches, too bad. I can’t change.”