He was never about schtick. Having fun? Yes. Flouting convention? Whenever possible. Being entertaining? Absolutely.
But Al McGuire never had an act to sell, only Marquette University and college basketball, and that was always the best thing about him in a profession so crowded with self-promoters you’re lucky if you get the score at the end of the game.
McGuire said last week that he was retiring from broadcasting 23 years after retiring as coach at Marquette, because of a form of anemia diagnosed 13 months ago.
The night before last Sunday’s Indiana-Wisconsin game, McGuire broke down as he told his CBS colleagues he did not feel strong enough to call the upcoming NCAA tournament. “I thought it would just be, `Hey, see you later, catch you on the rebound,'” McGuire said in a phone conversation from his home in West Palm Beach, Fla. “The last time I cried was when we won the championship in ’77.”
Fans of the game must surely feel the same melancholy at the thought of losing a voice that injected as much charm and enthusiasm into college basketball as it did class and dignity.
McGuire could be as cornball as they come, his expressions as silly as they were profound. If you were a player, it didn’t get any cooler than to have Al McGuire call you an “aircraft carrier” or a “blue-chipper.” Even being called a “three o’ clock hero” lent a certain prestige, even if it meant you’d left your game in practice.
“A lot of it was because I didn’t have the vocabulary,” McGuire said. “I just talked in color. And Dick [Enberg] always took me off thin ice.”
The essence of the man and the commentator is that there was never any phoniness to it, never any sense that he sat up at night inventing his next expression. It was merely an extension of McGuire’s style as a coach, a natural outgrowth of his love of the game.
He always said he wasn’t a salt-and-pepper coach, meaning the kind of guy who sat in a restaurant moving salt and pepper shakers around to demonstrate a play. He coached from his heart, never took himself or basketball too seriously, and he called games the same way. “My assistants, Hank Raymonds and Rick Majerus, coached basketball,” he said. “I felt it.”
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You were never quite sure which expressions McGuire invented and which ones he merely popularized. It really didn’t matter. If you could listen to a game called by Al McGuire and not smile, you weren’t trying.
McGuire laid the groundwork for many imitators to come, from John Madden, who has a similar passion for his sport but, like McGuire, reminds fans it’s only a game, to Dick Vitale, whose sincere enthusiasm spilled over into a lust for the spotlight.
They can all thank McGuire, a coach with no broadcasting experience who somehow made it look easy. “In 23 years, I never watched myself,” he said. “I just tried not to forget how I got there. If you lived in a tenement and become successful, don’t make believe you had grass in front of your house.”
Rarely was he mean-spirited, but he wasn’t a lightweight either. If he disagreed with a coach’s strategy, he said so, and he had the credentials of a coach who had taken Marquette to the 1977 national championship three months after announcing that season would be his last.
More than anything, his style was sincere, his emotion genuine. When McGuire threw his arms around Chicago legend Ray Meyer after DePaul clinched a Final Four berth in 1979, Meyer became a national treasure.
“He helped that no end, no question about it,” Meyer said. “I often say he made me a hero on TV with his comments. He brought entertainment to the game and he brought an awful lot of people along with it.”
McGuire is 71 now, which should make us all wonder where the time went, and his condition has left him feeling fatigued and achy, unable to handle the rigors of traveling to small college towns.
“I think I’ll be OK for a while,” he said. “This morning I went to a bagel place and word must have gotten around about me because the guy brought my bagel and coffee to the table. It was like a requiem mass.”
McGuire said he was dissatisfied with his performance in his last several games. “I was beginning to cut corners,” he said. But even in his last telecast, the gentle but direct and always funny McGuire was still in evidence.
“You don’t want to take that shot, son,” he chided a player.
And we don’t want you to go, Al.