A day with Al McGuire, and why it’s only important to win at war and surgery

By Jerry Ratcliffe

It was a frosty mid-January afternoon, thirty-nine years ago, when I was sitting in Terry Holland’s somewhat cramped office in University Hall. I was there to get the scoop from Holland on No. 2 Virginia’s clash with visiting No. 11 North Carolina and Dean Smith, a nationally-televised game by NBC the next day.

We were finishing up and out of nowhere, in walked Al McGuire, unannounced and full of questions to Holland about the experimental 3-point shot the ACC was using that season. McGuire was the quirky, eccentric former basketball coach at Marquette and arguably the top TV basketball analyst in the land.

Every basketball fan loved McGuire, who really wasn’t an X’s-and-O’s guy, but coached the game by “feel.” He once said, “I don’t know basketball. I feel basketball. Drop me in the middle of a game and I could manage it by the ebb and flow.”

The 3-point shot fascinated McGuire and he really wanted to gain more understanding that he could relay to his national-television audience the next day.

He quizzed Holland for quite some time, with Holland explaining that he had to adjust his team’s rebounding positioning because the shot was being taken from so far out (under 18 feet that season), so missed shots would bounce further away from the basket than normal.

When we were done, I was about to have my special Al McGuire moment, but didn’t know it until Holland asked me to give McGuire a ride to the Boar’s Head Inn. McGuire, I later found out in conversation, would show up in college towns and often hitch-hike wherever he was going so he could meet townspeople.

Al was so appreciative, he invited me in and we settled in at a table in a pretty empty dining room for a few beers and a lot of conversation. What a treat. McGuire had coached Marquette from 1964 to 1977, when he defeated Dean Smith and the Tar Heels for the national championship. Al walked away from coaching the next day.

He and his brothers (most notably older brother Dick, who played for St. John’s and the Knicks) lived over the family bar in Rockaway, N.Y.  Maybe that’s why Al loved spending some spare time in dives where he would drink and unwind to “good jukeboxes and sad country songs.”

None of that was available that day, so it was just conversation, and not a lot of it about basketball.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but McGuire owned some sporting-goods company out of Milwaukee and was a lot wealthier than casual fans listening to him on TV would have ever suspected. Yet, he didn’t splurge on material things. He once drove a Ford Falcon (no radio) for years.

He was a collector of things, and we talked about his love of toy soldiers. If he had spare time during basketball trips or business trips, he would almost always end up in antique shops or flea markets searching for toy soldiers. He had thousands of them, but liked a particular kind, and I don’t know what they were called, but they were heavy for their size and made from metal.

Was told he had a miniature battlefield of ‘em on his desk when he coached, but never stopped collecting them, and asked me if I ever ran across any to send them to him. I did a couple of times, and it was as if I had presented him with a bar of gold.

The first time I had encountered McGuire was at the 1974 NCAA Final Four in Greensboro, where as a young pup of a sportswriter, I had convinced ACC basketball “promoter” (for lack of a better word) Skeeter Francis to give me a credential.

McGuire’s Marquette team defeated Kansas in one semifinal, while NC State and David Thompson ended UCLA’s seven consecutive national titles in the greatest game I’ve ever seen.

McGuire lost to the Wolfpack in the championship when he tried to take the air out of the ball, and committed his own cardinal sin by getting whistled for a technical foul at a critical time, turning the game.

I was just a face in the media crowd that weekend, so sitting there at Boar’s Head was quite a treat to be talking to McGuire. During the ‘80s and I think into the early ‘90s, he and Dick Enberg and Billy Packer would team up to do telecasts, and it was heaven for basketball junkies.

While McGuire would play down his basketball knowledge, you didn’t want to get into a one-point game against him during his coaching days.

He was lively, unpredictable, and would often dance out on the court after a big win. He had a great sense of humor.

It’s difficult to remember details of an interview from so long ago, but I do recall a few things he said:

“The world is run by C-plus students,” he mentioned out of nowhere. “It’s only important to win in war and surgery,” was another.

When I asked him why he decided to hang up his whistle after winning the natty over Dean Smith that year, his answer was simple, but complicated.

“I don’t fool around with things that have stopped quivering,” McGuire said.

In McGuire-ese, that meant the thrill was gone. He was ready to move on.

Years later, it was kinda cool to write about Al’s granddaughter, who played basketball at Virginia, and relate a couple of those stories with her.

He passed in 2001 at the age of 72, and had tons of people at his funeral, although he made it a practice to not attend funerals unless it was family. Al used to say, “I bought you a drink once upon a time and that’s good enough.”