Al McGuire: a coach that everyone loved
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NEW YORK - "Freddy, you're taking advantage of a dying man," Al McGuire was saying to this guy who came into his office in Brookfield, Wis., to buy toy soldiers.
"Look at me, Freddy. Can't you see I'm dying? How can you do this to me?"
Yes, he was dying. But if I am dying, he said to himself, then let me use it to beat this Freddy.
He remembered his father in the family bar in Rockaway being asked for a loan of $4. The father handed the man $2. "You lose two dollars and I lose two dollars," McGuire the father said.
Now Al said this to Freddy, "The next time you come here I won't be here. I'll be dead, and they'll start forgetting me. So don't try to cheat."
He was trying to sell toy soldiers to Freddy for, being charitable, as we are speaking of the dead, at a price at least far more than they ever could be worth.
Al McGuire had thousands of toy soldiers. He collected them wherever he went.
"He wanted more of them all his life," said Steve Balkan, who has an old toy shop on Madison Avenue. "After he won the national championship that time everybody was coming in here from Wisconsin and buying toy soldiers to send back to Al McGuire."
There was an old blind woman in a worn neighborhood on the South Side of Milwaukee who had a huge collection of toy soldiers. Al figured she was good for a favorable bargain, as in to rob. Suddenly, the woman died broke and beat him out of the toy soldiers and, beyond that, he had to come up with the funeral money. He told nobody about it, except to say, "The carnival is over."
Now, just a while ago, Al got ready to bury himself. The strength went out of him four months ago, and he went into a hospice.
It wasn't his kind of place. Al McGuire and his brothers lived over the family bar at 108th Street in Rockaway Beach. Al's first fame came when he held matches to a coin and dropped it into the hand of a toll collector on the Cross Bay Bridge. The toll collector did two things. He shrieked and called the cops.
Al and a friend took a catamaran from the lifeguards at 108th Street and headed for Ireland. They planned on begging from fishing boats. The Coast Guard helicopter came in low and started a wash that sent the catamaran back to shore and to all authorities, including the McGuire father.
One brother, Dick, played in Madison Square Garden with St. John's and the Knicks and exploded every night and became a sports legend. Al then played on both teams and became the greatest figure in his own world, and it was his own world because we haven't had anybody who could dare take a step into it without being blown out by the whirlwind.
He won the NCAA championship in 1977 and quit that night. He never wanted to coach in the NBA.
"How can you tell 7-foot millionaires what to do?" Al said. "Jeff Van Gundy is the best coach. He is not too good-looking, so he doesn't get in trouble with skirts. He makes good faces.
"That's all an NBA coach does. Make faces on `the bench.' Mad, disbelief, wounded, tense. Pro football coaches? They do less. They watch films."
You had to love him when you saw him going after players. The mother, Winnie, went right into the kitchens of high school stars and sat down for a cup of tea and talked to the mother. "My son Al is a fine young man. Your boy will love him. Do you have a cigarette?"
Al had a rule for talking to high school players. "We don't say `my man,' and we don't slap five. We don't patronize. We shake hands and say, `Mr. Lee, I'm happy to meet you.'"
When 6-foot-11 Jim Chones was talking about leaving school early to turn pro, McGuire said, "I looked in my ice box and then I looked in Jim Chones' family ice box. I told him, `Do whatever you think is best for you.'"
And he was out talking, talking, talking. On television, at business conferences. Tell them anything. Make them love you. "Balloons and seashells! You can't help anybody unless you got a loaf of bread under your arm yourself."
He hated practices. But during a game, pacing the floor, pulling one out, sending another in, he was a sports genius. He won practically every one-point game. Nobody ever knew more about a clock that showed eight seconds left.
Now, we come to these long weeks in the hospice, back problems kept him on his face. Finally, he was able to get an hour out with his son. They went to a park near the hospice and the son went for a sandwich and Al stretched out on a bench. He had a hood covering all but his mouth and eyes and a blanket over him.
It was his last pleasure, looking up at the bare trees. Mothers grabbed children and told them not to go near this dangerous bum, this hobo, sleeping on the bench.
The last week was ominous. Suddenly, the other day they found him sitting up in bed, eating a hot dog and drinking a Sprite. That was the last strength before death.
Yesterday, there was a requiem mass for Al McGuire on the Marquette campus. The funeral was a large civic event, and that's all right, although this was the first funeral outside of family that Al McGuire ever attended. He always said, "I bought him a drink when he was alive." Which he did. And anybody who didn't had no business at the funeral to begin with.
After Al McGuire's funeral, there was a reception at a golf course.
"You got to come," he was saying last week. "You'll love it. Wait'll you see. When you walk in, you'll see a big sign, 'Cash Bar Only.'"