Always, Al McGuire was growing. And what he didn’t know he could cover with talk. His mind essentially was too quick for mere sports, which is why there is always so much more than sports going on when he talks to his players. Al McGuire wants college degrees for his players? Sure he does. It’s a good show for Al, and a good show for the boy. The perfect way to obliterate these coaches who sell black basketball players on the theory that a car and three white broads is all they really want out of life. Al McGuire promotes things that last. And gets the players. See Maurice Lucas, this season’s great sophomore. And then past the good show, past the fast talk, there is the knowledge that it not only looks right, but it is right. What better combination is there?
Al is Irish and Catholic, and he was behind a bar pulling beer at 108th Street in Rockaway Beach, in New York, before he was old enough to be allowed in as a customer. The background is supposed to produce conservative thinking. I sit with Al McGuire at dinner with business people from Milwaukee, and they are laughing about an open housing march led by a priest named Groppi. Al McGuire, the center of the table, said, “Fellas, you may think I’m losing my mind, but I have to tell you. I think the man is right.” Silence fell. But not that sullen kind of silence. An embarrassed silence. They all seemed uneasy that they had said something stupid. I have been around people in a business called politics who try to sell unpopular ideas even to the smallest groups and all they ever receive is a grimace. I watched this guy talk. I had a small idea that Al McGuire is one of the few I know who can tell the bastards anything and make them like it. And maybe, as he thinks himself, it’s time to try it out. But this is personal opinion. I know the guy a long time. See him through Jim Chones.
Chones came to Marquette in September, 1969. He found out a little bit more about his coach in the dressing room before a game with, he thinks, Creighton. He cannot remember it so well because he stayed in a corner of the dressing room in terror. One of the varsity players, Hugh McMahon, arrived late. The coach began screaming. McMahon started screaming back. Al McGuire was all over him so fast nobody knew what was happening. But Chones saw it clearly. The coach kneed McMahon in the groin. Then he hit McMahon in the face. He threw McMahon against the wall and was about to kick him in the groin. McMahon turned and started walking out of the dressing room, forever. It was one of the great goodbye scenes in sports. Then an arm came out and grabbed McMahon’s collar and McMahon came yanking back into the middle of the room.
“All right, now get dressed and let’s play,” Al McGuire said to McMahon.
There was another afternoon when the team was practicing and McGuire decided Gary Brell, 6-6, wasn’t in good enough shape. He had Brell running wind sprints from wall to wall in the gymnasium. Brell stopped in the middle of one of the sprints and stood in the middle of the gym, his long hair held out of his eyes by an Indian headband. “Why don’t you make some of the black guys do some of the running too?” Brell said.
McGuire said nothing. He loped out to the middle of the court and he spoke to Brell. He spoke to Brell by hitting him in the face. Brell began running again.
The Marquette varsity, on the floor before games, consisted of Brell with his head down in mourning for the war, a clenched black fist or two in the air and a coach who stood at attention while his mind was on the game. When somebody asked him about respect or style during the National Anthem, Al McGuire waved a hand. What the hell did he care about form in a matter as small as this? His team was here to play, not to pose. Patriotic Milwaukee, patriotic Roman Catholic Milwaukee, agreed. A weakling or somebody pompous would turn it into an incident. Al McGuire regarded the topic as a pain in the ass and he made everybody else think his way.
His black players came to him one day and said they were sorry, but the afternoon game with Detroit fell on Malcolm X day. At three o’clock, no matter what was happening in the game, they were going to stop playing and stand in silence for Malcolm X.
“You don’t have to stop playing, I’ll call a time out,” Al said. “Don’t worry about it. Now let’s get on with getting ready to win the game.”
When the time out was called, and the Marquette blacks stood in silence, fists raised, the Detroit coach, Jim Harding, nearly exploded. Which was understandable and even allowable. All coaches in all sports are not very smart, nor should they be expected to be very smart. They are in a business of games. Al McGuire is in another year, another century, from coaches of sports.
“Raise your fist, raise your ass, what do I care? Win the game, that’s the only thing that goes into the book.”
In his sophomore year, Chones was slow in early practices. He was not in the shape he had to be in, but he was blaming it on the floor, the heat, a cold, anything around him. The only ones tall enough to guard him in practice happened to be white players. Chones, irritated, pushed them around. In the middle of the practice Al McGuire walked onto the floor.
“Goddamn, why don’t you swing for once at a black guy? Are you afraid one of them’ll pick up something and break your head?”
Chones thought about that after practice. He never had heard a white man talk like that to him before. Completely uninhibited. As the months wore on, he began to see that his coach was the fairest white man he ever had heard of.
He also began to learn about a thing known as an Al McGuire promise. “You will make big money,” Al McGuire told him.
And in Chones’ sophomore year, Marquette came into New York to play Fordham and before the game, Al McGuire walked the streets.
“How’s the boy doing?” he was asked. His son Allie was in the starting lineup.
“Fine, it’s probably better for him that he would have gone someplace else, but at the same time it was better for me that he’s here with me. He isn’t the problem right now. I got to do something with Chones.”
“What?”
“Well, the kid got nothing. The mother’s working, he’s got nothing. It would be a shame if the two leagues merge and you have no competitive bidding for him. Cost him a fortune, if that happens.”
“What can he do, he’s only a sophomore?”
“Supposing he doesn’t play?” Al said.
Chones was inside Madison Square Garden, a nervous sophomore waiting to play his first game in New York.
And his coach walked in off the street and on the way to the dressing room he bumped into a sportswriter.
“I don’t know if I’m going to be able to keep Chones,” Al said. “They’re after him already. He’s the best big man in the country. I can’t stop him from doing what he has to do, either. I’ve looked in my refrigerator and I’ve looked in his.”
“How imminent is this?” the sportswriter asked.
“The professional teams are crawling all over him,” Al said.
At the end of the season, Jim Chones picked up the Milwaukee paper one day and he read an interview with Al McGuire. McGuire was quoted as saying, “I hope I can hang onto Chones for one more season.” The words jumped out of the page at Chones. He went to see McGuire, but he couldn’t find him. The season was over. Al McGuire has his own way of life. Nobody can find him unless he wants them to.
“I was looking all over for you,” Chones said later.
“Maybe I didn’t want to see you,” McGuire said.
Throughout Chones’ junior year, the practices were torture for Marquette. They had lost one game in ’70–’71, and that by a point. They were perhaps the finest defensive team college ball had seen in decades. Through drill after drill, Chones worked on his pick and roll. The big man comes out and picks for a backcourt man and in the melee he hopes to wind up with the wrong man guarding him, at which point he immediately rolls to the basket. Or if his man does try to stay with him, the big man doing the picking hopes to wind up with the inside and, again, he rolls to the basket. It is the basic play of modern professional basketball. It also was the basic play for Al McGuire’s big men.
In February, 1972, undefeated Marquette played Jacksonville. Marquet
te won by eight. Jim Chones scored 24, had 17 rebounds and blocked six shots. The next night, Chones was in his dormitory when he received a phone call from Gene Smith, a lawyer in Milwaukee. Gene Smith is Al McGuire’s lawyer.
“Jim, I don’t know what’s going on,” Smith said, “but I have some men here. They got my telephone number from Al. The men are from the Long Island Nets. They want to pay you, I don’t know what it is, something like $2 million. You better come down here right away.”
Chones went to the lawyer’s office. Al McGuire was not there. Roy Boe of the Long Island Nets was there. Yes, he wanted to sign Chones to a three-year contract. No, he wasn’t going to pay $2 million. That’s way out of line. He would pay Jim Chones $1,800,000.
Chones called Al McGuire on the phone. It was midnight.
The phone was picked up on the other end.
“Uh.”
“Coach?”
“Who the hell is this?”
“Jim Chones.”
“Oh, yeah. Jimmy. I’m asleep. What’s up?”
“Well these men are here from the pro team and they are offering me one point eight million dollars or something like that and I just wanted to. . . .”
“Well, good, Jimmy. I’ll see you tomorrow. I’m going to sleep.”
Marquette was undefeated, the tournaments were ahead, the coach was in line to be what the sports pages call “a basketball immortal.”
When Chones hung up the phone, Gene Smith, the lawyer, shrugged. He knew what to do now. He took out his pen and handed it to Chones.
There was, of course, no flim-flam. It was announced the next day Jim Chones had become a professional and he could not compete for Marquette anymore. The team without Chones immediately lost a couple of games and the season quickly came to an end.
Al McGuire shook hands with Chones, and Chones left Marquette. “He has his diploma,” Al McGuire said. “A big diploma.”
In the McGuire family, there are three brothers. There is Al, successor to Adolph Rupp, Henry Iba, Phog Allen. There is Dick, probably one of the best backcourt men the game has ever known. He was the Knick coach and now he is the chief scout. And there is the oldest brother, John, who is famous for having received the largest and undoubtedly most needed Western Union money order in the history of Hialeah race track.
I saw Chones recently. He was at Great Neck, on Long Island, after a Nets practice. He pulled up in a Cadillac car, and his sisters are in college and his mother is in a new house and she is not out making salads anymore. “She can’t just stay home, she’s so used to working,” Jim was saying. “She’s got to get a job. But a job doing something. Teacher’s assistant, something like that. Not makin’ any salads anymore. She can be useful.”
“What money can do,” he was told.
“But it’s like he always told me,” Chones said. “Coach McGuire always said to me, ‘Jim, I want to take care of my family and live my own life. That’s all that’s important. I don’t give a damn about anything else. I’m a happy man because I live my own life. I’m not dependent on somebody liking me or not. Now that’s how I want you to be. Any hard work you do for yourself. You don’t do it for me. And when you take care of yourself, you live your own life.’ ”
He got up to go. There was a team meeting upstairs.
“Everything he ever said to me came true,” Chones said. “Everything. What else can I tell you?”
I said nothing, because what he was saying was an old story to me. I know the guy a long time.
Tom Meschery
Descendants of czarist nobility who counted Leo Tolstoy as a cousin, the family of Tom Meschery (b. 1938) fled east after the Bolshevik Revolution, through Siberia to Harbin, China, where Tom was born. His father soon immigrated to the U.S., expecting the rest of the family to follow him. But with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, Tom, his sister, and their mother were detained and ultimately interned at a camp near Tokyo. Missionaries there taught Tom English, which served him well after the family was finally reunited in San Francisco six years later. During ten seasons in the NBA, for the Warriors in both Philadelphia and San Francisco and then the Seattle SuperSonics, he had a knack for starting fights and once led the league in fouls. But off the court he flashed elbow patches on his sportcoats and loved to read and write. Between the Beat poets of his American hometown and Russian reverence for the genre, he came naturally to poetry, and after he agreed to coach the Carolina Cougars for the 1971–72 season, a New York publisher signed him up to keep a diary. In this excerpt from a tumultuous December, he captures the chaos of the old American Basketball Association. Big-money contracts for veteran Joe Caldwell and rookie Jim McDaniels mess with team chemistry, and owner Tedd Munchak fumes that he’s not getting more victories on the dollar. Meschery can’t understand why his players won’t leave as much on the floor as he once had. Meanwhile, general manager Carl Scheer scrambles to mediate between owner and coach. Meschery eventually paves an off-ramp for himself, to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, from which he will go on to study with former U.S. poet laureate Mark Strand (who makes a brief cameo here), teach high-school English for two decades, and publish four volumes of poetry.
from
Caught in the Pivot
December 2
WHAT A wonderful feeling to be in Manhattan. We flew in early to play the Nets and it gave me a chance to grab a cab into town. New York City must have known I was depressed. It garlanded itself in its best late autumn fashions. The streets were mobbed with people of all kinds. Very different from the suburban atmosphere of Greensboro. Terrific psychological uplift.
Mark Strand called and wants to come to the game. I’ve just finished Darker, his new book of poetry. It was great to see him. He brought back memories of Seattle and my dreams of becoming a poet. Poetry obsesses me as much as basketball. That might be one of my problems as a coach; I don’t want to give of my free time to thinking only basketball. I don’t see enough of my family as it is and so far I’ve been unable to write a decent line of poetry.
December 3
New York beat us. The win for the Nets moved them into fourth and kept us solidly in last place. I’m getting a crick in my neck looking up from our basement spot. The team played uninspired ball. I feel like an idiot trying to explain the importance of being high for each game.
After the game I went to the bar at the Hempstead Motor Hotel where we were staying. I wanted to be alone but found half the team there. With the season going bad you would think they would find a more secluded spot to screw around. I didn’t mind the drinks but I saw some “stadium lizards” hanging around. Jesus! We had a game the next night. “Grown men,” I kept repeating to myself, “Grown men.”
December 4
Lost again to Indiana. By the half we had been out-rebounded, 44 to 18. Incredible! I can’t understand lack of hustle. I can’t comprehend lack of board work and unaggressive defense. At half time I began slowly building up to the fury I felt in my stomach. There was no way to tell them how much their performance sickened me. “No guts,” I yelled. “No pride.” I repeated it over and over. My voice was becoming shrill. The players sat there taking it all with their heads down. There was no escape for them in that tiny dressing room.
The blindness that I have felt so often when I become enraged was beginning to cloud my eyes. I suddenly realized that soon I would become irrational. I stopped and turned my back. I took a deep breath. I grabbed a piece of chalk and began to scribble diagrams on the blackboard. I didn’t care if the players were even watching. Our trainer came in to tell us there were only three minutes until the start of the second half. I motioned to the team to head out to the floor. Maybe the yelling did some good because we made a reasonable comeback in the second half. But the lead we gave Indiana was too great to overcome.
On the way home from Indiana my assistant coach, Jerry Steele, confided that he could barely sleep. Even though the pressure is off him, he takes everything personally. He told me that while he was waiting f
or the Cougars to decide whether he was to be the coach for this year, nine weeks, he slept about ten hours per week. From then on it was downhill. Finally, after he had been promised the coaching job, he was told that he could not trade Verga. It was all he could take. Jerry told me his nerves were shot from that day on. The Cougars were very inconsiderate of Jerry in handling the coaching job decision. I won’t let them do the same thing to me.
December 6
I hardly slept all night myself, thinking about how to handle this team’s future. I had promised them in Memphis after our first four games that I would be a prick if they wanted me to be. Idle threats hold no value. So today I fined every player $100 except George Stone and Wayne Hightower, who didn’t play against Indiana, and placed a 12:45 curfew before a game. I guess I’m as susceptible as all coaches for thinking the worst of his players when he sees them in a bar the night before a game and later the game turns out badly. Now all things are different. I will never be able to capture the elusive dream of being both a coach and a fellow comrade. I am bringing myself closer and closer to the end of my coaching career. If all I’m able to do is sustain the belief of coaches and players being separate and the idea of a coach as a dictator, then I don’t want the job. My feelings for the players run too deep.
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