Having Street Smarts Was Al Mcguire’s Golden Rule Unconventional Ex-Basketball Coach Made Sure Things Were Done His Way

Al McGuire lives by his own set of rules. Always has. Always will.

There was the speak-your-mind rule when he was a player that led him to climb on the trainer’s table in the New York Knicks dressing room one day and proclaim, “I own Cousy!”

This was a fairly outrageous thing to do considering that at the time Bob Cousy was an NBA All-Star and McGuire was a scrubeenie who had enjoyed one day of moderate success against the Celtics star. But he was just speaking his own mind.

There was the subtract-one-free-throw rule when he was a college coach. “I had to take care of my seniors for the pros,” he said. “I always knocked off one missed free throw from their stats. They vanished. It would fake out scouts, but what did I care about scouts?”

And now as a motivational speaker there is the five-minute rule. “I don’t work from notes,” he said. “Just give me five minutes of preparation, tell me what you want, and we go.”

McGuire, honored last week at the New York Athletic Club where coach Lute Olson accepted an award for Arizona’s national championship, also had scheduling rules.

Olson remembered coaching against McGuire just once, when Long Beach State traveled to Milwaukee to face Marquette. “Afterwards, I figured out how he managed games,” Olson said. “He’d bring warm-weather schools in there in January or February. All you’d want to do is get out and it didn’t much matter whether you won or not.”

Call that street smarts. McGuire has always had an abundance of that quality.

When he won his NCAA championship in 1977, he wept on the bench and then quit, going out on top as few people do.

“Everyone thought I was wedging, that I was looking for more money,” he said. “I was 46, 47. But my father taught me a long time ago if you carry a gun, shoot it. I don’t carry guns. I wasn’t wedging.”

McGuire misses only the big games. He doesn’t miss the practices and he doesn’t miss the memos. “In academia, they send memos,” he said. “A guy would be two doors away, maybe one floor away and he’d send a memo. Come and knock on my door. I’ll talk to you. Don’t send me a memo.”

Then there were the recruiting rules.

“I would recruit one kid a year,” he said. “You’ve only got one ball. If you put five guys out there who all need the ball, it’s a problem.

“In 13 years, I got 11 players. The only ones I missed were Jim McMillian, who went to Columbia and Brian Winters who went to South Carolina.

“My rule was I wouldn’t recruit a kid if he had grass in front of his house. That’s not my world. My world was a cracked sidewalk.”

So McGuire mined the playgrounds of the inner cities, unafraid of bad neighborhoods like Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant. That was how he got his first major player at Marquette, George Thompson.

“He said I was the only coach who came to see him in Bed-Stuy,” McGuire said. “The others all wanted to meet him outside.”

Some people thought a basketball junkie like McGuire couldn’t walk away. So every so often, they would come after him, convinced they could lure him back to the bench.

Once, when Madison Square Garden was looking for a new man, Sonny Werblin called McGuire, figuring the appeal would be huge for a guy who grew up in Queens but was now living in Milwaukee.

“He said, ‘We want you to come to New York,”’ McGuire said. “I said, ‘Mr. Werblin, I don’t like the traffic.”’

Werblin paused and then outlined the offer more completely.

“He said, ‘We’ll give you an apartment in New York and a place on Fire Island,”’ McGuire said. “I said, ‘Mr. Werblin, I don’t like the traffic.”’

Werblin thought about that for a few moments and decided there was nothing he could do about the traffic. So McGuire stayed in Milwaukee.

Then, during one of the University of Kentucky’s periodic coach searches, the school called McGuire.

“I told them I had no interest and I hung up,” he said. “Ten minutes later, the phone rings again. It’s them again. They said ‘We’re talking about the University of Kentucky.’ I hung up again.”

No wedging. Another rule.