Do you remember Al McGuire's last game as a coach? It's not Marquette's 1977 title game
You couldn't script a better ending.
Al McGuire won an elusive NCAA championship in his final game as Marquette men's basketball coach in 1977, with tears starting to fall down his face even before the buzzer sounded on the then-Warriors' 67-59 victory over North Carolina at The Omni in Atlanta.
In December 1976, the 48-year-old McGuire announced that he would step down after the season to become vice chairman at Medalist Industries. It was time to put away childish things like basketball and get a real job.
"All honeymoons must come to an end," McGuire said in a press conference at the Wisconsin Club. "And we've had an extended honeymoon."
It was assumed that McGuire would ride off into the boardroom, leaving behind a trail of seashells and balloons, to filch a phrase from McGuire's lexicon.
But McGuire wouldn't be done with basketball. In fact, he wasn't even finished as a coach.
He would appear on the sideline two more times in all-star games involving former MU players. He lost both exhibitions, though the meaningless results aren't factored into his 404-143 coaching record that includes seven seasons with Belmont Abbey and 13 at MU.
One of them, the 1977 Pizza Hut Basketball Classic in Las Vegas, was a unique-but-long-forgotten event in McGuire's history in which the consummate showman set the stage for the next act of his hoops career.
Al McGuire was 'mic'd up' before that became a thing
The only Pizza Hut Basketball Classic on YouTube is the 1979 game that presaged Larry Bird's greatness as a NBA player.
Archivists at CBS Sports were asked if they could find a master copy of the 1977 game in a dusty corner, but the search came up empty. A coordinating producer for the 1979 game started at CBS the year before and didn't know who would have worked in 1977.
That's a shame because some behind-the-scenes genius came up with the idea to have live microphones hover over McGuire as he led the East all-star team at the Las Vegas Convention Center. This was way before technology made it easy for broadcasts to feature "mic'd up" coaches and players.
The footage would be like a Holy Grail for one of the sport's deities.
McGuire had been followed by a film crew before. In 1972, Kartemquin Films – which later was responsible for MU-adjacent documentary "Hoop Dreams" – produced a fascinating portrait of McGuire as he coached games against DePaul at the Milwaukee Arena and at Loyola (Chicago). With McGuire yelling at his players and cajoling the referees, viewers really get a sense of McGuire's feel for the game and why he is considered one of the greatest bench coaches of all time.
So it would have been a special gift to watch a totally unscripted McGuire in the 1977 Pizza Hut Basketball Classic. The game ended well after midnight in Milwaukee, and longtime Milwaukee Journal sportswriter Bob Wolf stayed up late to watch it. He provided the only historical record of McGuire's performance.
The game was on April 5, exactly one week after MU won the national championship.
With McGuire wired for sound, Wolf wrote that "viewers got a treat that had always been confined to those within earshot."
The microphones captured McGuire in a timeout in the closing seconds with his team trailing by two points.
From Wolf: "Finally, when his charges stared at him as though pleading for one last piece of advice, he said 'We've got six-and-a-half seconds left (who knows where he found the extra half-second?). We'll use a double post and work for an inside shot. Now go out and tie the score.' "
The East all-star team didn't follow McGuire's plan and suffered a 97-95 loss.
"McGuire's last order as a college basketball coach went unheeded, but who really cared?" Wolf wrote. "It was a farewell befitting one of the few genuine entertainers in sports - the real McGuire at his show business best."
Bo Ellis, Jeff Jonas and Marques Johnson played in 1977 Pizza Hut Basketball Classic
Former MU star Bo Ellis doesn't remember many details from the game. Marques Johnson, now a Milwaukee Bucks broadcaster but back then a UCLA standout, only recalls winning the event's slam-dunk competition and proudly shares a current photo of him posing with the oversized trophy.
Jeff Jonas, a former Marquette University High School player who became a star guard for Utah, has a little clearer mental picture of the game, probably because he sank the winning free throws and then got some kind words from McGuire.
Jonas played on the West team coached by UCLA's Gene Bartow. Eddie Owens from UNLV was voted most outstanding player after scoring 26 points.
"(Michigan star) Rickey Green played on the other team, I think I had a couple steals on him," Jonas said.
It's understandable that Ellis' memory is hazy. He had just helped MU win the national title, then went on a whirlwind tour of all-star games.
"That was the measuring stick for the NBA and how high you could go in the draft, those type of games," said Ellis, who was picked No. 17 that June. "It started off with the East-West All-Star Game that was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, first. That might have been the NABC if I’m not mistaken.
"We were all together on them. So we all traveled together and after we were in Vegas we went right out to Hawaii for the Aloha Classic. That set longtime friendships with all those different players. We all pretty much knew each other anyway from the college seasons from over the years and stuff."
The Pizza Hut Basketball Classic was popular in the 1970s because players were voted into it by fans.
“Pizza Hut in those days had kind of like the dangling chad ballot things that you filled out," Jonas said. "It was a popular vote if you got picked. I got picked. I think was third or fourth in votes for the West. Kent Benson was No. 1 (overall), I think Bo was No. 3, if I remember correctly.
“It was a big deal. Obviously, we went to Vegas and that was a big deal. It was pretty cool.”
And, of course, Jonas got to be on national television.
"It was different in those days, you didn’t have every game on TV," he said. "Especially playing in Utah, most people in the country hadn’t seen somebody from Utah play."
Jeff Jonas shared memorable moment with Al McGuire
Jonas didn't need a "mic'd up" broadcast to know McGuire's eccentric personality.
"I went to Marquette High and Allie Jr. went there before me, but he was still a Marquette High guy," Jonas said. "He would come around and play while I was still around playing. Robbie, Al’s son, played on my second state championship team."
McGuire recruited Jonas in a memorable fashion.
"Al had called me in, as only Al could do, after we went undefeated my junior year," Jonas said. "I was all-state and he called me in and said, ‘Double J, I want you to see my clown pictures.’
"So I went in to his office and he took me around and showed me all the clown pictures he had in his office. We sat down for about two minutes and he said, ‘Listen, I want you to just go enjoy your season for your senior year. No matter what happens, you can blow out both your knees, you’ve still got a scholarship to Marquette. Go enjoy your season and do great things. At the end of the season, we’ll talk and decide if this is the best place for you, but you’ve got a scholarship.’ "
As his college decision neared, Jonas was wavering between Utah, Creighton, Kansas State, Wisconsin and MU.
"I came in and Al said ‘You know, I’m not dying to have you, but I’d love to have you. Make whatever you think is the best decision for you.’ " Jonas said. "I ended up going to Utah."
After the Pizza Hut Basketball Classic, Jonas and McGuire shared a moment that Jonas wistfully recalls almost 50 years later.
"I shook his hand and I think I was second in voting for player of the game, I had a good game," Jonas said. "He said ‘Double J, he always called me Double J, I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have let you get away.
"He did an interview with the local newspaper after the game, too, from Salt Lake (City) and he said ‘Yup, he’s like the big fish that got away. I should have never let him go.’ He was really kind.
“It really was unbelievable. One, I knew Al had never seen me play. He wasn’t the kind of guy to go see high-school players. Hank Raymonds would and (fellow MU assistant) Rick (Majerus) would and let him know who he should get and Al would go try to get him. I knew Al had never seen me play. So it meant a lot to me to play in front of him and play well and have him say something like that.”
Al McGuire became a beloved TV broadcaster with Dick Enberg and Billy Packer
The TV cameras presumably didn't pick up that exchange between Jonas and McGuire.
But the broadcast made clear that McGuire's charisma could easily translate from the sideline to the airwaves. In 1978, NBC paired McGuire with Billy Packer and Dick Enberg to form one of the most beloved and influential broadcasting crews in basketball history.
“We really did look at basketball in different ways,” Packer said in 2017. “People actually thought we didn’t like each other. But they thought it was neat to watch a game with us. Then people thought we prearranged the arguments. It was spontaneous.
“Al was the most street-smart person I ever met in my life. Yet, from a sophistication standpoint, he was something else. The more you got to know him, the more brilliant he became in terms of things he would say.”
McGuire became a great broadcaster even though he was notoriously bad with names.
Wolf's account for the Milwaukee Journal of the 1977 Pizza Hut Basketball Classic noted that McGuire had trouble remembering Walter Davis, despite Davis being a star on the North Carolina team MU had just beaten for the national title.
"When McGuire didn't like something that Davis did," Wolf wrote, "he yelled 'Come on, 41, get moving.' Later he turned to another player and said, 'Hey, you. Go in for 41.' "
When he was coaching at MU, McGuire couldn't even name his own players, including stars like Ellis and Butch Lee.
"He called me 'Butch' and would call Butch ‘Bo’ because both started with ‘B,' " Ellis said. "That’s a true story, that used to happen a lot.
"If somebody’s name was difficult to remember, he’d give you a nickname. Bernard (Toone, a player McGuire had a contentious relationship with), he’d always call ‘Sunshine.’ He never called him Bernard, he called him ‘Sunshine’ because Bernard was always smiling and happy. That was something that was Coach’s calling card for many years."
When Ellis became an assistant coach at MU in 1988 after his pro career, he would get calls from McGuire fishing for information.
"I do remember one day Coach came into the office at the old 1212 Building, this was way before the Al McGuire Center," Ellis said. "And he came in and he was prepping for his broadcast and he was asking for some things from my scouting report.
"I filled him in on everything that I had in the scout and he said, ‘That’s good, Bo, I just want to let you know that I am going to use everything you told me on my broadcast.’ ”
McGuire made one more return to sideline as a coach in 1978 at the NABC All-Star Game at Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis in which his former star Lee scored 29 points in an MVP performance against McGuire's team.
"I just have a gray, limbo feeling," McGuire told Milwaukee Sentinel reporter Dale Hofmann. "I would never go back to coaching."
He didn't need to. McGuire had already shown he was ready for a second act. He was a broadcaster until 2000, and died the next year of a blood disorder.
Contact Ben Steele at (414) 224-2676 or bmsteele@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @BenSteeleMJS or Instagram at @bensteele_mjs
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Al McGuire coached in Pizza Hut Basketball Classic after NCAA title
