This date in 1972- Al McGuire/Gamecocks

[Viennacock]

The most vicious and chaotic brawl in Marquette history erupted on today’s date in 1972, when Al's 2nd ranked Warriors traveled to Columbia, South Carolina to defeat future Milwaukee Buck Brian Winters and Coach Frank McGuire's 4th ranked South Carolina Gamecocks, 72-71, in an epic, nationally televised contest that was the subject of a feature article by Curry Kirkpatrick in the following week's Sports Illustrated.

“It is against my better judgment to go play in Columbia, South Carolina,” Al had admitted lightheartedly in the days leading up to the game.

Al traveled to Charlotte, North Carolina ahead of his team to visit old friends from his coaching days at Belmont Abbey College, about 15 minutes west of Charlotte.

“I left Milwaukee this morning," Al had said on the Wednesday before the Sunday game, "and my assistant asked me where I was going. This is a big game. Kids get ready for big games. It's the easy ones you have to worry about."

“It was a big deal for us,” agrees John Cary, then Marquette’s student manager. “It wasn’t like it is now. There just weren’t games of that magnitude very often, so it was a very big deal. I think that might have been the game where we introduced new uniforms— much to the surprise of the athletic department.”

Indeed. As noted by sportswriter David Caraviello of The Post and Courier, “They were an Al McGuire creation, designed to shine under television lights.”

“I had never been in the Coliseum with such suspense and tension and excitement,” recalled Kirkpatrick decades later. “It was a really big deal in those days. In terms of star power and recognition, this was a huge event, to see these two coaches go against each other with all these star players. In terms of color and star power and rankings and talent and players that people knew about, even in that day when there wasn’t much college basketball on TV—they were huge.”

Frank McGuire (no relation), who had won a National Championship with North Carolina in 1957, was Al's mentor and friend, and had actually begun his college coaching career at St. John's in 1947, when Al was a freshman and his brother Dick a junior.

In fact, it was Frank McGuire who, while still coaching at North Carolina, had recommended Al to the Benedictine monks of Belmont Abbey, which was less than 150 minutes southwest of Frank McGuire at Chapel Hill.

Frank McGuire also eventually recommended Al to the Jesuit priests at Marquette after he turned down the Warrior job to coach the Gamecocks in 1964.

“After seven years (at Belmont Abbey) I put in a word for him at Marquette,” said Frank McGuire, “and he got that job, then he bawled me out for leaving him at Belmont Abbey all those years.”

“I thought he would leave me there forever to die in a monastery," Al once laughed.

“But I owe a lot to Frank,” said Al before their matchup. “I respect him very much but this is no love affair. I’ll just have to step away from him for a couple hours on Sunday afternoon.”

“The student-against-teacher situation tears your gut out," continued Al. “I'd give anything not to play this game. But, really, I consider it a favor to me to do a favor for Frank. Maybe it's the first time I ever get to pay him back for all he's done. Loyalty-- that's what he always taught us.... This man-- I have to show respect. I don't know if I can wash out what this man means to me for the time it takes to win a game."

Despite the showing of friendship and respect between Al and his old coach, Jim Chones, Al’s All-American center, wasn't fooled.

“For starters, the two coaches, Al and Frank McGuire, didn't like each other very much," recalls Chones. “You know what it's like when two Irish guys don't like each other, they don't hold back."

In the second half, South Carolina sophomore Ed Peterson came off the bench to score 14 points and help engineer a late Gamecock run from 12 down to go up by one with 2:35 left.

“My assistant coach scouted them and must have got mixed up about Peterson," Al muttered later. “I said, 'Who is the guy?' and he makes five baskets in a row."

With just over 1:00 left in the game, senior Allie McGuire hit two clutch free throws and the Warrior defense shut down the Gamecocks on two straight possessions to eke out the one-point win and improve Marquette's record to 9-0.

Chones was the game's top scorer with 17 points while junior Marcus Washington chipped in with 16 and fellow junior Larry “The Hawk” McNeill rounded out the Warriors’ balanced scoring attack with 15.

But the scoring and the relationship between Al and Frank McGuire were only part of the story.

Kirkpatrick described the game in his Sports Illustrated piece as "a savage and bloody conflict" in which "several brawls had broken out" with "a good three minutes of heavy punching on both sides."

Kirkpatrick added that "(Bob) Lackey elbowed (Tom) Riker in the neck," "Riker flashed a left cross on Lackey's side-whiskers," Chones "opened a nasty cut under (Danny) Traylor's eye," and "Larry McNeill grabbed a chair."

According to the Milwaukee Sentinel’s Bob Wolf, even “little Marcus Washington got into three secondary fights and was floored each time.”

“Lackey hit me in the back of the head when the whistle blew-- at least he tried to, and that's good enough," said Riker after the game. “You're bound to get shoved and roughed up during the game, but after the whistle it's bush league so I tagged him."

“I was looking the other way and Riker just hit me,” explained Lackey, who needed two stitches to close his wound. “There was no reason for it. He just hit me.... The dude sucker-punched me."

Lackey protested that he had been unfairly ejected along with Riker and rationalized his involvement in the ongoing brawl by remarking after the game, "If I'm leavin', I want some action."

“Riker punched Lackey,” confirmed Winters while with the Bucks years later, “and Lackey pushed back, and they rolled on the floor. It got to be a real melee, a real bad scene all around.”

“That’s when I got scared,” admits Kirkpatrick. “I was like, ‘Get me out of here.’ Three minutes doesn’t seem very long, but it seemed like forever. It was almost like a hockey brawl, because the referees didn’t come in. The referees were standing aside, like they do in hockey fights, letting them fight. It was ridiculous.”

As noted by Caraviello in The Post and Courier, “neither program backed down, the product of coaches who instilled a hardscrabble ethos into everyone who played for them.”

But while Frank McGuire ran into the middle of the wild fray to help restore order, Al calmly remained on the bench, dismissively calling the wild fracas "a waltz."

“A bar-hall bouncer wouldn't take his coat off for this one," Al scoffed.

“That’s how he was,” laughs Cary of Al. “We never thought anything of it.”

“As for the game, we didn't get a call for probably three quarters of it," remembers Chones. “They also had a 6'11" left-hander who was just the enforcer in the ACC. I think his name was Richert (Riker) or something. The entire South Carolina team just beat up other teams. Dean Smith even petitioned the league to put an end to it. So they had a huge team. They were very skilled too. There were cheap shots flying during the game like the kind that we would only see on the playground. I will never forget it. Bob Lackey was on the free throw line and Richert (Riker) took the ball and threw it at Lackey after he made his first free throw. Immediately after that, Lackey looked at Al and Al didn't move. He was just sitting on the bench with his legs crossed. We all knew what that meant. Lackey picked the ball up and drilled Rickert in the face. All of a sudden, there were people all over the floor and the two teams were fighting. In the middle of the fight, Danny Traylor looks at me and was probably thinking, 'He looks pretty skinny, I'll go after him.' I actually got the guy pretty good. I popped him right on the chin actually. Soon after that, a security guard from the arena peeled me off of him. The guard opened his jacket and pulled out a gun on me and then I knew the fight was over. But we whipped the crap out of them. The fans kept calling us racial names because we were mostly black and they didn't have any black players. That was the times, you know?"

“Through all of this, Al was still sitting on the bench with his legs crossed," laughs Chones. “Al finally got up and took all of us off of the floor and into the locker room. They already had all of our things packed in our bags and instead of staying overnight, they told us we were getting out of South Carolina as soon as we could. It was incredible."

“Al claimed it wasn’t even a good barroom brawl, but it was something, believe me,” remembered Hank Raymonds years later. “Some players grabbed steel chairs and were ready to use them as weapons. I was right in the middle of it, too. They (the South Carolina band) finally stopped it by playing the national anthem.”

After Marquette’s team bus left the Carolina Coliseum under a police escort, an unimpressed Al simply said, "The fight really meant nothing, it's best to ignore it."

“I don’t ever remember him saying, ‘We’ve got to get South Carolina,’” says Cary. “I don’t remember him saying we’ve got to ‘get’ anybody. We just did it.”

 

[winloseortie]

We left church early that Sunday to get to the game.

 

[Viennacock]

We left church early that Sunday to get to the game.

I was only 5 at the time. Have no memory of this.

 

[Thunderstick]

Vivid, wonderful memories...was a junior at Carolina (when it was tough to get good b-ball tickets).

 

[Gradstudent]

Here is the SI Article

'YOU KNOW ME, AL.' 'RIGHT, FRANK, AND I HATE TO DO IT.'​

MARQUETTE, MILWAUKEE'S OTHER TEAM, WON, TOO—IN A ROYAL BATTLE OF THE MCGUIRE BOYS, AL AND FRANK

• CURRY KIRKPATRICK

It was a game made not so much in heaven as in an emerald corner of hell; the coaches mean and hungry, the combatants bred on asphalt playgrounds and nurtured in the slinky, scar-tissue ways of the sport. All of the Irish gags were trotted out. The game should be played behind barbed wire somewhere in the shadows of Ulster. Sean O'Casey would throw up the first ball. Everyone would wear green, and how was the closed-circuit crowd in Belfast taking it, anyway?

But when the jokes and psychology were over, after the deception and the guile, it was time for the McGuires of college basketball to get right down there into the pit and slug it out in that fashion familiar only to alley fighters.
Along the sidelines it was as Frank, the older and perhaps wiser of the McGuires, had said it would be: "The shanty Irish against the lace-curtain crowd." When Al heard that, he roared. "Lace!" he said. "We lived in the back of a bar where drunks interrupted dinner looking for the men's room."

Whatever the case, when Marquette met South Carolina high atop the national standings, it was more than just the personalities of the coaches dominating the scene. It was, instead, everything that makes the college game bristle—region against region, style against style, speed against power and, yes, black against white.


Moreover, it was a savage and bloody conflict that unbeaten Marquette won 72-71. And ultimately it was decided not on the rims or in the pit but outside, where Kevin Joyce, South Carolina's fine junior guard, had the worst 40 minutes of his life. It was, as Joyce knew, his game to win or lose when the Gamecocks got the ball with 11 seconds to go. But he fumbled it in the Marquette end, had to hurry his dribble downcourt and then missed a 25-footer wide to the left as time ran out. The shot, his 12th, would have won the game; it also would have been Joyce's first basket.
With Joyce silenced, but with sophomores Brian Winters and Ed Peterson scoring 11 baskets between them, the Gamecocks had come back from 12 points behind early in the second half. They had even gone ahead, 69-68 with 2:36 left, but Marquette's Jim Chones, who led all scorers with 17 points, got a quick basket. There were more points, but then Joyce missed his shot and there was nothing left.
Much earlier than this the game had grown extremely physical, until three minutes into the second half the muscling got out of hand. As Marquette's Bob Lackey and the Gamecocks' Tom Riker struggled for the ball, the guns went off. Lackey elbowed Riker in the neck; Riker flashed a left cross on Lackey's side-whiskers. Within moments several brawls had broken out—one featuring Chones against heavyweight Danny Traylor. "Let's stay out of this," Traylor said to Chones. "Can't do it," said Chones. "My man's in trouble." Then Chones opened a nasty cut under Traylor's eye.


Frank McGuire was in the middle of the floor, bodies whizzing past him, but Al McGuire remained on his bench with his reserve players. "A waltz," he was to say later. "A bar-hall bouncer wouldn't take his coat off for this one."
After a good three minutes of heavy punching on both sides, order was restored; immediately a hefty South Carolina state trooper charged the Marquette bench and went after Lackey. The Warriors' Larry McNeill grabbed a chair, but he and everybody else were finally restrained. Lackey and Riker were removed from the contest.

"The dude sucker-punched me," said Lackey. "Then they throw me out. If I'm leavin', I want some action."
"I'll take kicks, knees, elbows, every shot he's got," said Riker, "but not after the whistle blows. This guy's a cheap-shot artist. It was bush league."
Such pugilistic activity is not wholly unexpected when any McGuire steps on a basketball court. In fact, everything about this match between Al and Frank seemed to recall the past—all, that is, except the new uniforms Al broke out that featured wild stripes and a certain iridescent shade from which the color blue may never recover. Historians pointed out that it was not the first time the two men had brought their respective schools together. In the 1966 Milwaukee Classic, South Carolina defeated Marquette 63-61 in a game that contained many elements of the McGuire—pick either McGuire—style, a game that concluded on an offensive goaltending call that disallowed a tying Warrior basket.


Al still thinks Frank stole that one by earning two technical fouls early in the contest. These, he believes, persuaded the officials to look favorably on South Carolina toward the end. Another technical called on the Gamecock bench so frustrated the Marquette McGuire that finally he went to his knees and begged the officials to give him a T, too. "I say he won that game," says Al of Frank. "All I did was stand up," says Frank.
Since that time the coaches have ducked further encounters, assuming humanely that one should not beat up on one's friends. It was last April, after South Carolina had made its quick getaway from the Atlantic Coast Conference into the land of independents, that Frank McGuire felt maybe the two should meet again. He needed a basketball schedule fast and called on Al.

"The student-against-teacher situation tears your gut out," said Al last week. "I'd give anything not to play this game. But, really, I consider it a favor for me to do a favor for Frank. Maybe it's the first time ever I get to pay him back for all he's done. Loyalty—that's what he always taught us."
Al calls his relationship with Frank "distant close," but the careers of the two men have intertwined at so many points and in so many places along the way that in the minds of many basketball followers they must be either father-son, brother-brother or, at worst, distant cousins. They are unrelated.


They came together on the streets of the big city, at St. John's in 1947, Frank off a Greenwich Village block around the corner from Gene Tunney's house, Al from the beaches of Rockaway. It was Frank's first college coaching job and Al was a freshman player. When the youngest McGuire reached the varsity the following year, his brother Dick was already there, and the three McGuires combined to produce a strong team flavored by Dick's passing and Al's flair for lunacy. In the three years Al played for Frank, the Redmen went to three NITs, one NCAA and, contrary to belief, not one mental institution.

Frank McGuire's glory years were to come after he and Al parted ways. The year following Al's graduation, Frank coached St. John's to the NCAA finals, losing to Kansas in a game that Al listened to while on the road as a pro with the New York Knicks. Five years later Al was working in a sewer in Long Island City when the national finals came around again. This time Frank, then at North Carolina, defeated Kansas in triple overtime for the championship.

Within months Al was in North Carolina, too—at little Belmont Abbey College outside Charlotte where Frank had recommended him to the Benedictine monks. For the next few years, while Frank was rampaging through the ACC, Al withstood the perils of Belmont Abbey. "I thought he would leave me there forever to die in a monastery," Al said. But Frank bailed him out again, this time to Marquette, whose Jesuit fathers had offered him their coaching job.


So in 1964 Marquette got Al, the same year that South Carolina got Frank. Which is why it all came down to the flesh-and-blood confrontation last week in Columbia.
Both coaches were subdued about their feelings, but under the surface there was tension. Their players knew. "The feeling is there in practice," said Chones. "We know how much this means to them. I think all of us are out to get this one for a McGuire. But which one?"
Neither McGuire has ever lost any sleep over the X's and O's of the coaching business, so it was no surprise that Frank, for instance, was less concerned about the inside power and finesse of Marquette's Chones and Lackey than he was with his own team's attitude and their reaction to a long layoff.

 

[Gradstudent]

The Gamecocks had suffered their only defeat of the season in what they called a "sizzler," 77-76 to Villanova in the Quaker City tournament finals. It was their best game so far and they seemed to be rounding into form when a layoff of 10 days set in.
"The vacation and the mental thing are the hard parts," said Frank. "Nobody ever plays an easy game against Al McGuire. What an unpredictable fellow. He might run out there and start dribbling it himself."
As it happened, Al did not know what to expect either. "I'm not just blowing smoke rings at Frank," he said, "but he's got too much class to be a coach. Look at the clothes, those handmade shirts. I prefer not to get surly with him on Sunday, but I'm obnoxious and rotten on the road. I do it to get the crowd off my players and on me. But this man—I have to show respect. I don't know if I can wash out what this man means to me for the time it takes to win a game."


Strategically, the Warriors wanted to out-quick South Carolina underneath and press the Gamecocks into errors. "I think it will be sloppy in the beginning," said Al, "but I hope the refs let us play. McGuires like physical stuff.
"The baseline looks like a push," he went on. "We've got to get on Joyce. He's their head; you cut the head off, and the body dies."
In a phrase, that is what happened. South Carolina's massive Traylor played a wonderful first half, scoring 14 points to offset the Warriors underneath. But the Gamecocks were burned by Marquette's neat sophomore, Marcus Washington. He finished with 16 points and, with Sugar Frazier, hounded Joyce right down to the final shot.
Then Al McGuire walked to the center circle and raised his hands in victory. Frank met him in an embrace. "No hard feelings," said Frank. "It's like losing to a brother."
And again all was quiet in the emerald corner.

 

[Gradstudent]