February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Among younger generations of fans, McGuire’s most notable legacy may very well be the role he played in the shadows of two legends of the coaching profession, namely his brother Al and Red Holzman, both now deceased. The casual observer may be surprised to learn of McGuire’s continuing contribution to the New York Knickerbockers, more than 50 years after he first donned their uniform.
Officially titled Senior Basketball Advisor, McGuire still logs thousands of miles on the road scouting college talent, a task that took on added weight after recent maneuvers by Isiah Thomas, the Knicks president of basketball operation, resulted in the team’s acquisition of two first-round draft picks.
The Dick McGuire story began in 1926 on 166th Street in the Bronx, where his parents (he from Ireland, she from England) ran a bar and grill. About 12 years later, the family moved to Beach 108th Street on the Rockaway peninsula, where they opened a similar establishment that catered to the summer crowd and was boarded up for the winter.
Basketball? As an entering freshman at La Salle Academy in Manhattan, McGuire had yet to become acquainted with the sport as anything more than a spectator. But a series of fortuitous events conspired to lead McGuire toward his destiny.
The first one was the city’s construction of a basketball court alongside the beach, a hallmark of the early Robert Moses era. The opportunity to hone a craft that involved bouncing a large rubber ball was too great to pass up and pretty soon he was suiting up for La Salle indoors during that part of the year when his parents’ taps lay dormant.
The second event was his brother John’s assignment at St. John’s University, then in Brooklyn. Actually, this older brother to Dick and the loquacious Al didn’t suit up in shorts, sneakers and a tank top, but rather a cassock and chasuble. Fr. John McGuire was able to procure a scholarship for his younger brother and, for that reason, the Redmen had themselves a playmaker.
As a freshman, McGuire helped lead St. John’s to the 1944 NIT title, a crown that at the time carried as much, if not more, prestige than the NCAA tournament. That year, he won the Haggerty Award as the top collegiate player in New York City. The next year found McGuire leading his team to the NCAA finals, but this time he was wearing the green silks of Dartmouth, where he transferred when wartime commitments landed him in New England.
The cessation of hostilities allowed McGuire to return to St. John’s, where he was joined by Al and, eventually, another McGuire, although unrelated. Frank McGuire took over the reins from Joe Lapchick in 1947, a time when the college game was still king in New York, before the gambling scandal that tilted the sport off its axis. Both Lapchick and Frank McGuire preached a kind of basketball that played to Dick McGuire’s strengths.
“Both Joe and Frank loved to run with the ball,” McGuire said. “Joe was just a great man, a lot of fun to play for.”
And so it went through the mid-1950s, Lapchick having assumed the helm of the Knicks in 1947.
McGuire instantly reprised his St. John’s role on the professional level, leading the NBA in assists with 386, a 5.7-per-game average, his rookie season, 1949, with the Knicks. That would be the only time his name stood atop the heap in that statistical category; a young slickster out of Holy Cross via the streets of Gotham named Bob Cousy would dominate in that department for most of the next two decades.
Still, McGuire continued to steer the Knicks’ offense, as they made the NBA finals three years running (1951-53), although the towering presence of George Mikan was too great an obstacle to surmount. This was an era when St. Louis and Minneapolis represented the westernmost outposts of the NBA, with cities like Fort Wayne, Rochester and Syracuse among the whistlestops. While the circuit may seem less glamorous than the league’s current incarnation, McGuire remembers it fondly.
“It was better than working,” McGuire said. “We traveled by train most of the time, on sleepers. During the summer, I’d go down to the beach and swim, help the folks run the bar.”
His Knicks days came to an end in 1957, when he was traded to the Detroit Pistons in a deal that he can’t make sense of to this day. Two years later, he became the team’s player-coach. He retired as an active player at the end of the 1959-60 season.
In four seasons of coaching the Pistons, McGuire led them to the playoffs each year, although they never finished above .500. In fact, this hapless franchise had only six winning seasons between their inception as the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons in 1948 until 1983-84, when Chuck Daly became coach. Other luminaries such as a pre-Knicks Dave DeBusschere (yes, as a player-coach), Bill van Breda Kolff, Herb Brown and Dick Vitale were brought to their knees trying to wring wins out of the talent assembled there.
McGuire landed on his feet, however, and was hired to coach the Knicks in 1965, taking over for Harry Gallatin. The nucleus of the team that would win the franchise’s first championship in 1970 was present, although they hadn’t yet jelled. Two days after Christmas in 1967, McGuire and Holzman (then a scout) traded jobs. At this time, Walt Frazier was still a raw rookie, Bill Bradley had just joined the team after doing postgraduate work at Oxford, and DeBusschere had yet to be acquired. But McGuire recognizes that his motivational talents weren’t sufficient.
“I never really liked coaching,” McGuire said. “I just can’t get mad at people.”
He then assumed the responsibility of assessing college talent, a job that he still labors at.
“I’m out at least three days a week, nine, ten months of the year,” McGuire said. “It doesn’t really bother me, although it can get tiring. Airport security, although it’s necessary, has made it a lot harder.”
Despite decades of identifying potential talent, McGuire isn’t so full of himself as to believe that he has a special insight, a crystal ball, so to speak, as to who will pan out and who won’t.
“There are no geniuses,” McGuire said of he and his scouting brethren. “It’s all a lot of luck. There’s no way to get into [the players’] heads.”
Especially now with the high school ranks directly feeding the NBA, which “makes it really tough,” according to McGuire. So how does he distinguish among a crop of NBA wannabes?
“Talent,” McGuire said. “And I’m a big man for quickness. In most cases, we go for the best player.”
As for comparing today’s crop of players with those of his youth, McGuire draws a clear distinction.
“The biggest thing is [today’s players] are so much more athletic,” McGuire said. “But they’re not as well coached. There’s not a real good feel for the game.”
Although Dick McGuire garnered the lion’s share of plaudits during their time as players, Al McGuire became something of a legend by being very good at “getting mad at people” at Marquette University. Al became so good that it was he who found himself being inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 1992, at which time he expressed his disappointment that his brother Dick’s accomplishments had been overlooked. That oversight was rectified the next year, when Dick joined Al in Springfield.
“He was a great kid,” McGuire said of his younger brother, who died in January 2001 of leukemia. “We were complete opposites. One thing great about him is that he was not embarrassed to embellish a story to make it better. He was a very good person.”
This spring, the countless miles that Dick McGuire has traveled may render the talent that returns the Knicks to the glory they enjoyed three decades ago. And in a very practical sense, Dick McGuire may not only be earning another assist for the Knicks, but he may be scoring, big time.