When Al McGuire proved a point — with a beach ball
For Al McGuire, life wasn’t all seashells and balloons. At least once, a beach ball was involved.
At the start of 1968, McGuire was in his fourth season as coach of Marquette University’s basketball team, the Warriors. The season before, the team made it to the finals of the National Invitation Tournament, losing to Southern Illinois, 71-56.
Expectations were higher for 1967’68.
“… Our days of sneaking up on people are over,” McGuire told the Milwaukee Sentinel’s Mike Christopoulos in a preseason preview published Oct. 14, 1967. “The year’s going to break down to one thing — pride. We’ve got to accept the challenge and prove ourselves. What we did last season doesn’t count.”
The Warriors got off to a pretty good start. By the time they beat DePaul at the Milwaukee Arena, 71-50, on Jan. 3, 1968, the team had a 9-2 record. DePaul was no slouch; coached by Ray Meyer, the team had beaten Marquette eight of their previous nine encounters.
When the two teams faced off a month later, on DePaul’s home court in Chicago on Feb. 3, 1968, McGuire, known for his distinctive vocabulary (”seashells and balloons” was Alspeak for success and happiness), was expecting more of a dogfight. Both schools were battling for a berth in that year’s NCAA tournament.
“They’ll be coming at us all night … and it will be a wearing game on both clubs,” McGuire told The Milwaukee Journal’s Terry Bledsoe, in a story published Feb. 2.
The battle started soon after the opening tip-off. Marquette’s 6-foot-3inch center, Pat Smith, missed a short shot, then went after the ball.
“What happened then was open to dispute,” Bledsoe wrote in the Feb. 4 Journal. “Smith said De Paul center Bob Zoretich had elbowed him. ‘I elbowed him back and he put up his hands,’ Smith said. ‘It was self-defense on my part.’ ”
Meyer told Bledsoe that Smith had thrown the first elbow.
Zoretich was DePaul’s star, averaging 16 points and 8 rebounds a game; Smith, while a formidable rebounder, was not a scoring threat, averaging 10 points a game.
Whoever started it, Bledsoe reported, “in a flash the floor was awash with sprawling, brawling players, and when the smoke was cleared, Smith and Zoretich were relegated to their benches for the rest of the night.”
The whole game was intense. Marquette star George Thompson, bloodied during a second-half drive, scored 18 points, and Marquette won, 58-53. It was McGuire’s first win on DePaul’s home court since he started coaching Marquette in 1964.
Meyer was angry he lost his best player, while Marquette lost “some stumblebum” (an insult he quickly recanted).
“Smith couldn’t throw the ball in the ocean if he was on the beach,” Meyer complained to Bledsoe.
McGuire dismissed the incident, telling the Sentinel’s Christopoulos in a Feb. 5 story that the fight “was blown way out of proportion.”
But not so out of proportion that it couldn’t be turned into a good photo op.
On Feb. 5, McGuire and Smith met Journal photographer Ernest W. Anheuser at Lake Michigan. Standing just beyond the surf, Smith, armed with a beach ball and coached by McGuire, reared back and threw. The photo ran in newspapers across the country.
“For the record,” the Journal Sentinel’s Mike Hart wrote in an obituary for Smith, who died in 2007 at age 60, “Smith’s shot went in.”
McGuire was convinced Marquette would be grabbing more national attention that year.
“If we’re ever going to do something, it’s going to be this year,” he told Bledsoe in a story accompanying the beach ball photo in the Feb. 6, 1968, Journal. “We may have better talent some other years, but if I’m here 25 years, I don’t think I’ll see a team that plays like this one — that plays together like this one, and sacrifices itself like this one does.”
That Marquette team made to the Sweet 16 in the 1968 NCAA tournament, defeated by Kentucky in the second round.
But McGuire was wrong about 1968 being Marquette’s ultimate opportunity. After making it to the final eight in the NCAA tournament in 1969, Marquette rejected a bid for the 1970 tournament and went to the NIT, where the school won it all. Seven years later, in McGuire’s final season as coach, Marquette won its first NCAA tournament.