One of a kind

From Screenwriter and Executive Producer, Michael Angeli…..

We are creating a feature biopic based on the eminently fascinating and complex life of Al McGuire, the Pied Piper of college basketball, Coach of the Marquette Warriors. “He was the most incredible person I have ever known,” said Dick Enberg, “I didn’t like him at all at first, but I learned that he was impossible not to love.” Utter a single word about Marquette basketball and thousands will follow about Coach Al, who, as he would say, “went curtains” on January 26th, 2001.  But when you talk about Al, you don’t talk about the dead; you talk about a life so passionately lived that his spirit still burns bright among those who love him – which is pretty much everybody, even his arch-rivals.

Al gave the masks of comedy and tragedy equal time and wore them with a shambling grandeur, like a best man late for the wedding.  He was a walking passion play, a moveable feast of mania and Irish-Catholic repentance. He fought, he drank, he rode a Harley, and against improbable odds, he did the improbable. In 1977, the Warriors were the first team in history to enter the NCAA tournament with seven losses. With Marquette ranked 16th and considered first-round chum, Al was the one who caught the big fish, reeling in the Warriors’ first and only National Championship since then. He won by some wonderful, hocus pocus gumbo of bravado, brinksmanship, and the near messianic loyalty of his players who got mad at him for retiring on the night Marquette won the national championship. So why dig a tall skinny white guy with a butcher-block New York accent, a love-hate relationship with his church (“I don't hear confession and you don't coach this team,” he told Marquette’s contrarian Jesuits), called it quits at his prime and whose NBA highlight as a player was fouling the incomparable Bob Cousy on six consecutive trips down the court?

Partly because Al was human, like us. He made mistakes, he fell, and he got up. He was funny, educated, street smart: “When a guy takes off his coat, he’s not going to fight. When a guy takes off his wristwatch, watch out!”

He allowed his athletes to be human, to be themselves. His players yelled at him, and he yelled back. He knew almost all of them would ever have is basketball as a chance to make it out of a world booby-trapped with prejudice and racism, so he went to war for them. A quorum of Marquette priests once urged Al’s players to quit school as part of a race protest. “Don't come after these kids from the Jesuit House,” he shook his head at the priests. “You never bought a pound of butter in your life, and you're asking them to be kamikaze pilots.” He encouraged his players to embrace their culture, play their music, wear their hair the way they wanted, and commissioned forward Bo Ellis to design their “no-tuck” uniforms. But as much as he wanted them to have some autonomy, Al wanted his players to be, well, like him. “A team should be an extension of a coach's personality,” said Al. “My teams are arrogant and obnoxious.”

He brought to the sports world a cult of personality. A sportswriter’s wet dream of quotables, Al gave basketball its own language. An aircraft carrier was a huge center. French pastry was a player with style. Zebras were officials. The Checkerboard was about black-white relationships.

Al brought performance art to coaching. During game time, he wore his emotions on his sleeve. We knew when he was happy, mad, suffering, exulting – so did the zebras, but stone-faced stoicism was the other guy’s deal not Al’s. He battled convention, Jesuits, and leukemia, alas, going two for three. While at Marquette, McGuire founded "Al's Run," a charity event for the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin.  The race celebrated its 45th anniversary in 2021.

But here’s why we really love Al McGuire. Forget all that “if wishes were horses” crap. Nobody wishes harder than a guy who describes his hometown as “a place where if you fell down, someone would help you up by your wallet.”  Al willed his wishes to come true. Coached his team into the post-season in eleven of his thirteen seasons at Marquette. Won the NIT. Went 27 and 1 in 1971 and was named AP/UPI coach of the year. Then, in 1974, Marquette lost to North Carolina State in the NCAA championship game in large part because their coach wore his emotions on his sleeve, this time like a homecoming banner. The game was pretty much decided late in the first half when Marquette, leading 28-27, was called for charging. Al sprang from the bench, complained louder than his polka-dotted blazer, and was hit with a technical. A minute late,r he got his second T, crying – as only he could – over a goal-tending call. Behind 39 to 30 now, Marquette never recovered. He became the first coach to be ejected from an NCAA championship game. Yeah, he won the NCAA coach of the year award, but Al’s demons lost the game for his team. At least that’s how he saw it.

At the beginning of the 1977 season, Al announced that he would retire. `77 would be his last year as a coach. And despite the emotional chaos he and his players had to wrestle with, Al McGuire got what all of us wish, hope, and pray for:  A second chance. Despite losing on the day the NCAA tournament bids were announced, Al and his Warriors made it to the big dance. And this second chance was no gimmie.

This time, Al’s team was highly over-matched by a Dean Smith North Carolina team featuring Phil Ford and Walter Davis, two future NBA rookies of the year. Worse than that, during their first-round game, in a cavalcade of shouting matches between the two, Al impulsively slapped Bernard Toone, his most talented but underachieving player. Al’s demons were closing in on him before a record national TV audience and the sold-out 16,000-seat Omni in Atlanta. But this time – this time – he sat on his hands. Marquette won, 67-59. In the locker room, Al wept like a grandmother.  His coaches wanted him to go out and cut down the nets with his team, but no, he said, this was their day, not his. The kids did it all.  Then Al walked away. That was Al.

Emmy-nominated, Peabody award-winning screenwriter Michael Angeli and Emmy/Cannes Film Festival/Image award nominee Anthony Hemingway are attached to write and direct, and Josh Green, with Michael Angeli will produce the chronicles of a narcissistic leader of young men and a humble soldier for their fortunes, a man who saw the beauty in life but struggled showing it to others.