Reviving Al

Picture, if you can, the late Al McGuire, summoned back to earth from the Great Sideline in the Sky. He's standing in a room with a couple thousand people, watching a video of the closing seconds of the 1977 NCAA championship. The image hits the screen of McGuire famously sitting on the bench and wiping tears from his eyes as his Marquette Warriors salt away the title weeks after McGuire had announced he was retiring.

If we could ask McGuire what was going through his mind at that moment, what would he say? Probably something like this: "All I could think of was, why me? After all the years of odors in the locker room, the socks and jocks. All the fights in the gyms. Just the wildness of it all. And to have it end like this. It's been a great run. Normally, alley fighters, street fighters like me, don't end up in lace."

We can't actually bring McGuire back to life, of course, but beginning Saturday night, some lucky folks in Milwaukee will experience the next best thing: a live one-man show about McGuire, written by his close friend and longtime broadcast partner, Dick Enberg. The play, which opens with the scene described above, is called McGuire, and it grew out of an essay Enberg wrote for the notes given out at McGuire's funeral after he died in January, 2001.

"This is one of the most exciting things I've ever done," Enberg said by telephone last week from Paris, where he was covering the French Open for ESPN. "Writing in the first person, it was almost as if Al was standing over my shoulder saying, 'No, Dicksie, I wouldn't have said it that way, I would have said it THIS way.' He was not only in my head, he was in my soul."

Enberg, who has never written a play or any kind of fiction, spent a full year writing the script. He shopped it around for a while before it landed on the desk of Rev. Robert Wild, the Marquette president, who decided the school's theater department should produce it. The run will begin Saturday night with a special premiere to be preceded by a $1,000-a-plate dinner. It will continue with five more performances before the show closes Saturday, June 19th.

To be sure, Enberg's portrayal of Coach Al is not exactly balanced or critical. Aside from McGuire's claim to have violated most of the Ten Commandments -- "Didn't kill anyone, but I need to find a deaf priest for my final confession," -- we don't learn much about his flaws. But Enberg delightfully captures McGuire's voice, his wisdom and especially, his renowned flakiness.

In McGuire, the character confesses he often didn't know his own players' names, an affliction he masked by calling out to them with nicknames like "Disco" or " Hollywood." He says he never looked at game film, organized a practice or even blew a whistle. (He only wore a whistle for team photos.) He talks about his strange affinity for collecting toy soldiers, gleefully describing the thrill he once got after negotiating the price of a soldier from $14 to $8.

And of course, Enberg's McGuire describes the stop sign he used to pass on his way to work each day. A left turn would take McGuire to Marquette, a right turn would take him into the countryside. Once a month, without even telling his assistants, McGuire would decide on the spur of the moment to hang a right. He would spend all day eating ham sandwiches and chatting with farmers. As he explains, via Enberg: "Instead of travelin' the easy, comfortable way, where you know what's gonna happen, take a right turn and let life, the unexpected, come to you. It'll surprise ya, how beautiful the unplanned can be."

The actor whose job is to channel the late coach is 56-year-old Cotter Smith. He compares the challenge of playing McGuire to his role as Robert Kennedy in a TV miniseries in 1983. (In a bit of irony McGuire would truly have loved, the part of Jimmy Hoffa in that miniseries was played by Robert Blake.) "It's very hard to recreate somebody that people really knew and loved so much," Smith says. Smith, who has homes in Milwaukee and Los Angeles, studied audio and videotapes of McGuire and worked with a dialect coach to capture the McGuire's patented Irish New Yorker's accent.

"One-man shows are hard. It has to be about someone worth listening to," Smith says. "When I first thought about McGuire, I didn't think he'd be a good choice. But after reading the script, I realized this is not a play about basketball. It's about life."