McGuire, Francis Joseph (“Frank”)

(b. 6 November 1913 in New York City; d. 11 October 1994 in West Columbia, South Carolina), coach who helped bring big-time college basketball to the South, winning a national title in 1957 with an undefeated North Carolina team.

The thirteenth child of Robert McGuire, a New York City police officer, and Anne Lynch McGuire, a homemaker, Frank McGuire grew up in Greenwich Village and was a standout athlete at Saint Francis Xavier High School. At Saint John’s University, he captained the baseball and basetball teams as a senior. He received his B.S. degree in 1936. Starting in 1936, McGuire worked as a teacher and coach at Saint Xavier while playing five seasons in the American Basketball League, a forerunner to the National Basketball Association. In 1941 he married Patricia Johnson, with whom he had three children.

After serving as a U.S. Navy officer during World War II (he did not see combat), McGuire returned to Saint John’s in 1947 as the school’s baseball and basketball coach. In baseball, he led the Redmen to the final round of the 1949 College World Series, while in basketball he coached the team to the 1952 national championship game, where the Redmen fell to Kansas.

A smooth talker and fine dresser, known for the alligator shoes he wore during games, McGuire seemed a perfect fit in New York City. But in 1951 McGuire and his wife Pat had a son, Frank Jr., who was mentally retarded and had cerebral palsy. It was difficult to care for Frankie in the McGuires’ small apartment, and in 1953 McGuire left to coach basketball at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

McGuire immediately became a rival to Everett Case of North Carolina State in Raleigh, the coach who had built the state’s first college basketball program with national ambitions. To counter Case’s pipeline that brought top players from Indiana to Raleigh, McGuire established an “underground railroad” from New York City to Chapel Hill. The coaches soon became bitter on-court rivals, though McGuire later said they were good friends away from the game. In 1953 Case and McGuire moved their schools from the Southern Conference to the new Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), joining “Tobacco Road” rivals Duke and Wake Forest in a nine-team league that would become the nation’s college basketball showcase.

McGuire’s 1956–1957 team was his greatest. All five starters—Lennie Rosenbluth, Pete Brennan, Joe Quigg, Bob Cunningham, and Tommy Kearns—were from the New York City area, and they rolled through their schedule. By the time they reached the Final Four in Kansas City, Missouri, the Tar Heels were 30–0. They won the national title with a thrilling pair of triple-overtime victories, the first over Michigan State in the national semifinals. In the championship game, the Tar Heels faced Kansas and the Jayhawks’ seven-foot star center, Wilt Chamberlain. McGuire set an against-all-odds tone for the game by sending Kearns, at five-foot-ten, to jump for the opening tip against Chamberlain. In the third overtime, Quigg made a pair of free throws with six seconds left, then batted away a final pass intended for Chamberlain to secure a Tar Heels 54-53 win.

McGuire stayed at North Carolina through the 1960–1961 season, after which he left to coach the NBA’s Philadelphia Warriors. There, his star was Chamberlain, who later said that McGuire’s even-keeled approach to coaching changed his life. During the 1961–1962 season, Chamberlain scored 100 points in a game, a record that still stands.

When the Warriors moved to San Francisco the following season, McGuire declined to go. After two years working in public relations in the New York City area, he returned to coaching in 1964 with South Carolina, an ACC doormat. Given a mandate to build a national power by school officials, McGuire succeeded. In 1971 the Gamecocks won the ACC tournament title, 52–51 over North Carolina, and earned a trip to the NCAA tournament, the first of four straight NCAA appearances. Buoyed by McGuire’s success at building interest in basketball in a traditionally football-oriented state, South Carolina opened the 12,400-seat Carolina Coliseum in 1968. The arena would later be named in McGuire’s honor. Gamecock basketball became a South Carolina obsession, and cars bore bumper stickers reading “McGuire for Governor.”

Amid the acclamation, there were problems. In 1967 the Gamecocks were placed on a two-year probation because of the way they were paying the tuition of top recruit Mike Grosso. And in 1972 athletic director Paul Dietzel moved South Carolina to the football-dominated Southeastern Conference, a move McGuire opposed. “The ACC is the most important league in basketball history. You don’t just pull up and leave something like that if you’re ever lucky enough to be in it in the first place,” he later said.

McGuire was ousted at South Carolina after the 1979–1980 season. His 283 wins there were the most in school history, and with 164 wins at North Carolina and 102 at Saint John’s, the National Basketball Hall of Fame member (inducted in 1977) was the first college coach ever to win 100 games at three different schools. In all, McGuire won 724 games in his career.

McGuire retired to Columbia, South Carolina, with his second wife, Jane Henderson, whom he married on 3 June 1972, following his wife Pat’s death from cancer in 1967. In addition to Frank Jr., he had two daughters, both from his first marriage. In 1992 he suffered a stroke; he died of complications two years later at the age of eighty. He is buried in Saint Peter’s Cemetery in Columbia, South Carolina.

McGuire helped transform college basketball from a regional game, dominated by schools from the Northeast and Midwest, to a national game. In building college basketball in the South, both at North Carolina and South Carolina, he is rivaled in influence only by Kentucky’s Adolph Rupp. The perfect season of McGuire’s 1956–1957 North Carolina team helped make basketball a passion in that state, and that team’s triple-overtime championship upset of Kansas is remembered as one of the sport’s greatest games.

There are no full-length biographies of McGuire, although he figures prominently in Joe Menzer’s Four Corners: How UNC, N.C. State, Duke, and Wake Forest Made North Carolina the Center of the Basketball Universe (1999). A lengthy Sports Illustrated feature by Frank Deford, “A Team That Was Blessed” (29 Mar. 1982), recounts North Carolina’s perfect 1956–1957 season. The Columbia (South Carolina) State featured extensive coverage of McGuire following his death, though with an emphasis on his South Carolina years. Obituaries are in the New York Times, Boston Globe, and Los Angeles Times (all 12 Oct. 1994).

Tim Whitmire