![]() ![]() Marquette made the tournament all three years Butler was there, and never did any better than getting stomped in the Sweet 16 by North Carolina in 2011. How in the name of god did Marquette not win a couple of NCAA championships with this cat? I knew his basic biography: The mother who threw him out of the house when he was 13, leaving him to couch-surf all over Tomball, Texas until a local family took him in how he first went to Tyler Junior College and thence to Milwaukee, when a fellow Texan named Buzz Williams took over from Tom Crean. Which is, what in the unholy, unshirted fuck has happened with Jimmy Butler? Nobody else does, either.Īll of which is an extended prelude to a question that has been bugging me for the past four or five years. Do you remember that Juan Toscano-Anderson played four years by the shining banks of the Menomonee River? Don’t worry. The real NBA stars came later-Doc Rivers and, of course, Dwyane Wade, with players like Jae Crowder and Wes Matthews tracking solid careers. Butch Lee couldn’t stay altogether healthy, but both he and Chones picked up rings as teammates on Magic Johnson’s first championship team in Los Angeles. Maurice Lucas had a good run as Bill Walton’s wingman in Portland. Earl Tatum’s NBA days are marked primarily by his usefulness as trade bait. ![]() Jim Chones jumped to the ABA and had a decent NBA career. The only true historical oddity with the Marquette teams of that era is that, for all their success-and they won more games in the 1970s than any team except UCLA-they didn’t turn out that many exceptional pros. How could you not go to a school that had its priorities so firmly in order? In a little more than a year, I was sitting in The Gym, waiting for a bus to go down to the Milwaukee arena for a game. Similar thoughts are echoed regularly downtown at The Gym, a campus beer haven owned by a former Marquette enforcer, Brian Brunkhorst, and tended over by Fat Jack Rusnov, roommate of The Evil Doctor Blackheart. a journalism school! Granted, it had lost its accreditation a few years earlier, but what did that matter? My decision was made final by a piece Curry Kirkpatrick wrote for Sports Illustrated the following season, which contained the following passage: Which they did, easily, beating UMass and Julius Erving in the first round, and stifling Pistol Pete Maravich in the semifinal, after which a Marquette player named Jack Burke remarked, “I’d play pro ball for a hamburger and cab fare if I could guard him every night.” Needless to say, I was ensorcelled by the whole mad thing, and Marquette had. And it was in New York, which McGuire found preferable to Lubbock, Texas, where the NCAA wanted to send him. Even in 1970, it was as prestigious as the NCAA tournament. (For the benefit of younger readers who might have joined us late, the NIT once was the biggest deal in college basketball. (Narrator: They did.) He said, essentially, fuckabuncha these buffet-grazers, I’ll go to the NIT and win that. So I followed them all season, right through the moment in which McGuire turned down an NCAA bid because he thought the NCAA selection committee had it in for him. But it was the sheer strangeness of what McGuire was fashioning that made me think, hmmmm, this might be a good place to hang around for four years. Carr and Meminger put on one of the best head-to-head duels I ever saw in a college game. It was a terrific game that Notre Dame won in double overtime, 96-95. He also was the one who tossed the mustard packet. And that was my introduction to Marquette basketball, and Al McGuire, and Dean "The Dream" Meminger, and also Gary (Goose) Brell, a twitchy long-haired forward who (it was said) once celebrated a big win by cutting down the nets-with a switchblade. The player paused for a moment and then threw the packet in Dee’s face. Dee handed one of them a packet of mustard, signifying his distaste for this “hot dog” move. But my attention was soon taken by the opposition, a strange bunch in black and yellow, bumblebee-striped uniforms, with a coach who seemed forever on the edge of apoplexy and a herky-jerky point guard with a pencil-thin mustache and a quizzical little smile.īefore the game, the visitors made a point of shaking hands with Irish coach Johnny Dee. There should have been cave paintings. Anyway, I had tuned in primarily to watch Austin Carr, the magnificent Notre Dame guard. These were the days when every telecast looked as though it were being sent directly from the caves at Lascaux. 7, 1970, and I was a junior in high school. I was watching a Notre Dame basketball game on television. In retrospect, it was an unusual way to pick a college.
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