Legendary broadcaster Dick Enberg pens 1-man play about basketball coach, friend

Renowned sportscaster and ... playwright?

Yes, but only if viewers like Dick Enberg’s play, “COACH: The Untold Story of College Basketball Legend Al McGuire,” the professional play-by-play announcer and IU graduate joked.

“If the audience doesn’t like the play, I have a terrific out — I didn’t write it. Al wrote it,” Enberg said.

That is to say, Al’s own words make up Enberg’s one-man production that takes the stage in Bloomington for the first time with 3 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. Saturday performances at the Ruth N. Halls Theater.

Written by Enberg and starring actor Cotter Smith, the play follows the life of Al McGuire, coach of the 1977 national champion Marquette men’s basketball team and popular college basketball broadcaster later in life. The play reveals the inspiring personality Enberg saw in him.

In addressing IU sports marketing and communication students Thursday, Enberg said his late CBS colleague and friend was “the most amazing character I’ve ever met.”

One instance explicitly mentioned in “COACH” is McGuire’s willingness to “take a right-hand turn in life.”

“When he left his home outside of Milwaukee to go into Marquette (for work), he ran into a dead stop where if he turned left, he went into Milwaukee. If he turned right, he went into the Milwaukee countryside,” Enberg said. “He said, ‘Sometimes I’d come to that stop sign, and at that moment, I’d say I’m taking a right-hand turn today.’

“The right-hand turn allowed him to go out with no game plan,” he said. “ ... There was no agenda. It was just ‘Take a drive, and let life come to you.’”

McGuire was profoundly insightful and crazy at the same time, Enberg said.
“Al McGuire was throwing chairs long before Bobby Knight,” he said.

To Enberg, who has been a sports broadcaster since 1957 and as a graduate student at IU did radio broadcasts for the Little 500, a play chronicling his friend’s life seemed the most fitting way to celebrate McGuire’s memory.

When McGuire died of leukemia in 2001, his family asked Enberg to write the notes for the coach’s memorial program, which Enberg described as “a daunting task.”

“How do you put this man’s life on one piece of paper?” he said.

Rather than write a personal account, Enberg decided the best way to remember McGuire was to use his friend’s own words.

“I used a bunch of his ‘McGuire-isms,’” he said. “‘Take a right-hand turn.’ ‘Why are the largest American flags over foreign car dealerships?’ ‘Why do kamikaze pilots wear helmets?’ ‘If it’s wet, think dry. If it’s dry, think wet.’”

Compiling all of McGuire’s phrases for the program inspired Enberg to write them down for himself, and he soon realized he could do more with these expressions.

“After about six months, I had volumes of material,” he said. “I said, ‘You know? If I put this part here when he was dying, over here when he was coaching and this when we were broadcasting with (former CBS color analyst) Billy Packer over here, I think we’ve
got a play.’”

“COACH” debuted in 2005 at Marquette. The play has since shown in several cities, and it recently showed at North Carolina’s Belmont Abbey College, where McGuire earned his first college head coaching job.

Enberg said a reward of writing his play is seeing actor Cotter Smith become McGuire and receive a standing ovation each night for doing so.

“Any actor worth his salt or her salt would never want to do a one-man show,” Enberg said. “It’s tough to know the lines and deliver the lines at the start, and now, to not only know the lines, but feel the lines from his soul, that he’s become Al McGuire. (Smith) said in 30 years of acting, he’s never been so rewarded by any role as this.”

Enberg, who said he took a liking to theater during his days at Central Michigan University, said he believes drama should be preserved and has aimed to do so by highlighting it in the sports world.

“We are dictated by our computers and television,” he said. “And too often we don’t wander and appreciate something that’s actually been done live where you’re really connecting with an actor and the experience.”

In bringing “COACH” to Bloomington, Enberg said he hopes to connect with a target audience — students — by way of an in-person portrayal of one of the most interesting teachers he has known.

“If a student doesn’t leave the theater with at least five notes on life lessons, I’d be really disappointed because there’s a lot there,” he said.