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This Day In Sports…March 28, 1977:
Two back-alley scrappers, Sylvester Stallone and Al McGuire, walk away with big prizes. In a storybook ending to his coaching career, McGuire won the NCAA championship when his Marquette Warriors beat North Carolina 67-59. McGuire had announced three months earlier that it would be his final season, and despite seven regular season losses, Marquette had a charmed run through the Big Dance. McGuire called the Final Four the “Magical Weekend.” That was demonstrated when Jerome Whitehead pulled in a full-court pass from Butch Lee and laid it in at the buzzer to beat UNC Charlotte in the semifinals.
McGuire coached the Warriors for 13 seasons and was a quote machine. Example: “A team should be an extension of a coach’s personality. My teams are arrogant and obnoxious.” It was only natural that he’d go on to become a popular college basketball TV commentator. His first season as a CBS analyst was 1978-79, and he meshed perfectly with fellow commentator Billy Packer. McGuire’s charisma only added to the aura of the transformational 1979 national championship game between Magic Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans and Larry Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores (won by MSU). McGuire was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 1992 and would retire from broadcasting in 2000.
The Academy Awards ceremony was held the same night (something TV networks wouldn’t dare do now), and “Rocky”, starring Stallone as the rags-to-riches club fighter, took the Oscar for Best Picture. The movie was kind of a metaphor for Stallone’s life. He was an underdog from the time he was born, when forceps used in his birth accidentally severed a nerve and gave him his droop on one side and his face and his slurred speech. Stallone responded to bullying by getting into acting and bodybuilding, and both served him well.
“Rocky” resonated in the sports world almost 50 years ago partly because it came out at the height of Muhammad Ali’s boxing career. Audiences assumed Balboa’s fictional opponent, Apollo Creed, was modeled after Ali. But some insisted Creed was based more on another 1970s boxing star, Ken Norton. Either way, the movie and its theme song immediately became part of pop culture. There were nine films in the “Rocky” saga: I, II, III, IV, V and “Rocky Balboa”, plus “Creed” I, II and III. That’s not even close to the record, though. There have been 25 movies in the James Bond franchise. And counting.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
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