After scouring the internet, I was amazed at the dearth of material on Dick McGuire.  Here was one of the greats, and the only footage I could find of him playing bball was on MSG’s memorial for him.  In an age where every moment is recorded of people who are famous simply for being famous (like Paris Hilton or Jon&Kate), it’s sad that the exploits of a true pioneer will likely fade away into nothingness eventually.  How many websites do we need devoted to David Hasselhoff?  It’s up to us to keep our history alive.  How many great films, great books, great songs have been lost?  Someone recently said to me that the reason most books from before 1900 haven’t stood the test of time is because they weren’t that great.  I have a hard time believing that.  Yes, they may not have been Shakespeare, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have books that if they came out today would be considered one of the top 50 books of the year.  It’s also not just about whether things from the past are as “good” as things in the present, it’s about understanding how things have evolved.

For instance, one silent film which was considered a shocker at the time it came out was the original “The Great Train Robbery.”  If you watch it today, well, probably the recent “Taking Of Pelham One Two Three” is more suspenseful to our modern sensibilities.  However, the key to appreciating “The Great Train Robbery” is understanding why it was a shocker.  It wasn’t about the plot.  It was about a shot that they showed at the very beginning, and then the exact same shot shown at the very end.  It’s completely unremarkable to you and me.  It’s just a guy looking at us (ie.the camera) and shooting his gun.  The thing is that up until that point, they’d never had a person look right at the camera before, so when he shot that gun, the audience was literally instinctively afraid that he was shooting at them.  They ducked to the side.  In a sense, it was to them what the first 3-D films were to our times.  That’s incredible.

Similarly, while doing a bit of research on McGuire, naturally a lot of things came up about his contemporary dribbling maestro, Bob Cousy.  There’s an anecdote on him that reminds me of Michael Jordan’s famous improvised shot against the Lakers.  The one where he went up in the air for a right-handed lay-in, then seeing Sam Perkins preparing to block it, mid-air MJ switched the ball to his left hand and flipped it in.  Here’s the description of Cousy in a 1949 college game from an old Sports Illustrated article:

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