Quote:ATLANTA, March 30 — His players understood how Al McGuire could retire when he was 48 and had just won a national championship. He preached about how they should stretch themselves and how life was a basketball court and they should go right or left and never stay stuck in the middle.

Quote:McGuire, who was 72 when he died of leukemia in 2001, would suggest to his players that they spend six months bartending and six months driving a cab after graduation. They would be better prepared for life, he said.

“Once you got to know Al, you could understand how he could walk away and not sign the next contract after the championship,” Butch Lee, the star guard on the 1977 Marquette team, said in a telephone interview Friday from Puerto Rico. “He would tell us, when you feel confident in yourself, you can move around. Staying still was a problem, not only in basketball, but in life.

Quote:“At that age, you should be just getting the job you want. He was looking for something else in life.”

Thirty years ago, McGuire sat on the bench at the Omni in downtown Atlanta, buried his head in his hands and cried after Marquette defeated North Carolina to win the national title. It was his last game as a coach because he had already agreed to take a job as a co-chairman with Medalist, a Wisconsin-based sporting goods manufacturer.

Ben Howland, the coach of the U.C.L.A. team that is here in the Final Four, is 49, a year older than McGuire was when his team won the title. If the Bruins were to win a national championship Monday, it would be preposterous to think that Howland would consider retirement. His contract would probably be torn up and replaced by a new deal with a considerably higher salary.