When Frank McGuire went to South Carolina in 1964, he was returning to the ACC, where he had coached UNC to the 1957 National Championship. That team was 32-0 and won both Final Four games in triple overtime, including the championship over Kansas and Wilt Chamberlain, which is, in our opinion, the greatest performance in the history of the Final Four.
He would go on to coach Chamberlain for a year with the Philadelphia Warriors, before the team moved to San Francisco. McGuire wasn’t interested in moving to the West Coast, so he worked for two years in public relations in New York City before taking the South Carolina job.
In Columbia, McGuire’s legendarily combative personality fueled powerful ACC rivalries, notably with his old school, UNC, and also NC State and Duke.
Things got so hot with Duke and UNC in the late 1960s that the ACC commissioner allowed the 15-501 rivals the option to cancel the regular season games with South Carolina in 1967. Duke took him up on it, with A.D. Eddie Cameron saying that “[w]e are not mad, but it is the feeling of the Duke administration that this incident has grown out of proportion and a cooling off period is desirable.”
They couldn’t avoid the Gamecocks in the 1969 ACC Tournament though, and when Duke beat South Carolina, McGuire went ballistic, accusing the conference of favoring the North Carolina schools.
In the 1971 ACC Tournament, it looked for all the world like UNC was going to knock the Gamecocks out in the closing minutes of the championship game. With just seconds left, UNC’s 6-10 Lee Dedmond blocked a shot by South Carolina’s 6-3 Kevin Joyce.
In those days, that still led to a jump ball, and everyone assumed that Dedmond would control it, and UNC would close the game out, winning, 52-51.
Didn’t quite happen.
In one of the greatest plays in ACC Tournament history, Joyce out-jumped Dedmond, and teammate Tom Owens got the ball and put it in the basket at the buzzer.
It was a sweet win for the Gamecocks, who had lost to North Carolina schools in the tournament from 1965 to 1970, including an agonizing double-overtime loss to NC State in 1970.
South Carolina was furious about all of it, and that miraculous 1971 win was its swan song in the ACC: the Gamecocks went independent in 1971-72, and started a long and agonizing road to irrelevance, which mostly continues to this day.
In his last four seasons, McGuire finished 14-12, 16-12, 15-12, and 16-11. He made the NIT once, in 1977-78, losing in the first round.
He also had to watch his former rival, Duke, make an incredible run to the NCAA championship game that same year, losing to Kentucky in the 1978 finals.
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