DePAUL ICONS AGUIRRE, MEYER TO BE HON­ORED AS LEG­ENDS

Mark Aguirre and coach Ray Meyer teamed to pro­duce some 

of the great­est sea­sons in DePaul Blue Demons his­tory. | SUN-TIMES

STEVE GREEN­BERG @ SLGreen­berg

CHICAGO SUN-TIMES - 16 dic 2016

Mark Aguirre doesn’t of­ten find him­self lost in thought about the buck­ets he got in bunches with the Dal­las Mav­er­icks or the cham­pi­onships he won late in his ca­reer with the Detroit Pis­tons.

NBA life was good — damn good — to Aguirre for about a decade and a half in the 1980s and early ’ 90s. Yet, in some ways, it never could top the ex­pe­ri­ences he’d had as a light­ning rod of Chicago basket­ball.

At West­ing­house, Aguirre was a Pub­lic League cham­pion and a McDon­ald’s All- Amer­i­can. At DePaul, he led a charge to the 1979 Fi­nal Four and be­came the na­tional player of the year and, even­tu­ally, a No. 1 over­all draft pick.

It’s not un­usual for Aguirre, now 57, to close his eyes and be­come trans­ported nearly 40 years back in time.

“That’s when bas­ket­ball was, for me, all about the beauty of the game, the love of the game, you know?” he said. “That’s when I learned how to love it — the smell of the gym, the noise of team­mates, the view­ing of your com­pe­ti­tion.

“I was in­cred­i­bly con­nected to the city. I was this huge star, but I still played in the play­grounds and in the parks all sum­mer. Cole Park on the South Side, Hub­bard Park on the West Side, so many other parks — wher­ever the best play­ers were.”

These days, Aguirre spends roughly half his time in Frisco, Texas, and the other half in his old stomp­ing grounds, where he works in cus­tomer re­la­tions for the Wood Dale-based AAR Corp. and is of­ten spot­ted at top Pub­lic League bas­ket­ball games through­out the city.

Dur­ing Satur­day’s col­lege dou­ble­header at the United Cen­ter — North­west­ern vs. Day­ton ( 6 p. m.) followed by Illi­nois vs. BYU ( 8: 30) — Aguirre and his coach at DePaul, the late, great Ray Meyer, will be hon­ored in an on-court cer­e­mony as Chicago Leg­ends.

“It’s re­ally fit­ting that Coach will be hon­ored with Mark, who was one of the great­est ever to come out of Chicago and one of the great­est to play for Coach Ray,” said Joey Meyer, now a scout for the Los An­ge­les Clip­pers and A WGN ra­dio an­a­lyst for North­west­ern bas­ket­ball, who will ac­cept the honor on his fa­ther’s be­half as three dozen fam­ily mem­bers watch from the stands.

Joey Meyer refers to Aguirre as the “Pied Piper” who led a stream of top Chicago tal­ent to DePaul, light­ing the city on fire for the Blue Demons for an un­for­get­table, if long-gone, pe­riod. Aguirre re­mem­bers his re­la­tion­ship with his coach as be­ing about so much more than bas­ket­ball.

“We were as close as pos­si­ble, like ev­eryday close, ev­ery day for my three years, from A to Z,” Aguirre said. “It was in­cred­i­ble. He did some things to change my life, and I did some things to change his life, I think.

“There were so many dif­fer­ent things we shared with each other cul­tur­ally. There were things I didn’t un­der­stand com­ing from the West Side to the North Side, where there weren’t many African-Amer­i­cans. And, in re­verse, I would tell him about things on the West Side cul­tur­ally, and he’d be so amazed. We talked about deep things. Mostly, we laughed.”

Aguirre worries that Chicago’s aware­ness of the great DePaul teams of that era — and of Meyer, in par­tic­u­lar — is fad­ing.

“Our team re­ally loved Coach Meyer — I mean re­ally, re­ally loved him — and there was noth­ing any player who ever played for him wouldn’t have done for him, pe­riod,” he said. “He was com­pletely de­voted to DePaul and to Chicago. He was the best.”

Chicago Sun-Times

16 dic 2016