NEW YORK -- Frank McGuire, the New York City coach whose "underground railroad" of New York recruits was a cornerstone of college basketball's rise in the South, died at his home in Columbia, South Carolina, Tuesday after a long illness. He was 80.


MacGuire retired in 1980 after 45 years of coaching high school, service, college and professional basketball. His wife and other family members were at his side when he died.


In on his sport's ground floor from the time he played in the inaugural Madison Square Garden game in 1934, McGuire coached St. John's University, his alma mater, to the 1952 NCAA championship final (an 80-63 loss to Kansas), coached North Carolina to the NCAA title in 1957 and, after a single season coaching in the NBA in 1962, went about building South Carolina, from the ground up, into a perennial NCAA tournament team in the 1970s. He had 724 career wins, 549 on the college level.


He coached or tutored a virtual Who's Who of basketball names -- Wilt Chamberlain, Dean Smith, Al McGuire, Lou Carnesecca, Billy Cunningham and Larry Brown among them. As St. John's basketball and baseball coach in the early 1950s, McGuire coached Mario Cuomo.


McGuire coached in the two most memorable games of Chamberlain's historic career: Against him in the 1957 NCAA championship, when North Carolina defeated Kansas in triple overtime, 54-53; and for his Philadelphia Warriors on March 2, 1962, when Chamberlain scored his record 100 points against the Knicks.


The 1957 North Carolina team went undefeated in 32 games, with only New Yorkers in the starting lineup. "New York is my personal territory," McGuire said at the time.