Ask anybody off the street outside of Wisconsin and Illinois if they know where Marquette University is and probably less than half would know. But ask anybody who has a legit knowledge of sports who Al McGuire is and they might say, "The former coach of the Marquette Warriors."

Yes, McGuire is a legend in the sport of college basketball, unforgettable to the people who knew him and an icon on the Marquette campus. That is why the newly constructed athletic building on North 12th Street and West Wisconsin Avenue was named rightfully so after one of its most famous members.

Before I could really grasp how much of an influence McGuire had on college basketball, yet alone Marquette, I was given a few hints along the way. The first was when I discovered I was accepted to Marquette (a school I never heard of until a representative recruited me in high school) and my dad told me, "Oh yeah, Marquette, they was known for their basketball team back in the '70s."

Then, I think my first year at Marquette, I saw a special of ESPN about coach Bobby Knight and he said, "I remember Al McGuire used to say….." Now I think to myself, if Knight is mentioning this guy, he had to have been popular.

But it wasn't until McGuire past away on Jan. 26, 2001 at 2 a.m. at the age of 72, that I, and I think other students as well, understood what he meant to Marquette and all of sports. The media was all over it, The Marquette Tribune put out a special section about it and everyone in sports was talking about it.

From 1964 to 1977, McGuire transformed the basketball team at a small private school in Milwaukee into a national powerhouse, winning 78.7 percent of his games over his 13 years as head coach. In an almost perfect storybook ending, and also coincidently, McGuire decided to retire the same year Marquette won the NCAA Championship in 1977 with a win over Dean Smith's North Carolina Tar Heels. McGuire retired as the school's all-time winningest coach.

It was because of McGuire that Marquette had become so intimidating to other schools. Today, Marquette's legacy is clear in all of its sports, men's and women's basketball, soccer, volleyball and track, and each coach carries inside them the same enthusiasm as did McGuire.

Not every campus in America has an athletic building like our Al McGuire Center that praises the school's athletic achievements. I mean, I took a tour of the building and it is simply amazing. Large paintings, banners everywhere, pictures, newspaper photos, player's jerseys, trophies and a top-of-the-line workout room and training facility.

The building is parallel to McGuire, in many ways. Both entrust hard work, honor, dedication, originality and most of all, spirit.

If McGuire was alive today and was actually able to walk through the building named after him, he would probably describe it as "seashells and balloons." Taken from an article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel the day of McGuire's death, Joseph Moran, who wrote McGuire's biography, "You Can Call Me Al," said the phrase he used multiple times stemmed from his upbringing in Queens, N.Y. "Seashells and balloons is bare feet and wet grass," McGuire said. "It means a light breeze. You know, a light breeze that would maybe move a girl's skirt a little. It's sweater weather. A malted, you know, a shake. The gentleness of it. The wholesomeness of it. It's tender. That type of thing."

McGuire, who has always been a part of Marquette history, can finally be represented in the new athletic center for anyone driving past the campus to see.