The setting was the banquet room of the Thompson Run Athletic Association in West Mifflin in the spring of 1982.

Players, coaches and fans of the Bishop Boyle High School boys' basketball team were celebrating the recently claimed PIAA Class AA championship.

Near the end of the festivities, Sister Joan LaBoon, Boyle's principal, stepped to the podium to give a short congratulatory speech and present Fran Mannion, the team's coach, with a gift.

"Now, Mr. Mannion," Sister Joan began her presentation, holding an attractively wrapped box, "inside this box is a very nice blazer that we bought you. It was very expensive and it's a very sharp coat. It has a nice patch on the pocket with the school coat of arms. You'll look very nice in this."

She paused and in her most stern principal's voice warned the smiling Irishman: "I don't want to be walking down on Eight Avenue [Homestead's main thoroughfare] in a couple of weeks and see this coat on some other guy."

The capacity crowd roared.

No one was really certain whether Sister Joan was serious, but the message to all of those present -- those who knew Francis E. "McGee" Mannion so well -- was right on the money.

That was the kind of man "McGee" was -- he literally would give a person the coat off his back.

"He had zero interest in material things," said John "Buddy" Hobart, a former Mannion player on the 1977 WPIAL finalist team. "He was all about loyalty."

Indeed, he was.

Off the court, he was the nice guy who lived next door, ready to help a neighbor in any way he could. Inside the gym, however, he'd undergo a clear personality change. He was a competitor of the highest order and he had a record to prove it. He was extremely demanding.

Most of his former players would agree that his strongest attribute as a coach was his ability to motivate.

He made the Lancers competitive in their early years, in effect, playing up by at least two classes in enrollment by today's standards. The Lancers played against teams in the old Catholic Class A League, stalwarts such as Central Catholic, North Catholic and South Hills Catholic, all schools with significantly larger male enrollments.

A few years later, when the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association permitted the Catholic schools to join, Boyle, competing against schools closer to its own enrollment, became a perennial playoff contender, winning six section championships, reaching the WPIAL title game in 1977 and '82, and getting to the semifinals in '79.

All three of those teams also reached the final four in the state playoffs, with the '82 team winning the WPIAL and state championships.

Fran Mannion, 83, died Aug. 16 and his former players returned en masse from destinations as far away as Arizona and Puerto Rico to the R.V. Anderson Funeral Home in Homestead to honor their mentor. Like that Thompson Club banquet room, the place was packed during virtually all of the viewing hours in the days immediately following his death.

"You don't realize how many peoples' lives he touched until you sit back and think about it," said Ed McCallister, a starting guard on the '77 and '79 PIAA final four Boyle teams and now the chief information officer for UPMC Health Plan. "There were a lot of times I just wanted to stop by and shoot the breeze with him, but just didn't get the chance."

A lot of Mannion's former players from Boyle and St. Mary Magdalene Grade School in Homestead where Mannion began his coaching career and continued to coach long after Boyle came into existence in 1962, got a chance to do just that. They organized an informal tribute to him about five years ago at Duke's Sports Arena, a Homestead tavern, and men from teams covering four decades showed up to honor him.

"I had to tell him I was taking him to Las Vegas to get him to show up," Hobart said. "Otherwise he wouldn't have gone. He didn't like being the center of attention."

It was more than fitting that Mannion's former players would treat him to trips in his later years, because he did that for them for most of his life. A lifelong bachelor, Mannion's family, other than his brother, Larry, and his sisters, all of whom entered the convent -- Sister Mary Vincent, Sister Kevin Mary and Sister Philomena -- was his players.

In the 1950s, he began taking his grade schoolers to tournaments around the country and even to Puerto Rico, which is where Mannion struck up a friendship with Emilio Romero, who was coaching a Puerto Rican youth team.

It was there that the seed was planted for Bishop Boyle's sometimes controversial "Puerto Rican Connection." Boyle's critics said it was an unfair advantage.

Mannion always maintained that the players who migrated to Homestead from the Caribbean Island did so on their own volition. They were looking for a better education as well as the opportunity to attract recruiters from U.S. colleges, he said. He just happened to be the conduit for them to do so.

In all, a little more than a half dozen players came from Puerto Rico to Boyle over a 15-year span.

But that won't go down as Mannion's primary legacy.

The legion of former players who returned to Homestead last week to pay their respects will.