The Larry Siegfried Interview
By:
Michael D. McClellan
|
Tuesday, May 16th,
2006
Please tell me a little about your head coach at Ohio State, the legendary Fred
Taylor.
First
of all, I would be lying if I didn’t tell you that I had problems with my
college coach. And then I’m going to tell you that he was also an asset. Let’s
go backwards for a moment. When I was a high school player, I had this
versatility that we were just talking about. I went to college, and I was
recruited as that individual. Are you with me? Shooting, rebounding,
passing…that whole concept. When I went to college, it was my understanding
that the offense at Ohio State would resemble the system that I’d played in high
school, and that I would be able to utilize my talents all over the court.
Freshman weren’t allowed to play varsity ball back then, so a whole year passed
before I started to see what was really happening. As a sophomore, I was either
one or two in the Big Ten Conference in scoring, but I was gradually being moved
away from what I had done in high school. The key word is gradual; I got a
taste of varsity ball that sophomore season, and while it wasn’t exactly what
I’d been doing at Shelby, I was still somewhat of a focal point in the offense.
The following year is when [Jerry] Lucas and [John] Havlicek came into the program, and all of a sudden we’ve got all of this talent. Suddenly, my role and responsibility on the team took me so far away from where I was as a high school player. Remember what I told you about playing at Shelby – I was all over the place. As a sophomore at Ohio State, I was moving away from all of that, but I was still getting enough touches that I really didn’t have a lot of problems. Then, my junior year, Lucas and all of those other kids come in with all of that talent. Suddenly, I become just a guard. I was so frustrated.
Take Luke [Lucas] for a second. Luke was a great high school center. He went to Ohio State and he was a great college center. His role really didn’t change much from one level to the next. My situation was different. In high school, I was doing everything, and suddenly as a junior at Ohio State I was just a guard. It was a terrible, terrible experience for me, because I’d had all of this freedom in high school and suddenly I’m playing a very specialized role in the system at Ohio State. Now, was I recruited wrong? Was I used wrong? There were a lot of people who questioned whether my talents were utilized to the fullest in college. What happened to me was this – at Ohio State I ended up becoming more of a playmaker, a complimentary piece, if you will. Our other guard, Mel Nowell, was an outstanding college player. We had Havlicek and Joe Roberts, and all of those guys had all kinds of talent. Well, all of a sudden I become just a playmaker type of guard. Think for a second what I was doing in high school – I did very little of that. I became so frustrated, and from that standpoint I had a lot of problems at Ohio State. Not that I wanted to shoot the ball every time. That was never, never how I wanted to be utilized. I found out later that all of the guys were frustrated, because we had all of that talent and only one ball. Here I am, getting six shots a game, after getting twice that as a sophomore.
I communicated that frustration to Fred. Luke was good on the high post, because he was such a good shooter from the perimeter. I said, ‘Fred, play Luke at the high post once in a while, and let me go down low and post up.’ But he never allowed me to do that. To me it didn’t make sense. As a 6’4” guard in the Big Ten, that size was unheard back then. I had guys guarding me that were 5’10”, 5’11”, so most of the time I had a great size advantage. At Ohio State it was like having a fly nipping at my feet all game long. But I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t go down low and overpower my man. In high school I was able to do that. If I had a smaller man on me I’d go low and score. If the opposing coach adjusted by playing someone bigger, then I’d go back outside and score from there. But Fred didn’t want to run that high post, which I never understood. If we ran it, I could go low and take the ball to the basket. And if the opposing center had sagged off of Luke to help guard me, I could have kicked the ball back out to Luke for a shot at the top of the key. He had great range, and as a pro he proved that he could scored from the perimeter. He would have hit that shot all night long.
And all of this isn’t sour grapes – I’m just being honest with you. I don’t know if I was utilized properly. We won, so I guess everybody’s happy. But I’m telling you that I was frustrated. And maybe I’m wrong. But the thing that I question is whether the coach made the most of my ability. I go back to Reggie Bush – it’s like drafting him and then making him run the same play every time. The opposition is going to start keying on that play and shutting it down. And yet we won, so people say that this is all sour grapes on my part. I don’t mean it that way. That’s not what I’m saying. And I discovered later that other kids on the team were frustrated because of similar issues that they were dealing with.
Bottom line, I wanted to win. Was I happy with the way I was being utilized? No. But would I have wanted to do all of the other things on the basketball court and lose? No way. I was a team player who cared about winning. That was the main thing above all else. So I tried to do what I could do within the context of how I was being utilized. I tried to take advantage of my ability at all times, given the situation, and I tried to do my part to help the team win.
Now, let’s flip over to the other side of the coin. I give Coach Taylor all of the credit for developing the defensive aspect of my game. And defense was what really won the national championship for us. Fred talked to Pete Newell, who coached at California, and he got a lot of information from Pete on how to build team defense. This was the summer prior to that 1960 championship team. He got all of us kids to buy into that thing. And I think from that concept, the thing that I learned the most was how to play solid, fundamental defense. And now [former Ohio State teammate Bob] Knight has taken that whole thing up a notch, to a higher level. But he got it from Ohio State, from Fred Taylor, and Fred Taylor got it from Pete Newell. So, between those two things, that’s what I remember the most about playing basketball at Ohio State – the frustration that I had, and the defensive fundamentals that I was able to take with me to the next level.
1960 was
a magical year for you, as the Buckeyes won both the Big Ten and the NCAA
Championship. Please take me back to 1960 – what was it like to win the
national title as a member of your home state Buckeyes?
I
was ecstatic, because winning covers up a multitude of sins. It was great.
The following year – my senior year – I accepted my role because it was my
last season of collegiate basketball. Maybe I’m off base, but I still feel
that I was never utilized properly. One of my assistant college coaches
told me one time that in the recruiting process, the thing that you don’t
want to do is overdo recruiting. Sometimes you can pull in too much talent,
and you find that the pieces don’t fit. When I say they don’t fit, I mean
that they’re not a healthy fit. We had so much talent at Ohio State that
I’m not sure it fit, but we made it fit because we had good kids. You know
what I mean? There wasn’t a bad kid on the floor. As soon as we stepped on
the court we all played together. But as I look back, there was a lot of
frustration on that team. Maybe we had too much talent.
Again, that is neither here nor there. We won the championship in 1960, so everyone was happy. And that was our goal. We wanted to go out on the floor each game with the idea of getting better, and with the goal of coming one step closer to winning a national championship. We knew we were that good. That’s the flipside to having all of that talent. We knew we had more talent than any team that came up against us. It was just a matter of playing together, and playing within Fred’s system. That meant accepting your role for the team, even if it didn’t make the most of your talent. It also meant playing the kind of defense that Fred and installed after working with Pete Newell. And because it was such a good group of kids, we were able to put egos aside and come together for that common cause. Winning that championship was by far the most rewarding part of my career at Ohio State.
The
following season, Ohio State battled Ed Jucker’s Cincinnati squad for the
national championship. Please take me back to that tournament in general,
and that title game in particular.
We
were undefeated going into the final game. In my opinion, we would have
beaten that team nine out of the ten times that we played them. We were the
defending champions, so the pressure was clearly on us. We were 31-0 and we
played the title game in Kansas City. At that particular time, there was a
preliminary game played in the NCAA Tournament, and then there was a
championship game. So you had four teams in the finals. The two losers
played the consolation game for third place, and then the two winners played
for the national championship. That’s the way it was structured.
Like I said, the tournament was held in Kansas City, and there were no locker rooms in the facility. You had to dress at the hotel, and then walk across the tunnel connecting the hotel to the stadium. Now remember, we were the defending champions. The previous game, the consolation game, I think it went into two or three overtimes. When you’re the defending champions, I believe that you’ve got to prime the pump and be ready to play, because the pressure is on you. Do you agree? We were supposed to start the championship game at 7:30PM – that’s when we were supposed to take to the floor. Well, the consolation game went one overtime, then two, and then three. By the time we walked onto the floor, we had lost that momentum. I know what people are going to say, but I believe that with all my heart. When we were ready to go out, someone came over and informed us that there was overtime. Mind you, the coach has the team primed and ready to go on the floor to compete. And we were ready. We were ready to go out and get the job done. By the time we went onto the floor, we were already out of synch. And I remember walking out there, standing on the court, and being unable to find the basketballs. They were nowhere to be found. It was just something else to jolt us out of rhythm, and to me, we never got started. From there the whole game was just an uphill battle.
Now, that is just my personal opinion. It’s like the analogy of a racehorse. The racehorse is all primed to race, you take him to the gate, and then you pull him away. You take him back again and pull him away. After the third or fourth time, the horse is confused. You load him into the gate and the race begins. What’s going to happen? The horse is just going to stand there because it doesn’t know what’s going on. I think that’s exactly what happened in that game. I give Cincinnati all of the credit. They beat us fair and square. But Tom Thacker told me one time when we were together in Boston that, to a man, Cincinnati never expected to beat us in that championship game. But I give them credit. They went out and beat us.