The Jerry Sichting Interview
By:
Michael D. McClellan
|
Friday, November 3rd,
2006
You were born on November 29th, 1956, in Martinsville, Indiana. Please
share some of the memories from your childhood, and also some of the events
in your life that led you to the basketball court?
The
main thing that drew me to basketball was, number one, growing up in
Indiana. Number two, my family moved when I
was about three years old. The
property that the house was on was connected to a park, and the basketball
court was about twenty feet from my backyard. I grew up on the basketball
court, playing outside whenever the weather permitted, and whenever the
weather didn’t permit. That’s kind of what drew me to basketball. And
being in a small town in Indiana, back in those days that was a major source
of entertainment. Everybody looked up to whoever played on the high school
team, and your goal as a kid in grade school and junior high was to make the
varsity basketball team. And as you got closer to achieving that goal, then
you maybe thought about making the Indiana All-Star Team, which was a huge
deal in those days. So that’s how I really go interested in basketball.
The guys that played on the varsity team would be over in that park a lot in
the summer, and I would just try to do what they did.
You were a four-year starter at Martinsville High School, and played for the
legendary Sam Alford. Please tell me about your high school basketball
career.
Coach
Alford came as I was coming in as a freshman. He really rebuilt the
program. There had been some years when Martinsville had had good teams,
but it had been fairly inconsistent. In his first couple of years as head
coach – especially my freshman year – we struggled a little bit. He decided
to go with a youth movement, I guess you would call it, and he played a lot
of freshmen and sophomores. We didn’t have a lot of seniors that year. We
really took a lot of lumps because we played one of the most difficult
schedules in the state. I think we only won five or six games my freshman
year. The next year we turned around and had a winning season, and then my
last couple of years we consistently ranked in the state, and had a really
good experience in terms of how well we did in the regular season. That’s
back during the days of the legendary one-class tournament, so we never did
make it to the state finals. But we were a good team. We played in this
old gym that was built in the 1920s. I tell people that it was almost a
high school version of the Boston Garden. It was a big ol’ brick building
called Glenn Curtis Gymnasium, and it sat separate from the rest of the
school. When it was built, it held more than the population of the town.
That’s the same gym that Johnny Wooden played in the ‘20s. They may have
played one more season after I graduated from Martinsville High School, and
then after that they moved to a new high school. It was an incredible
atmosphere – we’d pack it for every home game, and I think we lost one game
there my last two years, during my junior year, and it was really quite a
home court advantage.
You were
an all-state quarterback at Martinsville, and Notre Dame showed interest in
you. What led you to choose basketball instead, and what factored into your
decision to attend Purdue?
I
was always a basketball-first athlete. I liked football, although I didn’t
play my freshman year. What drew me to football was the head coach that
came in on the football side, maybe a year or two before Alford came in, and
he really turned the football program around. The football program in
Martinsville had always been horrendous, and we never had a winning football
team. The coach was Bill Siderowitz, and my freshmen year the team went
9-1, which really got the whole town in a frenzy. It was as if the
community discovered for the first time that there was a sport called
football. So coach really did a sales job on me, and talked me into coming
out my sophomore year. I was a backup quarterback then, and we finished
with another 9-1 season. By the time I was a senior we finished the job and
went undefeated. Growing up, I’d always liked football. We basically
played whatever sport was in season at the time; like I said, I lived in the
park as a kid. The baseball diamond was there, tennis courts…we played
pickup football all of the time, tackle football without pads, so I’d always
liked playing football. But before Siderowitz, everybody thought our high
school program was a joke, so a lot of the good athletes wouldn’t even go
out for awhile. But this coach completely turned it around, and my senior
year in football is one of the best experiences that I’ve ever had in
sports.
I really never gave college football serious consideration. I just played in high school because I liked it, and because we had some really good players on the team. Notre Dame never actually offered me a scholarship, but I could have gone to Purdue or Indiana and played football. My first love was basketball, and quite a few schools showed a lot of interest in me. My coach, Sam Alford, really wanted me to go to Indiana, and I was actually recruited by Indiana. I was giving it serious consideration, but I really hadn’t made my mind up, and Indiana gave the scholarship to another player. It really was a source of motivation for me after that, because I kind of thought that [head coach Bob] Knight didn’t think that I could play in the Big Ten. So it came down to Cincinnati, Louisville and Purdue. I had grown up being a Purdue and an Indiana fan. I remember Rick Mount and those teams of the late sixties and early seventies, and even back to when the Van Arsdales played…I remember watching both of them on TV – this was back when there were only four channels to choose from, but all of the Indiana and Purdue games were televised. So I went to visit Purdue. And like I said, I wanted to play in the Big Ten. So I decided to go there.
You were
All-Big Ten following during senior season at Purdue. As one of the best
guards in the country, did you feel that you would get the opportunity to
play basketball in the NBA?
I
wasn’t sure. I wasn’t a high draft choice or anything, and to be honest I
thought the NBA was probably an outside shot at best. I just thought I was
a fringe player who might need the perfect situation to get there. I had
confidence in my ability. One thing that definitely helped me was playing
in the Big Ten, because there was so much great competition in those days.
In the late seventies, the Big Ten was the best conference in the country,
hands down. When you go back and start picking apart the different players
that played in the Big Ten, and the length of their careers in the NBA, it’s
really quite amazing. I don’t know of any conference since then that’s had
that many players play that long in the NBA. Almost every team had an NBA
point guard, with the possible exception of Illinois. Quinn Buckner was at
Indiana. Kelvin Ransey was at Ohio State. Rickey Green was at Michigan.
Magic Johnson was at Michigan State. Wes Matthews was at Wisconsin.
Minnesota had Ray Williams and Osborn Lockhart, who played for the
Globetrotters. Billy McKinney was at Northwestern. So all of those guys
matriculated into the NBA, and those were just the guards. There were a lot
of forwards and centers who made it to the NBA as well – Mychal Thompson,
Kent Benson, Joe Barry Carroll…all of those guys were in the Big Ten. So
that’s what really prepared me, and what gave me the confidence that I could
play NBA basketball. I knew that I’d be a bubble-type of player coming out
of college, but I knew I had a shot if I just got with the right team.
