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The Tony Delk Interview

By: Michael D. McClellan  |  Tony Delk arrived in Boston as part of Rick Pitino’s UK pipeline, a member of the ’96 Kentucky championship team dubbed “The Untouchables” and still regarded as one of the greatest collegiate teams ever.  Antoine Walker was on that team.  Walter McCarty, too.  Ron Mercer.  Wayne Turner.  All eventually wore a Celtics uniform, either playing for Pitino himself, or later for the man who replaced him on the bench, former UK assistant coach Jim O’Brien.  Delk, brought in late in the 2001-02 regular season, arrived in time to help the Celtics end a six year playoff drought, the longest in team history.

“Tony helped fortify our backcourt situation heading into the playoffs,” O’Brien says.  “He could handle the ball, and he was a great shooter.  We knew he could help us.”

For the uninitiated, Delk’s hoops career got its start in Brownsville, Tennessee.  Nicknamed “Shooter” in high school, Delk transitioned from a noteworthy high school career to college prominence at UK, leading the Wildcats to that ’96 NCAA Championship over Syracuse.  Delk was named the Final Four Most Outstanding Player, and capped his college career by being named a consensus first-team All-American.

Selected by the Charlotte Hornets with the 16th overall pick in the 1996 NBA Draft, Delk embarked on an 11-year NBA career that included stints with Golden State, Sacramento, Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, and Detroit.  It was his abbreviated stay in Boston that endeared him to Celtics fans.  He was there for that emotional playoff return, which included wins over Philly and Detroit on the way to the 2002 Eastern Conference Finals.  Never-mind that the Celtics fell to the Nets is six games; Delk played a key part in that memorable Game 3 win, a 23-point fourth quarter comeback that not only breathed new life into an iconic franchise, but gave future Hall of Famer Paul Pierce a glimpse of things to come.

Delk finished his NBA career with averages of 9.1 PPG, 2.5 RPG and 1.9 APG, before signing a contract with the Greek basketball team, Panathinaikos, in Athens. He won the Greek Cup, the Greek Championship and the European Championship with Panathinaikos, and announced his retirement from professional basketball in November 2007. In 2008.

On February 14, 2015, the University of Kentucky bestowed its highest athletic honor on Delk, retiring his iconic “00” and raising his jersey to the Rupp Arena rafters.

“It’s a great honor, just to be amongst the great players here who have laced up, who have worn the Blue,” Delk says, recalling the event.  “I’ve played with a lot of great guys, and to go from my backyard in Brownsville, to the hardwood of Rupp Arena, who would have thought that?”

Please take be back to the beginning.

Covington was my birthplace and my hometown, but I made my name in Brownsville, Tennessee. I have brothers who are 15-to-20 years older than me, and they were my role models growing up.  They didn’t drink or smoke, and were really good influences.  I didn’t get to see them play because I was too young, but I lived vicariously through the stories that I heard from family and friends.  They’re the ones who taught me how to play fundamental basketball.  They weren’t easy on me.  It was tough love.

 

Did you follow the NBA growing up?

My brothers were Dr. J fans, so I initially became a Philadelphia 76ers fan.  When you live in Tennessee, you don’t get a chance to get all of the cable channels, but we got WGN out of Chicago.  So when Michael Jordan blew up I switched allegiances and became a Chicago Bulls fan.  They were always on TV, so it was great.

 

Let’s talk high school ball.  What memory jumps to mind?

Our freshman team won the championship, and then my coach, Rick Sullivan, put me on the varsity team.  It was a big deal because that didn’t happen very often.  He walked to the end of the bench during a game and asking me if I wanted to go in.  I was scared to death!  I remember telling him that I wasn’t ready – I might have gone in and scored a couple of points, who knows – but I promised him that that I’d be ready the next year.  I started as a sophomore, and by the time I ended my career I was Haywood High School’s all-time leading scorer.

 

What kind of music were you into?

Music was a huge part of my life back then.  I listened to old school R&B legends like Marvin Gaye and the Temptations.  Michael Jackson was a favorite.  I grew up during the Ice Cube era, so I also listened to N.W.A., Public Enemy, Run DMC, Fat Boys, Houdini, Eric B, Rakim, the list goes on and on.  Those artists were from my generation and brought in a completely different style of hip-hop and rap.  It addressed topics like police brutality, which is still a major concern in the black community today.

I recently saw Straight Outta Compton and I thought that movie was great!  It took me back to when I was a young kid and being an N.W.A. fan.  I remember when Ice Cube left the group and came out with his first CD, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted which I had on cassette tape.  I’ll never forget being at a team camp, and our coach walked in when we were playing it.  He heard the profanity, made this face…and then he took my tape [laughs]!  It was a big deal to me at the time, because back then you had to go out and buy your music, and cassette tapes were like $14 or $15.  I had to save up for it…that cassette was an investment…but I never got it back [laughs].

 

Tell me about the recruiting process, and your decision to sign with Kentucky.

The recruiting process started for me when I began playing AAU basketball.  Coming from a small town, it was my opportunity to show the world that this country boy could play with the city guys.  I came out of nowhere – I was this long-armed who could jump out of the gym and score the ball.  We finished third in the nation when I was 15, and a year later I was voted the most outstanding player in the whole AAU tournament.  That really put me on the map as far as being one of the top recruits in the country.

All of the teams in the South started recruiting me –Arkansas, Kentucky, Georgia Tech, Tennessee, Memphis State.  I signed a letter of intent to play at Kentucky, even though I knew that it was going to be tough to earn minutes.  The Wildcats had guys like Jamal Mashburn and Travis Ford.  They’d barely lost out on a Final Four berth against Duke, so I knew that this Kentucky team was pretty good.

 

What was it like making the jump from high school to one of the biggest basketball programs in college basketball?

As a freshman, I didn’t play that much.  Dale Brown played my position.  He was a JUCO All-American, and he’d started as a junior, so he wasn’t going to let me beat him out for his position.  After three or four games I was ready to transfer.  I remember calling home to my mom and saying, ‘I’m not liking it here.  I’m not playing.  Maybe I should look somewhere else.’  It was very disheartening to watch my peers play, knowing that I’d put in all of this work.

 

You didn’t transfer.  How come?

Billy Donovan started working out with me.  We would get together and work out in the mornings, and then we’d play at night.  He kept me in shape, and he kept me engaged, and he told me that my time would come if I just stayed ready.  Dale Brown hurt his shoulder playing against Michigan in the Final Four, Coach Pitino put me in the game.  We ended up losing in overtime, but I played well against the Fab Five.  The next year I led the team in scoring.  The whole experience taught me to work hard and not buy into your own hype, because there’s always someone out there working to take your job.  Conversely, I learned that I wouldn’t be given the job.  I had to go out and earn it.

 

The 1996 Kentucky Wildcats rolled to the Final Four, defeating Syracuse for the National Championship.  How close were you as a team?

The things that I remember most and are most special are a lot of the off-the-court things that we did together as a team.  That’s one of the things that brought us so close together and made us the team that we were on the court.  We won 27 games in a row, and we won a championship.  A lot of that had to do with our closeness away from basketball.

 

Who were you listening to back then?

Tupac and Biggie were the ones on the rise.  Those guys were at the top of their game.  And when we won the championship, Tupac’s double CD, All Eyez on Me, was blowing up across the country.  I can’t even tell you how many times I played that CD.  He was a musical genius, just like Biggie.  My favorite Tupac song ever is Hit ‘Em Up.  Tupac fired off at anybody that had something negative to say, and you’d better not say anything negative about him because he would come back hard.  He put some lyrics together, and Hit ‘Em Up is a prime example.  Tupac could spit fire.  You could feel the venom that was coming out of his mouth whenever he was rapping.  There was an intensity to his rap that very few could match.

 

What were you watching?

The movie Friday came out that year.  Walter McCarty and I watched that movie over and over again – we knew the scenes, we knew the words, we knew the character’s expressions.  We really loved that movie.

 

How good is the competition at the NBA level?

Unbelievable.  You’re playing against the best players in the world every night, so it doesn’t matter the record of the team.  The talent is so good that you can’t take a night off.  You have to bring your A game every night.  You realize quickly that if you’re going to get paid – and keep getting paid – you have to perform your job and show them that you’re there for a reason.  For me it was always about always trying to prove a point, that I belonged.  Each and every year there is a draft.  Each and every year they’re bringing in the best players from college and around the world.  There’s also free agency.  That means that everybody is coming for your job.

 

Trades are a part of the business, and you’ve been involved in a few.  What’s it like to start off somewhere and then try to fit in somewhere else?

It’s about being in the right situation and being on the right team.  I had really good seasons with certain teams…I was finding my rhythm, loving the city, and enjoying my teammates…and then I would get traded and have to start all over again.  That was the hardest thing for me.

 

You’re something of a quiet guy.  What was your approach to playing the NBA game?

When I played the game, my intensity level went off the charts.  Off the court I like to have fun and joke around, but on the court I wanted to rip your heart out.  A lot of that fire came from sitting the bench at Kentucky, watching my peers play and knowing that I should be on the court.  I took it personal, and I was pissed off.  I’d take the court pissed off at the person guarding me, even if they didn’t know it.  I wanted to annihilate them.  That has to be your mentality. I tell kids today, you have to have a soft voice, but a killer instinct. And the players who are the greatest, some of those players have a killer instinct.

 

On January 2, 2001, you scored 53 points on 20-27 shooting from the field as a member of the Sacramento Kings.  What was it like to be in the zone?  

“That was my second game back in Sacramento after ending up in Phoenix.  It was one of those games were all of my shots came in rhythm.  It wasn’t like when you see a guy going for 50, 60 or 70 points, and his teammates are feeding him the ball.  My teammates weren’t feeding me.  I was getting my shots, but so was Rodney Rogers, Cliff Robinson, Shawn Marion, and Jason Kidd.  It was all in the flow.  I made nine or 10 consecutive shots, and I remember somebody saying, ‘Dude, you’ve got 45 points.’  I was in a zone, which I had to be to score that much volume, because I wasn’t the kind of player who commanded 20-to-25 touches a game.  Role players don’t get that many touches, and I certainly wasn’t a star like Allen Iverson.  On that night the opportunity came, and I made the most of it.”

 

The Kentucky pipeline was alive and well in Boston.  Did that help you adjust to life in a Celtics uniform?

Once I got to Boston it felt familiar.  Walter McCarty, Antoine Walker, and Coach O’Brien were all there.  Those guys knew me, and they knew my game.  Coach O’Brien allowed me to play to my strengths.  He knew that I wasn’t a traditional point guard – my gift was scoring – so he would have guys like Antoine help handle the ball.  I knew my role, which was to take intelligent shots and put the ball in the hole.  I knew I wasn’t going to be a start in college, and I had to be able to accept and embrace my role, and that’s what I did with the Boston Celtics.

 

You were part of that epic 2002 playoff comeback against the Nets.  What do you remember most?

It reminded me of how loud it was in Sacramento when I played for the Kings.  They were the only show in town, and I can’t begin to tell you how loud ARCO Arena was with the screaming fans and those bells horns.  That’s what the fan base was like when the Celtics were winning, and the fans went nuts in that Game 3 comeback.  We dug ourselves a big hole, but we were able to lock down on defense and then the shots started falling on the other end.  Boston fans had only known winning as far back as Bill Russell, so the six-year playoff drought had created a lot of pent up emotion.  We got the momentum and the fans fed off of that, and we fed off of them.

 

The Celtics brought you back the next season.

My second season with the Celtics was a lot better.  I suffered a bad ankle injury partway through the season, but I finished strong in the playoffs.  We won that first round playoff series against Indiana, before going on to have a tough series against New Jersey.  We were happy to make the playoffs, but losing to the Nets again was a bitter pill to swallow.

 

There were some of us who thought you were going to be in a Celtics uniform for several more years.

I felt I was really coming into my own, but that’s when Danny Ainge was hired.  He wanted to make some changes and put his touch on the team, so he started to dismantle some of the core players that had reached the Eastern Conference Finals the year before.  You’ve got to understand that when a new GM comes in, he has a different vision, so it was time to move on.  But my years in Boston were amazing.  Getting to play for one of the greatest franchises in history, you know, it doesn’t get any better than that.

 

Tell me about Paul Pierce.

When I think of a guy like Paul Pierce, I think of his love for the game and how hard he played.  Paul competed harder than most stars at that time.  He spent extra time before and after practice, doing whatever it took to be an elite player.

 

Did you ever meet Red Auerbach?

I never met Red Auerbach, but I remember him coming to the practice facility and I could smell his cigar.  We all knew that he was in the building.  I never got a chance to speak with him, but I appreciate what he did for black culture.  He was one of the first to open up the door and bring in black players and provide them with opportunities that hadn’t existed before.

 

Did you ever meet Bill Russell?

You can’t be a Boston Celtic player and have not met and talked to Bill Russell.  He is one of the greatest men I have ever met.  He’s a guy that’s helped pave the way for our culture, and what’s he’s done beyond the basketball court is remarkable.  He is a true pioneer.  Bill Russell also has the best stories, and he is one of the funniest guys.  That laugh is contagious.  When you hear him laugh, you can’t help but start laughing.  You might not know what he’s laughing about, but whatever it is, you’re laughing right along with him.

 

Out of all your coaches, which one had the biggest impact on your career?

Coach Pitino while I was at UK. He taught me the game – the mental aspect and the physical aspect. But most importantly, he prepared me for life after basketball. In fact, as a senior, Coach Pitino set me up with a really good business manager who’s been with me since 1996.

 

What’s an important lesson from Coach Pitino?

The most important thing that he taught me was to not let money define who you are, and to always stay humble. Because of that advice, once I began making a lot of money, it didn’t change who I was as an individual.  The money that comes in, in tandem with the fame from being on TV, results in an extreme pressure to change and let it go to your head, but my foundation in which Coach Pitino helped to create kept me grounded and humble.

 

What did this foundation consist of?

Mostly, it was surrounding myself with a good circle of friends, which was something else Coach Pitino provided. His circle of friends became our circle of friends. That’s one of the things I enjoyed most about him. He didn’t allow us to go out and meet new friends that that could take us away from being who we were, or give us money or some other thing we thought we wanted.

 

Why did you choose the number “00”?

My brother wore it before me, and I wanted to honor him.  I think I did a tremendous job just representing his number.

 

The University of Kentucky retired your number.  What does that me to you?

It’s a great honor, just to be among the great players who have laced up and worn the Blue.  I’ve played with a lot of great guys, and it was fun just being a part of the program.  To think of where I came from – starting out playing in Brownsville with my brothers, and then making to the hardwood of Rupp Arena, who would have thought that?

 

Last Question:  If you had one piece of advice for others, what would that be?

Hard work trumps shortcuts every time.  Put in the work, stay faithful to whatever it is that you choose to pursue, and you can walk away knowing that you’ve done things the right way.

Michael McClellan
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