The Jerry Sichting Interview
By:
Michael D. McClellan
|
Friday, November 3rd,
2006
You became a free agent during the summer of ’85. Jan Volk expressed an
interest in you, and yet the team went out and selected Sam Vincent from
Michigan State. Please take me back to that period in you life, and to the
events that led you to sign with the Celtics.
I
actually made the first phone call to the Celtics to see if there was any
interest. Growing up, my two favorite teams were the
Pacers and the Celtics.
The Pacers were in the ABA in those days, that the Celtics were the greatest
team in NBA history. I followed them in the late 60s, and then on into the 70s
when John Havlicek and Dave Cowens were running the show. I just always liked
the style of play – I felt that they played basketball the right way. They had
just been defeated by the Lakers in ’85, and I was a free agent. With a little
bit of encouragement from my wife, I finally picked up the phone. I’ll never
forget that. She said, ‘You should just call them. Maybe they have interest,
because they definitely want to add outside shooting after losing to the
Lakers.’ So, I called Chris Ford, and Jan Volk was calling before you know it.
He said that they were definitely interested. It was right before the draft,
and he asked me to call him back after the draft. When they picked Sam Vincent
in the first round, I decided not to call back. A day or two later, Jan calls
me and says, ‘I thought you were going to call’. I said, ‘Well, I thought you
got your point guard in Sam Vincent’. He says, ‘Well, we like Sam, but you’re
more of a proven commodity right now. We’re still very interested in you’. So
that kind of got the ball rolling. I was coming off a stress fracture in ’85,
so I went to Boston and had the doctors look at me. I had a couple of
interviews, and I went to KC Jones’ basketball camp that summer. I got to sit
down and talk with him a little bit, and before you knew it I signed the
contract.
Your
arrival in Boston coincided with that of the great Bill Walton. What did a
healthy and hungry Walton mean to this team in terms of regaining the NBA
Championship, and what was your relationship like with the bid red head?
He
was the NBA Sixth Man of the Year that year, and he provided a lot of stuff
for that team. He was a great passer, a great rebounder, and so
intelligent. He was just on a mission that year. He was probably the most
focused guy from the first day of camp until the end of the season, because
he had gone through so much adversity with his health. I think he knew that
this was probably his swan song. He had a couple of years left in him,
possibly, and he was finally in a position to be on another great team. I
think everybody would tell you that he was just a fantastic teammate.
Larry
Bird has been raised to a level of near mythology. What was Larry like as a
person, and just how great a player was he during the 1985-86 season?
Well,
he was a great player, obviously, and he was the leader of the team. He
definitely was all about winning. The hard work that he put in carried over
to everyone else on the team. He could do some amazing things on the
basketball floor. He had a sixth sense for what was going to happen next –
his anticipation and recognition of what was going to happen in the next
second or two was really unparalleled. It enabled him to do some things
that other people with the same athletic ability wouldn’t be able to come
close to doing.
The
Celtics were practically unbeatable at home that season. What was it like
to play in the Boston Garden, and what was it like to perform in front of
those fans?
The
Garden was a place like no other, especially in terms of the fans. The just
never believed that we were going to lose. There were several times that
year when we were down, but I don’t think anybody that sat on our bench, or
anybody who was on the court, or anybody who was in the stands, ever thought
that we weren’t going to come back and win. It was only a matter of time,
and it was only a matter of what the eventual winning margin was going to
be. It took us a little while to really jell that year because Walton and
myself were new to the team, and there a few tweaks in the lineup and the
rotations from the year before. Once we started rolling – I’d say in early
January – we went through once stretch, a good three week period, where we
were beating teams by an average of over twenty points. We just got to
clicking and everybody kind of fell into their roles and knew what everybody
else on the team was going to do, night in and night out. We were pretty
much untouchable there for a while.
