The Ron Bonham Interview
By:
Michael D. McClellan
|
Tuesday, May 17th, 2005
You were Indiana's Mr. Basketball in 1960. What did this honor mean to you
then, and what does it mean to you now?
One
of the things it proved was that team success really goes hand-in-hand with
individual success. We had awesome teams during my junior and senior
seasons, so we were in the limelight quite a bit. All of the big newspapers
all around the state covered us, including the Indianapolis paper. We were
winning games by such a large margin that reporters followed us everywhere.
So I think our team accomplishments had a lot to do with people getting to
know about my ability, which in turn led to me being named Mr. Basketball.
You followed the great Oscar Robertson to the University of Cincinnati. Was
this a coincidence or by design?
I
wanted to go to a basketball school. I had just over 300 offers for
college, and I was torn between Purdue and the University of Cincinnati.
Purdue was a college football power, and the University of Cincinnati was a
power basketball program. And with Oscar being at Cincinnati, oh boy…I went
to his senior banquet – he was a senior in college when I was a senior in
high school – and you couldn’t even see Oscar at the table. He won every
award you could imagine that year.
I just really wanted to be a part of the UC program. It was strictly a run-and-shoot, which is what I’d always played in high school, but then the coach had some health problems prior to my sophomore year and Ed Jucker came in as coach. So my sophomore year I really had to buckle down and work on defense, and all the other aspects of the game. It was a slowdown, half court type of offense, which is completely different from what I’d ever played before. But it was obviously very successful.
Although denied a championship in high school, the Bearcats won the NCAA
title during your freshman and sophomore seasons, while finishing as a
runner-up to Loyola of Chicago following your junior year at the school.
What memories stand out after all of these years, and what was it like to be
a part of the Golden Age of Bearcat Basketball?
I
can remember being well ahead of Loyola – we were the top-rated team in the
country, and we were winning that championship game handily – and Vic Rouse
was guarding me. At one point in the game he actually said, ‘Ron, great
game. You guys have a great team.’ He had actually given up. Well, our
strategy when leading like that was to go into a stall. We had worked on
their zone press for two weeks. We felt we were capable of holding the lead
for an extended period of time. Well, we were so far ahead that we started
stalling with well over ten minutes left in the game, instead of our usual
six-to-eight minutes. It was just one of those things where the momentum
changed. We threw the ball away, lost momentum, and I’ll be doggone if they
didn’t come back and beat us in overtime. We should have had three national
championships in a row, but the game just got away from us.
The talent
on those three Cincinnati teams was phenomenal. There were two high school
All-Americans that came in as freshmen – George Wilson and myself. We had
great defensive players in Tom Thacker and Paul Hogue. Anytime you can beat
an Ohio State team that had John Havlicek, Jerry Lucas and Larry Siegfried,
and do it for the national championship, then you’re really doing
something. Ohio State was rated Number 1 in the nation during my freshman
and sophomore seasons, and Cincinnati was rated Number 2, and we beat them
for the title both times – and pretty handily, at that. So that shows the
talent that you had on those Cincinnati teams.
You were a two-time All-America selection at Cincinnati. How did it feel to
be recognized as one of the greatest players in the country?
It
was a real thrill. Basketball had been such a large part of my life, going
back as far as I could remember as a youngster, and to be named one of the
top five players in the United States was such an honor. But there again, I
need to talk about my teammates. We were so successful because of the
group, not just because of one player, and I ended up getting a lot of votes
because of that success. I may have been the top-scorer, but there were
other players who got you the ball, set the picks, things like that. And a
lot of the plays were set for me, so that I could shoot. So I was lucky all
through my career – high school, college, and then with the Boston Celtics –
to be able to play with great teammates who know how to win.
