BATON ROUGE – There were lots of memories, lots of good stories and some reflective talk about former teammates Tuesday afternoon as Durand “Rudy” Macklin met with the media in preparation for the retirement of his jersey Saturday at halftime of the 3 p.m. men’s basketball game with LSU and Kentucky at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center.
Coach Dale Brown sat alongside Macklin and introduced him to the media at the press conference.
Macklin was a two-time first-team All-American in 1980 and 1981 and led LSU to the 1980 SEC Tournament Championship and the 1981 SEC title and the NCAA Final Four. He finished his career as the all-time leading rebounder in school history and the second leading all-time scorer behind only Pistol Pete Maravich.
Tickets remain on sale for Saturday’s game at LSUsports.net and at the LSU Athletics Ticket Office. LSUsports.net is documenting Macklin’s year-by-year career and that series will resume Thursday with Macklin’s two junior seasons.
Here are the opening comments of both Coach Brown and Macklin at today’s session:
Rudy Macklin Press Conference
February 2, 2010
FORMER LSU HEAD COACH DALE BROWN
Opening statement…
“Rudy’s career cannot be summed up in statistics. I’m going to start with the statistics and then talk about why he’s the kind of person he is. He was really the sparkplug to giving us an opportunity to really recruit nationally true All-Americans. When you come from a basketball state in Kentucky, and (the University of) Kentucky is on one side and Louisville is on the other side, both wanting you, and a superstar chose to come to LSU, I think it gave vision to other guys. ‘Hey, man. They must have something going.’
“In that arena (Maravich Center), you will see three other (men’s) jerseys already hanging and the Maravich jersey. That’s a record (NCAA scoring record) that will never be broken. I think in Rudy’s first game, he established a record that will probably never be broken – the 32 rebounds, which is just incredible. Another record he holds and being from Kentucky, I know he’s going to smile here, he was on a team that beat Kentucky six times. Prior to that in LSU history, they’d only won twice. He was on two SEC championship teams and an SEC Tournament championship and the most wins in LSU history. They were not all because of his statistics but just the kind of person he was.
“Everybody on the team liked him. He was a fun guy to coach. He was never a know-it-all, and there’s a light year of difference between a star and a superstar. Stars have great stats, but superstars make other people better on a team. He was that kind of guy. He was always patting a guy on the butt. Everybody liked him. He was the captain of the team, but the greatest tribute Rudy had was he was just a doggone good human being. He was always smiling. He was always complimentary. He had a real fire inside of him burning all the time, but after the ball game he was always a gentleman, and it was truly an honor for me to be involved with Rudy. I think what an honor to have this. As we well know, jerseys just don’t get retired (that often), and what an honor for this to happen.”
FORMER LSU PLAYER RUDY MACKLIN
Opening statement…
“It’s good to see that I can still draw a crowd. I tell you, what an incredible journey. I would first like to thank the LSU Athletic Department, (Senior Associate Sports Information Director) Kent Lowe and his people and the Hall-of-Fame committee and those who selected me to have my jersey retired. It just seems like yesterday when coach Brown and I were sitting in Johnny Park where I learned how to play ball, trying to decide if I was going to go to LSU or Louisville. There was one conversation that really changed the course of my life, and with (former Louisville coach) Denny Crum sitting in his car in front of the school, we left him behind. UCLA called and worried my parents to death, and the Georgia Tech coaches were trying to follow my mother around. The Tennessee coaches were just blowing our phones up, and there was just tremendous pressure at that time. There were so many negatives out there, saying that I shouldn’t come and play for this man (Brown) and that LSU was never going to be a basketball school and how LSU was always just about football and nobody comes to games. When you’re 17-years-old listening to all these negatives, you start to sometimes believe that it’s so, but there was really one person who really brought it home for me, and that was this man sitting to my left (Brown).
“Somebody who I just met and somebody who had a dream, and he was asking me to follow his dream. That seems kind of impossible to do with somebody you just met. You don’t know him that well. He came out of nowhere. There were so many negatives about his school and himself, but he said if I went to those other big-time basketball schools like a Louisville or Kentucky, they would always be successful whether I went there or not. If you go to LSU, you can always say you built something, and that always stood out in my mind. He believed it with all his heart. He looked me in the eye, and I said, ‘I don’t know why, but I’m just going to tell you. I believe what you’re telling me.’
“Coming here has been a lifelong dream. We proved everyone wrong. They didn’t think we could turn this into a basketball school, but we did. We just ignored all the negatives, and we just did one thing and one thing only – we kept winning. That’s what it’s all about. I couldn’t have done it without my teammates because basketball is a team game. You’re playing for one of the best point guards in the country, some of the best shooting guards in the country and defensive players all around. He put together a squad that just meshed together. Sure I grabbed most of the headlines, but it was my teammates that brought me here to this particular point in my life right now.
“Seeing this school going from 300 people attending the game to when I left, you could barely get a ticket, and that’s a sign of success. That’s leaving a legacy behind. That’s enabling your school to recruit better players such as a Shaquille O’Neal or a Chris Jackson or a Stanley Roberts. It opened the door for others, but it also did something that I didn’t expect and didn’t see coming. When we began to have our rise to the top so to speak, I noticed the landscape of the university had changed. I noticed the landscape of the arena had changed. More people of color were starting to come and attend LSU. More people of color were buying season tickets. The school was now diversified. We only had about 1,000 minority students on the campus when I arrived, but when I left, minority enrollment went up tremendously. It let everyone know that LSU had gone to the next level, not only athletically but also scholastically and academically, and anybody and everybody were welcome at LSU. That was probably my greatest accomplishment, help LSU not only in basketball but also go to the next level as far as their academic enrollment.
“LSU will always be in my heart and in my mind. My whole family is LSU fans now. They will all be here on Saturday. My only regret is my parents will not be here. They both passed away some years ago, and that’s something I know they would really have been proud of. This person to the left of me was my mother’s favorite person.
“I just want to thank everyone in this room, especially the media. Charles Alexander, who you all know, when I first came here he invited me to Football Media Day at LSU. I went over there and saw all the news outlets, everywhere from Sports Illustrated to all the big sports magazines from all over the country. He was signing autographs and getting interviewed from all the media outlets from everywhere. When I came to our Media Day, all we had was Sam King from the Advocate and a guy from the Daily Reveille, but that next year, after I pulled down 32 rebounds, and we pulled off 10 in a row, that’s when things started to happen. Our Media Day next year was as crowded as football’s was, and that’s a sign of success. It put LSU basketball on the map as a basketball power. We went from the floor out there on the ‘PMAC’ to the rubber-top floor to the wooden floors now to the big Jumbotron and the refurbished locker rooms and all those wonderful things that changed when we got LSU to the next level. That really helps out recruiting and things like that.
“Thank you all for helping me to be here, help shape the person I am, the player I was, and without your help and support, especially the fan support from the front row lunatics on down, they’ve always been there. I can still hear the roar of the crowds in my mind and in the past. It will never go away, and I just hope that we can get that kind of crowd this Saturday for this LSU team because anything can happen in the ‘PMAC.’ It’s a magical place. There have been No. 1 teams that have been known to fall there, and I think that once they put it (the current team) together, I think they could have a very big game and beat the team that I loved beating over the course of my years.”