Storytime with Doug: an Allen Iverson tale

I emailed Doug Gottlieb recently 10 questions I had for him about his career, OSU sports, and some of his favorite stories. He sent back some gems. I’m going to bring them to you in installments over the next few weeks/months. This is the first.

Best guy you ever faced in your career (college or pro)?

Victor Williams, honestly. He consistently ate my ass in practice. And I mean that in a good way.

Now Vic threw more passes into the stands than any player I have ever seen. He couldn’t remember plays sometimes and he just didn’t value the ball, but I’ve never seen a player as quick and good in the mid range as Vic. He was a beast on defense too. Worst part for me, was he played every day like it was his Big 12 championship and all the other guys had chumps on them.

Vic lit me up, Im not going to lie, I had good days against him, when we split up teams and played games my team always won, but containing Vic was a chore. He made this exhaling noise when he went into his “shit” as we say… he would come down the court make this “chhh” and bye, he was gone.

Dude could go.

Outside of Vic, Jamaal Tinsley couldn’t shoot, but he was too big for me.

I played against AI at Notre Dame twice. He got a bad 28 against us in South Bend but he was the rare combination of Victor Williams like quickness and Jason Kidd end to end speed. We never practiced zone, put one in the day before G-Town and nearly beat em twice playing zone for 37 minutes.

We went man late and I took the ball from him. He was a soph, took horrible shots, but dunked on our 7-footer and had the best line mid game I can remember.

We started five white guys that game, at Notre Dame in 1996, probably the best year talent wise in Big East history.

Uconn had Ray Allen, Daron Scheffer and Travis Knight, was ranked in the top five all year, Georgetown had AI, Othello Harrington, Jahidi White, Williams (Junk Yard Dawg) and Victor Paige. Nova had Kerry Kittles and Alvin Williams, Syracuse finished runner up at the Final Four with John Wallace. The league was sick at the top, look it up.[1. I did — UConn, Nova, and Georgetown were all ranked in the top six to start the season. It was like the LSU-Bama-Arkansas triumvirate in 2011 in football when they finished the season at 1-2-5.]

Anyway, the Hoyas come into the Bend and we throw out me, Pat Garrity, Ryan Hoover (incredible 6’1″ shooter), Matt Gotsch (aforementioned dunked on 7-footer) and Derek Manner.

So my boy Antoine Wyche checks into the game and he is asking me a question while Garrity shoots a free throw and AI pops in and is like “damn, ya’ll got a lot of white dudes”– “They got a rule in Indiana or something?”

Again, big thanks to Doug for doing this. He gave me some pretty epic stories — I really think you guys are going to love them.