John Siegler lives in a yellow house on the water — the kind you notice from afar and slow down for without realizing it. His car is parked halfway into the garage, the back bumper catching the sun, its custom license plate, JOHN8, is legible if you know to look for it.
It’s a nod to his days on the mound for the University of Miami baseball team, though he never says it that way. He doesn’t talk about “his days.” He talks about people. About moments.
On his leg, the orange-and-green U is still there, too. The ink has softened with time, the edges no longer sharp, but the meaning hasn’t faded at all.
The last few months have been full of people calling him a living embodiment of the Hurricane spirit. But when you ask Siegler about it, he shakes his head.
“I hadn’t planned to go back and finish my degree,” he said, walking me into his living room and gesturing toward a chair facing a bookshelf and a wall crowded with a lifetime of achievements. “I was sitting there, looking at that shelf, and I thought it would be a good place for my diploma.”
No one except his parents knew that he hadn’t graduated.
“That’s when I turned to my wife, Brenda,” he said. “It was time.”
For most people, graduation is a four-year sprint that ends in a ten-second walk across a stage. For John Siegler, that walk took sixty years.
Siegler pitched for Miami from 1961 to 1965, leaving the University just a few credits shy of completing his business degree. Then life arrived — the U.S. Army, marriage, children, long workdays and the slow accumulation of responsibility that doesn’t wait for unfinished dreams to catch up.
But at one point, college and baseball were integral pieces in his life.
“I miss it every day,” Siegler said.
His world was once defined by practices and dugouts, by the easy camaraderie of teammates. He knew he was good — a pitcher who learned how to grind through bad days, to compete when his arm was tired and his legs were heavier than they should’ve been. That feeling followed him like a shadow he didn’t want to shake.
He spoke of the homesickness, too. About coping with it through long stretches of fishing, alone, away from the noise of campus.
“My dad used to take me,” he shrugged. “Maybe that’s why I did it.”
In spite of that homesickness, he built a life. One that, in a quiet way, had been waiting for him to return.
But these days, his competitive spirit has traded box scores for crossword grids. Still racing the clock, still keen to win — even if no one is watching.
These small rituals have kept him tethered to something he wasn’t ready to lose.
Because the potential for his degree never disappeared, it just paused.
This past fall, at 82 years old, Siegler logged onto Zoom for the first time. With encouragement from his family and the support of Miami Herbert’s undergraduate advising team and UM Athletics, he enrolled in two online classes.
He learned how to mute himself on Zoom. He learned how to share a screen. And, more importantly, he learned that the door he thought had closed decades ago had been waiting for him the whole time.
On Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025, inside the Watsco Center, Siegler finally walked across the stage — forever a Hurricane, but this time, with a diploma in hand, surrounded by a class young enough to be his grandchildren.
But when you talk to him, it isn’t the ceremony he lingers on. It’s the feeling of returning to a place that never stopped belonging to him.
“I’m just grateful,” he said. “But mostly, proud.”
And he should be. John Siegler is not a comeback story. He is a continuation.
His life holds many chapters — pitcher, soldier, husband, businessman, father of four, grandfather of eleven — and now, college graduate. The Miami diploma will sit at the top of them all, not because it defines the rest, but because it completes something tender that couldn’t be rushed.
After 60 years, he finally stepped onto the stage he once thought he’d never reach. Except, he didn’t walk onto that stage like a ceremony. He walked like someone who had been waiting in the bullpen for nearly a lifetime.
Perhaps this is the ninth inning he’s been waiting for his entire life.
And what a shutout it is.