The Big O

by Oscar P Robertson

  Legend has it that the week that Attucks opened, the Klan had a parade and celebrated the separation of black and white students. That was before my time, so I can’t verify the story any more than I can dismiss it. What I can say is that when I was a child, seeing the school’s green, gold, and white colors on a tee shirt commanded my attention. Players from Attucks dominated at the Dust Bowl and the Y.

  In those days, if you were black, you were told you weren’t smart. You were bad. You were inferior. Black people needed something to look up to, something to give us hope. This was why my brothers and I listened to Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson on the Friday night fights, and this, I think, is why the Crispus Attucks basketball team was so important to the black population of Indianapolis, why the African-American newspaper, The Indianapolis Recorder, covered the team so fervently. They won games.

  Well, imagine how important to our family it was when, in 1950, Flap made it onto the varsity squad at Crispus Attucks.

  Standing five feet nine, Flap was just a sophomore. He filled in as a reserve guard on a team loaded with talent. There was Hallie Bryant, the team’s leading scorer, who would go on to become one of the first black players to enroll in the University of Indiana. And Willie Gardner, a tall, thin, six-foot-eight forward, would be recruited by various colleges, but because his family was dirt-poor, he ended up signing on directly with the Harlem Globetrotters. As for Flap, after his high school career, he went to Indiana Central College (now the University of Indianapolis) and set a state collegiate scoring record, with 2,268 points in four years—a record that, as I write this, still stands for small colleges. Flap would also spend a short stretch with the Harlem Globetrotters. But that was later. In 1950 to 1951, the Crispus Attucks Tigers, coached by Ray Crowe, was the first all-black basketball team that played in the state finals of the Indiana High School Basketball Tournament.

  I vividly remember watching the regionals and the game that got them into the state finals. The state tournament was broadcast on television, and we watched the regional finals in our home. It was really something—that game was the first Crispus Attucks basketball game I ever watched, as well as the first sporting event I ever saw on television. Even if I didn’t understand that it was the state high school tournament, I knew something important was happening.

  With four and a half minutes to play in the 1951 regional finals, the Crispus Attucks Tigers trailed the all-white Anderson Indians by ten points. John “Noon” Davis, the Tigers’ fine forward, was called for his fifth and eliminating foul. My mother’s fist curled around a napkin as she watched a five-foot-nine sophomore checking into the game to replace Davis. Bailey “Flap” Robertson.

  A smattering of polite applause came from the sea of black faces stuffed behind the Attucks bench. There were shouts of encouragement from the black fans way up in the corner of the back bleachers, where all the police were on watch, ready to prevent any problems.

  Coach Ray Crowe had left Flap’s name off the roster during the sectional tournament for reasons he never fully explained. So this was Flap’s first action in the playoffs. He later told me and Henry that when he got a chance to play, he wanted to make sure the coach would remember him. And he did. The first time Flap touched the ball, he shot. Fifteen-foot jumper. Nothing but net. Anderson’s lead went down to eight.

  The Indianapolis Recorder’s Jim Cummings would report that this shot “rekindled a spark of hope in Attucks hearts. If sophomore Bailey Robertson—who didn’t even play in the sectional games—could score so easily, so can we.”

  Two quick baskets by Willie Gardner. A free throw by Bob Jewell. Within ninety seconds, the lead had been cut to three.

  Fifteen thousand fans were going wild in the Butler Fieldhouse. The Attucks supporters were stomping their feet and shouting. Across the floor, the Anderson fans were just as crazy.

  Hallie Bryant hit a turnaround jumper to cut the lead to 74–72. Now the Attucks corner broke into their legendary “Crazy Song.”

  Oh, Anderson is rough

  And Anderson is tough

  They can beat everybody

  But they can’t beat us

  Hi-de-hi-de, hi-de-hi

  Hi-de-hi-de, hi-de-ho

  That’s the skip, bob, beat-um

  That’s the crazy song

  Twenty-three seconds left. Anderson ahead by one. We brought the ball up court. A newspaper account of the game says there was light backcourt pressure. And that the Attucks coaching staff was trying to get the attention of his players, or the referee. Ray Crowe wanted to call time-out and set up a last shot. Nobody paid attention.

  Twelve seconds left. The ball was in the hands of Charlie West, a substitute Attucks guard. He drove and pulled up and attempted an acrobatic scoop. Missed. Ball out-of-bounds. Referees signal Attucks’s possession.

  Seven seconds left.

  Center Bob Jewell held up two fingers to set up an out-of-bounds play. The first two options were covered. Flap was not. My brother caught the ball on the baseline far in the corner. He did not look for Hallie Bryant. Did not worry about the called play. Flap jumped, cocked his wrist in its usual style.

  “I just grabbed the ball, shot, and prayed,” he told a reporter later.

  Some would remember the shot as flat and arcless, striking the side of the rim and bouncing straight up, as high as eight feet. Others offered the opinion that the ball bounced only a foot or so above the rim. Attucks’s coach Ray Crowe would always say that the shot floated with a lovely, high arc. One thing for sure, it hung high enough above the rim for some suspense.

  Straight down. Through the hoop.

  Final score: Crispus Attucks 81, Anderson 80.

  You could hear horns honking on the street and people cheering in the homes up and down Colton Street. Attucks players and fans started hugging in the middle of the court. All of a sudden, the world of black Indianapolis had somehow, magically expanded.

  “People told me their relatives died of heart attacks,” Flap would recall. “One lady said when the ball went through that hoop, she started to go into labor.”

  My mom and Henry were elated; I was overwhelmed with joy and happiness. I stayed up that night, anxious, waiting for Flap to come home. I did not realize that he had to deal with reporters (Indianapolis Recorder: “Without a doubt one of the most thrilling high school basketball games ever played in Indiana—or the world.”), or that the team would take a victory ride down Indiana Avenue, that the head of the police traffic division would—in the name of caution and security—send extra patrolmen to the west side and tour the area himself, in a squad car, or that the team and coaching staff would stop at Seldon’s Café for a late dinner of ham and sweet potatoes. I did not realize that there would be a celebratory walk back to Crispus Attucks, a bonfire, even a snake dance.

  There was no way for me, or anyone else, to know that Attucks would lose its next game, in the state semifinals, to Evansville Reitz. And there was no way of imagining the way basketball would infuse my life, the long, strange, and sometimes heartbreaking journey the game would take me on, the highs of championships and ceremonies, the lows of hardball politics and being blackballed from the sport that I so loved. No. All I knew that night was that things had changed. It was almost as if Sugar Ray Robinson had knocked out his mightiest opponent in the first round, except that on this night my brother was Sugar Ray; on that night the rest of the world was the opponent. I did not know how, could not have explained it for a million dollars. But after Flap’s shot, things would never be the same again for me. I knew it. For the first time, a candle of hope flickered inside my heart.

  It was early in the morning when Flap finally made it home. By then I was in bed, dreaming.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Li’l Flap

  1951–1954

  INDIANAPOLIS’S FIRST public-housing project was known as the Lockefield Gardens. The Gardens rose adjacent to Colton Street, not far from my house, and were built with asphalt basketball courts ou
t in front. Eventually, as many of the players from the lot on Colton shifted to playing at Lockefield, the asphalt courts absorbed the “Dust Bowl” name. The day after Flap hit that shot in the finals, I pretty much started living at the Lockefield courts. If it was a school day, I’d go there straight from school and stay until it was time to go home to do my chores and homework. If it was a weekend, I’d leave as soon as I got up, or right after changing out of my church clothes. Me and my trashed, secondhand basketball would head down Colton.

  That year, during Attucks’s run in the state tournament and on through the spring and summer, the Dust Bowl seemed especially crowded. The neighborhood echoed with the hard reverberations of basketballs getting pounded into the dirt, clay, and asphalt, and a film of dust was ever present, wafting through Naptown’s shanties and apartment complexes. There might be fifty or sixty guys on the side of the court—adults, high school cats, you name it—all of them sitting and waiting for their turn to run. If your team lost, you weren’t going to play anymore that day, so players had to put out, really compete. There wasn’t spare time to look around, pose, and see who was watching.

  Since I was too young to run with the best players, I had to show up early if I wanted to play and get on a team when games were just forming, before the big guns had taken over the courts. Lots of times I ended up off to the side, on my own, working on something basic: free throws, crossover dribbles, or dribbling with my weaker left hand. The basics were about all I could achieve back then, but I always liked counting down the seconds on an imaginary game clock. Then, with the score tied and time running out, I’d take the same shot Flap took, for all the money.

  Whether it was at the Dust Bowl, the Senate Avenue Y, or during Police Athletic League games a bit later, I took any chance I got to get in a game with older players, like Hallie Bryant, Willie Gardner, Henry, and of course, Flap. The younger group of guys I ran around with and I were always trying to get in those playground games, but there was a pecking order, and the older guys wouldn’t let us on the court. In order to play against the older guys, you had to have the size and strength necessary to win your way through the day. Eventually, though, we became the dominant team. The tough guys.

  Basketball players—even good ones—don’t become smart all at once; it takes years and years of playing the game. In my case being a smart player and a good player were wrapped up in one another. Getting a chance meant you had to make the most of it. Nobody out there was running a charity. If I wanted to stay on the court, I had to be good enough to keep myself on it. Guys were bigger and older and stronger than me, and they tried to overpower me, pushing and holding me, playing rough. Guys would try and set up down low against me all the time, getting position near the basket. Then, once they had the ball, they’d back me in, muscling their way toward the basket, protecting the ball with their bodies and clubbing me out of the way, or simply jump over me. In basketball terms, it’s known as posting up. And I had to learn how to deal with it. I had to figure out how to hold my ground, learn when to sneak around from the weak side for a steal, or box out a charging, flying body and get the rebound.

  When I was bringing the ball up court, a guy might leave his man and rush me, double-teaming me, trying to steal the ball. So I had to be aware of where the other players were in relation to me, had to learn to recognize when a double-team was coming and what to do about it. If someone crowded me, I had to know how to blow past him. In every game, it seemed I would pick up something worth practicing. Then, the second that I got even passable at a certain move, I would try it out in a game. Something didn’t work? More practice. A different move. Now could I use that to better advantage?

  There’s a saying about the Lord helping those who help themselves, and it’s true in basketball as well. The guys noticed me improving, saw how serious I was about the game. Soon they started giving me pointers. Hey, Oscar, you know, if you use your foot to job . . .

  Maybe it was because of all the basketball beatings I’d taken at the hands of my elders, the gauntlets I’d been put through just to be able to shoot at the back of the house with my brothers, let alone to stay in a game at the Dust Bowl, but after a while, whenever I played, I felt at ease. I had skills nobody else had, understood things in a way that they did not, did things they could not. As I played, I was hearing whoops of approval and getting high-fives from other guys—both on and off the court. And rather than bask in a good play or win, I was the kind of kid who got greedy from success. It made me want to do better, work harder. Without knowing it, I started becoming a better player, someone who knew how to react and adjust to a situation without having to think about it, a player who understood that huge effort had to be his routine. Throughout my adult life, I’ve been described as one of the most fundamentally sound players in the history of basketball. But so much of what I know I learned on the playground. I didn’t learn much basketball in high school, or even in college, but rather from playing outside in the park.

  It was Tom Sleet—my coach in seventh, eighth, and ninth grades—who started it, and then other people began to call me Li’l Flap. I was a different kind of kid than Bailey. I didn’t have Flap’s personality or style. I didn’t play a lot of ball against Flap; he generally wouldn’t play against me, his little brother. On a rare occasion, we did get on the court at the same time. He might be rough on me, but never mean. I just played and practiced, kept my mouth shut, then dribbled my ball home when the sun went down.

  Bailey was a flashy player, an aggressive and vocal player. There’s a lot of talk that flashes on the court, and Bailey was a big part of that. Coach Crowe used to get mad at him for talking during high school games, but believe me, all that talk came out in the playgrounds. He would have fit in the modern NBA very well; he had that fiery style and brashness, and the guy could shoot the living daylights out of the ball. Me, I might give you a single look or make a slight gesture to a teammate, but I was very polite. Now, I’ll say what I have to say.

  I don’t know exactly how long it was before the paved courts over at the Lockefield Gardens took over the Dust Bowl name, but I know that it was sometime during my adolescence. The Indianapolis Police Athletic League sponsored basketball and football leagues at the “new Dust Bowl.” All the credit for discipline and fair play at Lockefield Gardens goes to James “Bruiser” Gaines. He made sure that there wasn’t any trouble on those courts and provided some guidance and order. Local coaches used to make the rounds, checking out league games and pickup games alike. They’d come from the nearby middle schools, Public Schools 17 and 19 and 24, with one eye looking to future teams.

  When I started seventh grade, I had skills as a player, but they were street skills. I was rawboned and lanky and really didn’t have any knowledge or experience with organized basketball. But that year I got my first real coaching. At P.S. 17, Tom Sleet was in charge of working with the seventh and eighth graders. He also coached the Crispus Attucks freshman squad. I didn’t have any expectations, but I was excited to go to practice each day, where Coach Sleet taught me the basics, things like how to pivot, how to pass. “Throw it as close to your man’s head as you can,” he told me, showing a pragmatic ruthlessness that one day I’d become famous for. “It’ll get by—your man will have to blink.” Tom Sleet started me in the right direction.

  Back in the old days, they really didn’t teach you but one thing: to pass and cut off the pivot. The principles of offensive basketball taught back then revolved around the idea of catching the ball, pivoting, passing to an open man, and then taking off, or cutting, in the opposite direction. Catch, pivot, pass, and cut. It’s known as a motion offense, because at its best and most flowing, it looks as if everyone is in perpetual motion.

  In those days, the pivot was a passing pivot. The center—the tallest player on the court—handled the ball a lot. He’d come out from close to the basket and stand at the free-throw line and look for cutting players. You hit the high post pivot and then cut, like I said, away from
the ball. Everyone was in motion, passing and cutting. You would move and then run toward another designated offensive player or area, at which point you would come to a stop, setting what is known as a pick (think of a picket or a post). A guy on your team would then run closely past you and try to “bump” or lose his man by running him into your pick. This was perpetual: moving, then setting a pick, and then cutting again, creating advantages for offensive players while confusing, tiring, and impeding the defense. Eventually, when an offensive player got the ball back, he would have an advantage over his defender, which the offensive player would use—either taking an open shot, driving, or somehow creating an opportunity. Pivots, picks, and cuts are fundamental concepts of basketball, although they have a hard time getting kids to do them nowadays. As far as defense went, Coach Sleet had us learn how to play man-to-man.

  After practices, with Coach Sleet encouraging me, I started giving myself daily assignments: layups and tip-ins with either hand, free throws, crossover dribbles, dribbling with my left hand. I just liked to play. The game helped sustain me and gave me a sense of identity. I never thought about being better than anyone else. I did not spend much time thinking about how good I was, or how I stacked up in comparison to other players—any of that stuff. It’s true that if I had played nowadays, someone would have noticed me. Tout sheets these days can declare sixth graders to be future Hall of Famers; high school kids are on magazine covers and cable television. But I was just a kid who liked to play.