The Big O

by Oscar P Robertson

  With Hallie Bryant at Indiana University, Willie Gardner playing for the Harlem Globetrotters, and Flap spending his freshman year at Indiana Central, the team that I joined had neither height nor a consistent scorer—our tallest player was six feet three and a half inches—so Coach Crowe had me playing forward, down low, in the post pivot. When I’d played in the park, I’d played outside. Seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade, all I’d played was guard. I didn’t know anything else. Didn’t matter. I was about six three, and we needed someone to be able to rebound, score from the post, and defend inside. I was going to be that man.

  When he handed out uniforms, Coach Crowe didn’t make a big deal of it, and I took Flap’s old number, forty-three.

  It was supposed to be a down year. Before we’d played our first game, The Indianapolis Recorder—usually optimistic about Attucks’s chances to the point of boosterism—had doubts, writing, “If there’s a Hallie Bryant on the squad, he is as yet undiscovered.” When their reporter asked an Attucks student for a word on the team, he was answered, “Oh, they say they won’t get anywhere.”

  Our first game of the season was against Fort Wayne North and was played at Arsenal Technical High School’s gym. Coach told us when to arrive for the game, but not how to get there. I knew where the gym was and decided to take a cross-town bus to the game. Damned bus seemed like it took forever, and it went through one neighborhood after the next. Some dude pulled a knife on me. Why? Just life on the streets. I was so worried about missing the game I just looked at the knife and got off the bus.

  What was later to be voted the greatest high school career in the history of Indiana started with me riding pine. For all of three minutes.

  Then Crowe sent me in, to play a forward spot. Since I was Bailey’s brother and wore his number, people in the audience were calling me “Li’l Flap” all over again. I did okay, scored about fifteen points, and we won. I was too shy to talk to reporters, so I showered and left before they even made it into the locker room. The next day, The Indianapolis Star said I displayed “poise unexpected of a sophomore.” From that point on, I was in the starting five.

  We played three games that first week, going on the road to win two games. Road trips were quite an experience for me. Our principal used to get onto the team bus before we’d hit the road and tell us we were representing our school and to act accordingly, and there was good reason. In the same way that the Globetrotters were a much hotter draw than any NBA teams back then, out-of-town schools regarded games against us as big-money games. Our visits became the focal point of these guys’ seasons. We’d arrive in these matchbox towns, and folks would be waiting for our buses to arrive. Like we were from outer space, they’d follow us into the gym. Really. It’s comical in retrospect, the long gawking stares they’d give us.

  I heard the word nigger yelled a few times during those trips. But being raised in the South, I’d been taught to not let that crap get to me; the taunts made me play harder. The Indiana Officials Association excluded all blacks from membership, so we played a lot of those games with a bunch of white, hometown refs making calls. Coach Crowe used it to motivate us. At least once a trip he’d say, “Get a big lead and keep it. Then the referees and crowds won’t have anything to do with it.”

  We started the season on a hot streak, and this built up interest for our first game against our cross-town rival, Arsenal Tech. Our schools hadn’t played each other in two years, since an Attucks win in the state tournament. Part of the rivalry had to do with geography: one strong team on the west side, the other on the east. Naturally, they’re going to eye each other. On top of that, we used their gym for our home games. And of course race played a part. Arsenal had two black kids in their starting lineup, but still there were a lot of people who looked at them as the “great white hope.”

  On December 8, 1953, eight days before the rematch, things took an ugly turn, which made the rivalry more intense. According to published reports, Arsenal guard David Huff, age seventeen, was walking home after basketball practice when he noticed a parked, mud-splattered automobile. As Huff moved past the car, three black men in their mid- to late twenties supposedly leaped out and surrounded him. One grabbed his collar. The other two poked him with knives.

  “You’re Huff? You better not play too good. If you make one single point, we’ll come back and cut you wide open.”

  The threats plastered the front pages of the Indianapolis newspapers. Anonymous school board officials questioned the wisdom of having the game. The city turned on edge, everyone scared of what the blacks were fixing to do to the nice white boys. But it never made much sense to me. Huff was okay, but he wasn’t Tech’s best player. Going over box scores from the Indianapolis newspapers back then show him to be a steady role player, that’s about it. If you’re going to threaten somebody, why not target a player who has some impact on the game?

  One threat led to reports of more. Huff’s mom and Tech coach Charles Maas supposedly received telephone calls with the same message: If David Huff played, he would regret it. Notes penciled on toilet paper arrived not only at Huff’s home, but also Maas’s: “Keep Huff and [Don] Sexton out of the ball game,” the notes read. “We mean it.” Police came up with detailed strategies to keep the races separated at the game. Soon Coach Crowe started receiving some threats too. The most interesting was unsigned and misspelled, a rough note written on scratch paper. “Do not play Winford O’Neal or William Mason if you value their lives. I have all my possessions bet on the game, including my car and house, and I want to see Tech win.”

  A few nights before the game, I got a call. If I played, the guy said, he was going to shoot me. I told him to go to hell. My father didn’t like that, but I didn’t worry. It was probably just some gambler who wanted to give me something to think about. With the Tech game approaching, we beat South Bend Riley pretty good, then beat this other cross-town team, Broad Ripple, finally losing a pretty rough game to the state’s top-ranked team, Terre Haute Gerstmeyer.

  By the time Crispus Attucks hit the court against Arsenal Tech, five different players had been threatened, and the newspapers were covering every crank counterthreat and stray boast. About ten thousand fans crowded into the long bleachers of Butler Fieldhouse, a new attendance record for a regular-season game in Indianapolis. Police patrolled outside both dressing rooms and followed our teams when we went to warm up, and then back into our locker rooms before the game. Uniformed and plainclothes police and a few FBI agents were crawling around the arena, because the death threats had been sent through the mail. David Huff wasn’t out there for Arsenal. Later, I heard that his parents and coach wouldn’t let him play—the story goes that his coach had to give the news to him, and when David he heard it, he broke down.

  It was a tense, sloppy game. Both teams shot terribly, and there were lots of turnovers. Winford O’Neal, our leading scorer, made two of fifteen shots. Harold Crenshaw was one for ten. Same thing on the other side of the court. The pressure and drama and press coverage of the whole thing really got to everyone. I scored the first basket of the game, and we got an early lead, extending it to fourteen in the second half. After a late Tech rally, we held on, 43–38. I ended up with fourteen points, I think. Afterwards, I showered and, just like the last time, got out of there before any reporters could talk to me.

  After that game, reporters never called me “Li’l Flap” again, but I wasn’t anywhere close to being my own man. I had a spotty sophomore season, filled with the typical peaks and valleys of a developing player. A twenty-point game might be followed by four points. But we had a balanced, strong team, with lots of athletic ability. Winford O’Neal was undersized at center, and while he could really play, he was injured and missed the first half of the season. Harold Crenshaw took up for him inside, along with Sheddrick Mitchell and me as forwards. I got most of my points driving and drawing fouls or hitting short jumpers. Like I said, we were a good, smart team. We could have out-jumped and outrun all of the whit
e kids, but we played team basketball, slowed things up when we had to, ran when we had to, knew who to milk and where to attack. In a rematch with Arsenal Tech at a holiday tournament, we couldn’t come back from a fifteen-point fourth-quarter deficit, and there were a few other bumpy roads. But I think if we’d been completely healthy through the whole season, nobody could have touched us.

  “If” may be a powerful word, but usually it has nothing to do with what really does happen. When O’Neal got back, Willie Merriweather promptly messed up his shoulder; he was out for the second half of the season. Then Sheddrick Mitchell tore his knee ligaments playing football. As if this wasn’t enough, three weeks before the playoffs started, O’Neal hurt himself again, this time during a game against Indianapolis Sacred Heart. Three starters, done for the year. The sports page of the Indianapolis News proclaimed: “Attucks’s Long Reign of Supremacy Is Over.”

  If we wanted to make any noise in the playoffs, something had to happen. So Coach Crowe switched our lineup. He didn’t do it to affect some sort of chain of events that would eventually change the game, or because he had a vision of the future that included long, tall athletes handling the ball while they sprinted up and down the court, or because he saw me as some kind of prototype. I don’t think he had any idea of the revolution he set in motion. He put me in the backcourt for the same reasons that most people do things, out of a combination of convenience and necessity, insight and desperation. He saw that I had ball-handling skills. He saw that while I may not have been forceful off the court, I knew how to run a team and I had real potential as a leader. He also knew that with our frontcourt basically out of commission, we needed to be able to run and slash and do things that would speed up the game and emphasize our perimeter skills. It simply made sense to have me handle the ball more. Though I still rebounded and defended on defense, now I assumed the role of a guard when we had the ball, helping against full-court pressure, driving and penetrating and dishing the ball, attacking defenses more, and finding the open man when teams decided to double-team me. This was the stuff I’d grown up doing, and of course my comfort level jumped several notches.

  Practices started running longer, with Coach Crowe driving us harder than ever, working to turn us into a frenetic team, pressing on defense, attacking on offense. It took awhile to adjust to our new team—not only to playing without our starting frontcourt, but to our new style as well. We lost a pair of games, came away with close victories in three others. Slowly, however, during the first weeks of February, the team began to play with more confidence. By the end of the regular season, we routed Indianapolis Cathedral and finished the season on a roll, with a 17–4 record.

  The state tourney always marked the official end of winter along Indiana Avenue. The Indianapolis Recorder was filled with advertisements. “One Two Three Four, Who Are We For? . . . Attucks,” said the ad paid for by the Twenty-Second Street Cigar Store. “Roll! You Tigers, Roll!” read the copy paid for by Jack’s Upholstery. “Come on Attucks! Load ’em Up, Haul ’em Away, We’re Pulling For You All The Way”—Spurling Trucking Co. “Attucks! Attucks! All the Way!”—Dave’s Market. Liquor stores. Furniture stores. Mattress companies and moving companies, pharmacies, bars, bakeries, beauty shops: ads filled the back pages of the Recorder, even as the front pages filled with stories of police raids, investigations that resulted in a crackdown on citywide gambling and shut down a bunch of cigar stores, smoke shops, and nightclubs. Rumors drifted down the Avenue like jazz—the gambling raid was a matter of political convenience; it was a way of keeping blacks in their place; it was one of the end results of what had begun with Arsenal Tech and David Huff.

  We were ranked as one of the top ten teams in the state and were one of the sixteen teams that, with our fans, crowded into the Butler Fieldhouse in Indianapolis for the Indianapolis sectionals. The first round was on a Wednesday, the second on a Friday, and the semifinals and finals were on the same Saturday, with the survivor emerging and moving forward into the state’s version of a final four.

  Most of the teams playing in the sectionals stayed on the Butler campus. Not us. Win or lose, we went home for the night. We were also treated differently in some other ways. Beneath the fieldhouse bleachers was a room with several baskets, where teams could warm up before their games. We played in that fieldhouse every year during the regular season. I played three years of playoff games there. I didn’t find out about that room until I was in the NBA. On Saturday we beat Broad Ripple in the early game and set up a rubber match against Arsenal Tech, this time for the sectional championship. We wanted a rematch. We’d made up our minds that if we played them again, we would beat them, and even spent those first two days we had to wait before the sectional championships rooting for our rival to win their bracket.

  Before the game, Coach drew upon everything we’d been through in all our road games. Once again he stressed the importance of taking the referees out of the game. This time we followed his words to the letter, blanking Arsenal in the first five minutes and building a 12–0 lead. Tech didn’t score a field goal in the first quarter, and from there we played deliberately and made sure not to turn the ball over, milking the clock until it ran out.

  So on we moved, advancing to the semifinal round on Saturday. In the first game, two tiny schools were matched up, Montezuma High School and Milan. Montezuma had something like seventy-nine students in their school—just thirty-six boys—and no home gym. Milan wasn’t much bigger. Nestled in the rolling farmlands just northwest of Cincinnati, Milan had roughly eleven hundred people, and most of their time was spent worrying about their hogs and chickens and crops. The high school had all of 161 students, just seventy-three boys—fewer than tried out for Attucks’s varsity squad. They were a bunch of farm boys who were unfamiliar with stoplights, let alone neon. But they’d made it to the state finals the previous year and had eight returning players, including schoolboy heartthrob Bobby Plump.

  Indiana basketball had been increasingly dominated by larger, more urban schools from Evansville, Anderson, Lafayette, Indianapolis, and South Bend, so you just know that reporters loved the small school, David versus David matchup, and covered the hell out of the game. Milan beat Montezuma by ten or so, and afterwards their coach, Marvin Wood, let his players sit in the stands and watch part of the next game before he bused them off to a postgame meal, then to their hotel, for whatever rest and recovery time they could get.

  We were in the late game, matched up against another large school, Columbus High. Some people looked at being in the late game as a compliment—you were the team chosen to play in the main event. But on the other hand, there were only a few hours between the end of that game and the nightcap, where you came back and went at it for the championship. Truth is, I didn’t consider either opinion. The whole thing was such a new, wild experience for me that I didn’t really know what to think; it was too busy happening for me to have many thoughts about it.

  Well, we went out there and stunk up the place. Columbus scored twenty-three points in the third quarter and toward the end of the quarter had a fourteen-point lead. But we chipped at the lead, point by point. I kept driving, going to the basket, hitting Bill Mason with passes for open jumpers, and halfway through the fourth quarter, it was a game again. I drove and drew a fifth and eliminating foul on the Columbus center. Then I did the same thing to their leading scorer. There were about four and a half minutes left and, leading by three, Columbus tried to stall and turned the ball over twice. I started bringing the ball up from the backcourt, running and calling the plays, emerging through the gauntlet, stepping into the player I would become.

  We took the lead, then gave it up, then took it back. With a minute left, and the score tied, I took my man off the dribble, drove, got fouled, and made both free throws. Columbus came down and hit a jumper. I drove again, got fouled, and hit one of two. Five seconds left. We led by one. They got a final shot and missed. What was the highest scoring game in the history of Indianapolis semifin
als was over, 69–68, an Attucks win.

  There wasn’t much time to celebrate, only a few hours. Then we went back out there again, to play Milan for the sectional. I can’t honestly tell you that exhaustion had anything to do with what happened next. Milan had a strong team. They started fast and shot sixty percent in the first half and captured a comfortable lead. Bobby Plump shot the hell out of the ball and ended up leading all scoring with twenty-eight. I played okay, with twenty-two. We had another forward who would be critical to our winning our first championship. His name was Willie Merriweather. But he was out with an injury. We were outmanned. If we’d had Winford O’Neal and Merriweather, I would have liked our chances. As it was, Milan won by eight or ten and advanced to the state finals. It was a rough loss, and afterwards our locker room was quiet. I remember that one guy, a reserve, sat in the dressing room and stared at the doors, waiting for the stream of visitors and reporters. “They’ll all come in now,” he said, and he didn’t say it bitterly, but with a certain resignation. There were a lot of people happy to see us lose, probably even more who were happy to see a bunch of small town white farm boys beat us.

  In the state finals, Milan defeated powerful Muncie Central when Plump hit a last-second jumper. You may have heard about the shot and the game; they became immortalized in the 1986 movie Hoosiers.

  Maybe you remember the film: the rusted car driving down country roads, the golden morning light and grain elevators, cornfields and barns with weathered paint and churches with large, white steeples. A coach heads toward the town of Hickory. At each bend in the road, there is a basketball hoop, and more hoops beside grain elevators, nailed to barns, at a crossroad. Coach Norman Dale instructs his players to always throw at least four passes before taking a shot, reinforces the timeless notions of discipline and patience and teamwork. Men gather on frosty nights to talk about what kind of defense the town should play. There are town meetings to decide on the future of the coach. Before the state championship game, the schoolboy hero looks at his teammates and says, “Let’s win one for all the small schools that never had a chance to get here.”