The Big O

by Oscar P Robertson

  I ask you this: when the fictional version of Milan—a team named the Hickory Huskers—reaches the championship game in Hoosiers, what does it mean that the filmmakers twisted the truth? Instead of having Milan defeat Muncie Central and an integrated team with two black guys on it, which is what happened in real life, Hickory defeated a fictional team of black players, coached exclusively by black men, whose rooting section consists of black men, women, boys, and girls. Is the proverbial race card being played?

  Bailey and Ray Crowe both had small parts in the film. You can see them sitting on the South Bend bench, coaching. Obviously, they disagree with me on this point. They’re entitled.

  The night Bobby Plump’s shot gave Milan the real state title, a convoy of Cadillacs hauled the players around Indianapolis’s Monument Circle. The next day the caravan headed south, down back roads toward Milan. Thousands of people turned out along the way, waving flags. Children were perched in the boughs of sycamores. Women stood on porches, with freshly baked pies and peach cobbler for the conquering heroes.

  At the Senate Avenue Y in Indianapolis, good-natured banter and laughter filled one end of the basketball court. The other end was empty except for a lone player, who was in his own world, dribbling, faking, shooting, lost in the sport’s subtle rhythms.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “They Don’t Want Us”

  1954–1955

  THE SUMMER BEFORE MY JUNIOR year, the city took the land on Colton Street to build a hospital, and we had to move. Dad married Ivora Helms. Mom and the rest of us moved into a nearby home at 3945 Boulevard Place. But Mom could not make the payments on that place, and soon we moved down the street to 3453 Boulevard Place. My brothers and I did not get much of an explanation for the split. We just had to move. Dad wasn’t coming with us. That’s just how things went. Honestly, it wasn’t that strange to me at the time. My parents had in fact been divorced for three, maybe five years by this point, and if Bailey and Henry and I did not know about the actual divorce, we knew enough to understand that our parents were living separate lives underneath the same roof. Still, we were black people from the country, raised with a deep religious background, and we never heard of divorce, let alone knew about it happening to people like us. It wouldn’t be until I was in college and started to see a bigger world that I learned that people got divorced all the time.

  Our new neighborhood on the west side was known as the city’s Black Gold Coast. Our house at 3453 Boulevard Place had three full bedrooms, a living room where we could watch television, and indoor plumbing. In all ways it was a huge improvement. Strange thing, my dad lived a couple blocks away, on Kenwood Boulevard. I’m sure he contributed something, but it was not enough to take care of everything. Bailey was at Indiana Central on scholarship, so there weren’t as many expenses, but my mom still worked two full-time jobs—by day as a licensed beautician, then at night cooking for the family on Broadway. At the same time she made sure our house was clean and there was food on the dinner table, mostly cabbage and green beans and cornbread, with some sort of meat dish—maybe pork chops or fried chicken—showing up once a week or so. My mother didn’t have much spare time, but with what little she had, she joined the Beck Jubilee Singers, a traveling choral group. She used to tell us there were two reasons to sing: You sing because you’re depressed, or you sing because you’re happy.

  Instead of spending the whole summer in Tennessee, I worked with a construction crew, then got a job paving asphalt. That freed up my father from giving me money, which he didn’t have anyway. The work hardened my body. I built a hoop up at Dad’s house with two-by-fours. It had a plywood backboard built on a triangle base, and was held down with sandbags. There was an alley behind Dad’s house, and a little driveway off the alley. I’d roll the basket out there. I spent hours upon hours in that driveway, working on my shot. For instance, I used to shoot from the spots where I had difficulty—bank shots from every conceivable angle, side shots, hooks, running jumpers, layups and tip-ins with either hand. Hugo Green was a local player whose style of play I admired, and I tried to copy it. I’d stand out there when the wind drove other players inside, to figure out the angle of the wind, how to best control my dribble in the rain. When Bailey came back from school for summer vacation, every now and then we’d go back there and get after it. Bailey was still a better shot than I was, but I’d grown a couple of inches taller—and a bit stronger than him. We wouldn’t play one-on-one too often, but whenever we did, Bailey would tease me that I played harder against him than anyone else.

  Maybe I did. To a certain extent, basketball in Indianapolis meant a certain power. I could go all over the city and get in a pickup game. If you were not an athlete, people in other neighborhoods might try to beat you up. But I could go places. I played ball, and everybody in black Indianapolis knew it. I’d show up, and immediately guys wanted me on their team. If the guys had already made their team, or if there was a bunch of people waiting to play, it didn’t matter. I was going to be chosen. I’d run with the next squad, because the guys on that squad wanted to win. As long as a team won, they were staying on that court and guys wanted to stay out there. Which meant I was playing. I’d get out there and would hold a court all day long.

  This neighborhood court time might have something to do with why I never dunked during a regulation game. It wasn’t that I couldn’t dunk. I competed in the high and long jumps in track. I could jump with anyone, and I could dunk. But the Dust Bowl backboards were held up by wooden posts set right on the other side of the out-of-bounds line. During one game, I had a lane to the basket and went to dunk. Some guy knocked me right into the post. It hurt enough that I never dunked again. Instead I did what I was taught, making sure to put my body in between any defenders and the ball. If someone flew into me, I scored the layup and then went to the line.

  I think one of the big benefits of playing organized sports is that it teaches you about loss. The fact is, if you play a game, you are going to lose sometimes. In life you are going to lose sometimes. But how do you respond to losing? Do you blame the world? Throw a fit and sulk and shy away from trying again? Coaches have remarked that I practiced as hard as any player they’d ever seen. Former teammates have said that I had great control, not just in how I handled the basketball, but in how I controlled myself and controlled the game. I think a big part of my game had to do with responding the right way. When you get down to it, this is just a matter of having answers and being smart. All I ever wanted was to have the same chance to compete as anyone else.

  I always believed that if you gave me a chance, I would figure out the rest. For instance, if you played me to go to my left, or off, hand. In that case, I had practiced enough with my left hand to be able to beat you. But I also knew enough about the game to be able to see whether it was a trap. So I might start left and then spin back the other direction. I might go left and draw the double-team and make sure to hit the open man. The next time down the court, I’d build off what I’d just done. Anything you did, I knew how to react. It was important to be a smart player on the floor, but it was just as key to be unpredictable, to have the guy guarding you wondering what you were going to do to him this time.

  My newfound status as one of the city’s prep elites occasionally had perks as well. Like getting to know the Harlem Globetrotters. Willie Gardner—the star on Bailey’s team—had signed with the Globetrotters straight out of high school. Through him, I ended up meeting and getting to know the Globetrotters’ ace ball-handler, Marques Haynes. I also saw the team’s clown ringmaster, Goose Tatum, play a lot of baseball with Indianapolis’s triple-A baseball team, the Indianapolis Indians.

  The first time I saw the Globetrotters play, I think Willie Gardner invited me. At halftime someone took me down into the locker room. Everyone was playing cards. I couldn’t believe it, I literally said it to the locker room, “Man, they’re playing cards!”

  Someone explained to me what was going on. The Trotters played something lik
e 250 games a year. Every one of them had a halftime show, which lasted for about a half an hour. The guys played cards to pass the time.

  Doors to halftime locker rooms weren’t the only ones that opened. By the time my junior year started, administrators, coaches, and students at Shortridge High School would have been thrilled to have me attending their school. Mostly white in its student body, Shortridge High was only a few blocks east of Mom’s new house. Among their student body and supporters, the thinking went that with me on their basketball team, they’d have the best squad in the city, maybe even the state. I wasn’t interested, though. I’d much rather walk the twenty-four blocks to Attucks on foot or thumb a ride, often with one of the teachers headed to work.

  I loved my time at Attucks. The city fathers may have instituted a roll call in the middle of the day so they could keep track of where the black teenagers were, but aside from on the basketball court, there was no place 1 would rather have been. It sounds corny, but sitting in class, having teachers who you knew cared—cared not just about me as a player, but as a person—that made me feel good. Special. I pretty much went through the equivalent of a Black Studies program, reading DuBois, Ellison, and Wright. My best grades were in English, Spanish, and math, and I was better than average in chemistry.

  A picture was taken for an article about me in The Indianapolis Star. I am in the school cafeteria at lunchtime, sitting at the end of a long, rectangular table. The table is jammed with students and covered with plates and food—you can read the label on a near bottle of Al steak sauce. Three or four other students are looking at the camera, everybody neat and groomed. I am closest to the camera. Wearing a collared shirt with thin stripes on it, I look skinny. You wouldn’t know I am an athlete. My eyes are focused on the camera, composed, with a hint of uncertainty to them. I am smiling warmly.

  As much as I can’t help but be taken aback by how young I look—how young we all look, how long ago that was—what really comes through in that photo is a sense of optimism, a sense of life and joy.

  Often that year, I’d finish with practice and would head over to my friend Don Brown’s house. His dad worked in the sheriff’s department, and his mom worked for the school system. I’d go over there and unwind, listening to the blues on his record player. Para Lee and Jimmy Brown, Don’s parents, were like parents to me.

  In 1955, not one school in the city of Indianapolis had won in the forty-five-year history of the state tournament. But with Willie Merriweather, Bill Hampton, Sheddrick Mitchell, and Bill Scott among our seven returning veterans, our Attucks team was the clear favorite. I was labeled the best player in the city, with Charles Preston of The Indianapolis Recorder writing: “Willie Merriweather has grown an inch and a half, Oscar Robertson is shooting goals all day long in an alley behind his house—and away we go!”

  I think Coach Crowe had enough of capitulation and close finishes and refs getting their shots at us, because he finally unleashed our offense and let us run a lot more. We started the season on fire, winning our first fourteen games. Our only regular-season loss came on the road, near the end of the season, against a small-town team named Connersville High. The school’s swimming pool was directly underneath the basketball court. It was an unbearably warm night and the gym was packed, and this made the place hotter and more stifling, so the windows and doors were open wide to try and cool off things. But right in the middle of the game, one of those low-pressure fields—the kind that Indiana weathermen still like to talk about—moved in. By the time the second half started, the temperature had dropped thirty degrees, and the Connersville floor had turned into a skating rink. To top this off, we had played some complacent ball in the first half, and Connersville was tough anyway—they’d opened up a good lead, and there was simply no way we were going to catch them while trying to run around that basketball court without skates on.

  The only other close game we had all year was also something of a fluke and came in the city holiday tournament, against Shortridge High. In that one, Coach Crowe permitted us to load up on food before the game. Naturally, we went out there and were sluggish. The game went to overtime, then double overtime. I decided to jump the center tip to start each overtime period. I’d win the tap, get the ball back, and start running the offense. I had grown to six feet four inches and would play every game, alternately bringing the ball up court, finishing fast breaks, and posting up like a center. We took the game in double overtime, and I learned a good lesson. I never ate less than four hours before tip-off again. I would take long walks during the junior varsity contest and think things through for myself, rolling my shoulders, getting loose.

  When the playoffs started, we had a 21–1 record and were clearly the best team in the state. Willie Merriweather shot 705 for the season and averaged a state record twenty-one rebounds a game, but a lot of attention was being thrown my way, with different papers naming me the best player in the tournament. We cruised through our first four games, winning by an average of something like twenty-eight points per contest. In the state semifinals, we played a highly anticipated game against Muncie Central, a power from up north. That program had won two state titles in the early 1950s and was considered the other favorite to win this year’s title. If there was a glamour game in the tournament so far, this was it.

  Radio station WOWO in Fort Wayne made sure to broadcast it, its signal carrying the details through the night, all the way from California to Virginia: the berth in the state finals on the line. Attucks leading by six with a minute left; Willie Merriweather fouling out and turning his back to the court, disgusted with himself, taking his time in putting on his jacket and then slouching down at the end of the bench; a one-point game, eleven seconds left, Muncie taking the ball out-of-bounds; their guard noticing that I seemed about three steps behind my man, not realizing it was a trap. When he threw the pass, I intercepted the ball, ending the game, putting us in the state finals . . .

  There was a week break before the final games and throughout it, our team was loose and confident and more than a little giddy. At Butler Fieldhouse, we had to wade through lines of photographers and reporters who had gathered from all over the state. We joked and posed for pictures. We weren’t exactly overconfident, but we’d lost only one game all year. We’d just finished defeating the only other team anyone thought had a chance to take the whole show, and now we were exactly where we wanted to be. For the first time in our lives, there was some serious attention focused on us. It was fun. It was novel. Plus, this year we were scheduled for the first game of the semifinals match, so if we won, we’d have some recovery time before the finals.

  On Saturday, March 19, 1955, the temperature climbed into the low forties. There was a light drizzle and a gray sky. Traffic from the city’s west side began to snake north toward Butler long before tip-off time, inching over Fall Creek and near my mom’s new home on Boulevard, past the Crown Hill Cemetery, toward the barnlike arena just off Forty-ninth Street. The line of automobiles, decked out in Attucks’ green, gold, and white displayed signs of support and honked their horns, like some sort of circus riding into town.

  Almost fifteen thousand spectators jammed the Butler Fieldhouse that afternoon. The air was electric. And when the ball was tossed to start our game against New Albany, we weren’t ready. We went out there and made lazy passes, threw the ball away. We had two-on-one fast breaks and didn’t convert. Not once or twice, now. Seven times. If New Albany had possessed half of our talent, we would have been in serious trouble. As it was, the game went back and forth. We’d build a lead, Jim Henry would score and bring New Albany back. Gradually, like it seems we always did, we wore them down. We were just too quick, too large, too determined. In the fourth quarter, with six and half minutes left, they cut the lead to 65–58. Then I took over, scoring two baskets and two more free throws in thirty seconds. And there you had it. The game was out of their reach.

  With a 79–67 victory, we not only accomplished something none of my brother’s tea
ms had been able to do, but also made up for the previous year’s disappointment in the state semis. Moreover, for the first time in school history, for the first time in the history of Indianapolis, an all-black team was in the state finals. For the first time, Crispus Attucks would be playing for the championship.

  Nobody on our team celebrated. We showered, then went up in the stands to watch the first half of the next game. Fort Wayne North against Gary Roosevelt was an even match. Like Crispus Attucks, Gary Roosevelt was an all-black team and was loaded with players. Their center, Wilson Eison, was six feet six and about the finest big player in the state—he went on to win Mr. Basketball in the state of Indiana and received all Big Ten honors at Purdue University. And I’d see their forward, Dick Barnett, for more than a decade in the NBA. The rumor was that after they’d won their sectional, the players on Gary Roosevelt had gone wild in their dressing room, yelling and chanting, “Naptown, here we come.” So of course we were curious to see what they’d brought.

  Against Fort Wayne—another one of those small and smart teams that shot the hell out of the ball—it looked like a cakewalk. Roosevelt led by sixteen midway through the fourth quarter and tried to run out the clock. But Fort Wayne countered with a full-court press, took Eison out of the game, and rallied to outscore Roosevelt 16–2 over the last four minutes. Roosevelt survived, but just. They were decidedly worn down.

  In any case, that night, the Butler Fieldhouse was cleared, cleaned, and then reopened. The stands and bleachers once again filled, and a statewide audience turned on their television sets, this time to watch real history in the making.