The Big O

by Oscar P Robertson

  It was the strangest thing: While the teams were warming up, I remember the crowd being silent. Could it have been because there were no white players on either team? Because Indiana’s legendary cultured and die-hard basketball fans were not all that excited about sitting there and watching black players, black coaches, and black student managers? Because maybe they were worried about us racial interlopers kidnapping their beloved game? They weren’t sitting on their hands because of a lack of cheerleaders. Squads from white schools in Indianapolis and Gary made a point of showing city and racial unity, coming out to join in with both teams’ cheer lines. That touched me back then. Even now it’s one of the little details in my life that helps me, when I look back.

  We won the opening tip, and I immediately took a pass at the top of the key, gave my quick fake, and took that one hard dribble—a move I’d been making since I was a child, a move I’d practiced tens of thousands of times.

  The game was nine seconds old. I pulled up for a sixteen-foot jump shot. The ball dropped through the bottom of the net.

  We picked up their guards in the backcourt and applied pressure for all ninety-four feet of hardwood, going after them from the moment we scored, trying to prevent them from getting the ball inbounds, then from dribbling it, jumping right to them, putting hands in their faces, getting right into their jerseys. Pressure was our game. They weren’t going to get to walk the ball up and easily, naturally start their plays. They weren’t going to be able to make their natural four or five passes as they looked for a good shot. We’d seen from the Fort Wayne game that they couldn’t handle pressure. That game had been a war, and those players had to be tired. Our backcourt of Bill Scott and Bill Hampton jumped all over them. Sheddrick Mitchell and Willie Merriweather constantly beat their big men down the court.

  And me, I was not going to be stopped. I worked my move to death that night, putting together every possible combination I could think of off it, using every variation: that one move serving as the building block for others. First a jump shot without a fake. Then fake the jumper, take a dribble, and shoot. Now I’d fake, take two dribbles and drive. Now no fake, straight drive. I’d fake left and drive right, fake right and pull up for a short shot. They started double-teaming me. Then triple-teaming me.

  We were ahead 24–15 at the end of the first quarter. Eison was hitting shots and trying to keep his team in the game, but in the second quarter we hit nine out of twelve shots, led 51–30 at halftime, and pretty much put the game out of reach. On television, the announcers stopped discussing the game, and started on whether Attucks would score a hundred points, and whether I’d break the scoring record for most individual points scored in the semifinals and finals.

  We approached the century mark. What cheers there were grew louder. I scored thirty, bringing my three-game total to ninety-seven, breaking the record by four points. To his credit, Eison also broke the record, scoring thirty-two, for a three-game total of ninety-nine. With time running out, I had a chance to tie him, but passed up a running jump shot. Willie Burnley was a senior who hadn’t played much all year—he was in the game, getting some mop-up time. He was wide open under the basket and took the pass and got himself a championship bucket, which mattered more to me than the record.

  The final horn rang, and pandemonium broke loose.

  We whooped and hollered and embraced, and it was the best, most pure feeling I’ve had in my life, all of us celebrating, the court filling and then overflowing with students and fans. I don’t know how long the party lasted, don’t have words to describe it. When we cut down the nets from each hoop, a picture was taken of me standing on the ladder with clippers, wearing my green, gold, and white warmup jersey. I am posed, about to cut down a strand, wearing about the biggest smile I’ve ever had; my eyes are shining, and you can see the absolute glee on my face.

  There was a small awards ceremony, and, finally, we showered and dressed. Leaving the Butler Fieldhouse, our team was loaded on top of a red fire truck. It was a cold, brisk night, and I remember the chill against my still-overheated body, the stinging sensation of being alive like that. The fire truck followed Mayor Clark’s limousine and a reinforced detail of police motorcycles. There was a line of buses and cars behind us, everyone honking and whooping, people singing the “Crazy Song” from windows, screaming out our chant, “Ba-ad, ba-a-ad Tigers.”

  Our motorcade moved east on Forty-ninth Street, and south onto Meridian, each street lined with people cheering to congratulate us. At Monument Circle, we made a victory lap around the fountains and statues and the shaft dedicated to all of Indiana’s veterans of the Civil War. We passed all of the limestone soldiers, and then the crowning figure—known for more than half a century as simply Miss Indiana—and finally all the memorials of bronze and stone. Published reports have said there was a quick stop at the circle. Supposedly there was a raucous crowd, and the mayor presented Coach Crowe with the key to the city. That’s not how I remember it. In my recollection we did not stop at the circle. The motorcade completed the circle and headed up along Indiana, and then north on West Street. Something was wrong. I knew the traditional parade route. I’d seen other champions go south, take a route that led downtown and through the heart of the city.

  Instead, we were moving into territory I knew all too well. Into the heart of Naptown. Past the brick walls of Crispus Attucks.

  Later I would talk about what happened with Bill Swatts, my best friend. I’d go over the evening with Willie. All of us would recall the large bonfire that lit up Northwestern Park, the sea of what seemed like thousands of people cheering as our truck stopped, the friends who embraced us as we climbed down, the familiar faces all around us, ecstatic.

  Bill remembered this night as pure joy and told me about how nice it was to celebrate with his people, in his neighborhood.

  “There was no place I would have rather been that night,” he said, “no people I would have rather been with. I was just so happy.”

  I understand why he felt that way. I felt the same way. It was one of the greatest feelings in the world.

  On that chilly night, I stood and stared at the bonfire and all the celebrating faces, all black, and I could not help but think about little Milan High—hadn’t even been from the city, but their team got to ride through downtown around the squares of Indy. I knew all those stories about their long ride back to Milan, women coming out of houses with fresh pies for them, men standing on the lawn with flags. Why was that honor denied us?

  For thirty years, the Indiana High School Athletic Association had refused to officially admit black schools into their organization or let black referees officiate games. Instead, a white-run government had empowered an all-white school district to decide that blacks were not good enough to attend schools with white children. This government had built an overcrowded all-black high school without a gymnasium, had underfunded this school and made us play all our home games across town at the Butler Fieldhouse. And then, during the playoffs, the same morons had complained, saying we had an unfair advantage because we played regular season games at the playoff site.

  In the years to come, I would also learn about a meeting that took place the week before the state finals.

  I would find out that the same mayor who was leading this motorcade had met with Coach Crowe and Attucks’s principal.

  The same mayor who would pay public lip service to our victory being for the entire city? Behind closed doors he had talked about the importance of proper security at the game. He worried about the possibility of rioting.

  He and the other city fathers had decided it was too much of a threat to allow us to congregate around Monument Circle.

  They sent us back to our neighborhood and made sure we had a police escort to guide our way.

  Even now I wonder: Did they think we’d riot because we were primitive animals, beasts who could do nothing but destroy, or maybe, just maybe, did they worry because they knew we had good cause and were entitled to our
rage?

  It is hard to forgive them for this. I try, but I can’t. We weren’t savages. We were a group of civilized, intelligent young people who through the grace of God had happened to get together and win some basketball games. We’d just won the biggest game in the history of Indianapolis basketball.

  They took our innocence away from us.

  How can I forgive them for doing that?

  I eventually left the bonfire and the celebrating. I saw someone leaving and caught a ride back to the house my dad lived in with his new wife. I got to the house, and my dad greeted me, excited, hugging me. Then he saw that something was wrong. I told him I was tired of all that noise. I went into the kitchen and made myself a sandwich. Stretching out on the living-room floor, I turned on the television. My dad stood behind me, not asking questions, but concerned.

  “Dad,” I said. “They don’t want us.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Talk Is Cheap”

  1955–1956

  ALTHOUGH I AM NOT WRITING this book to relate every injustice I’ve suffered, it’s simply impossible to tell my story without talking about race. As much as I am an American, I am a black American. And to tell you about growing up in the Jim Crow South, and a segregated, Klan-infested Midwest, I must acknowledge the influence of race. Similarly, it’s impossible to discuss my experiences with basketball without mentioning race, black and white. Otherwise, you might as well think about America’s history during the second half of the twentieth century without acknowledging the civil rights movement. Or consider the Civil War without mentioning slavery. The subjects are all intertwined.

  It wasn’t until Attucks won our initial state title in my junior year that I had my first meal in a restaurant. I was seventeen years old, and before that, I hadn’t so much as set foot in downtown Indianapolis, much less eaten there, except to catch the bus to Tennessee. Being a champion basketball player opened the restaurants’ doors to me. Maybe there were some white high school basketball champs who had never been in a restaurant until they won it all, rural kids out on a farm or whatever. But they at least would have been welcome.

  That first trip downtown filled me with a strange mixture of excitement and disappointment. I still felt the fresh glow of the win, an enormous pride in our achievement, a sense of giddy lightness inside. At the same time, it was a shadowed happiness, weighed down. When Ray Crowe shepherded our spiffed-up Attucks Tigers into a restaurant called La Fendricks, my smile had long faded. I don’t remember being overly impressed by the place. I can’t remember what I ate. But I do remember the camaraderie, the novelty, and the sense of a hushed excitement. We were on our best behavior, and we were treated like champions.

  Besides the trip downtown and the restaurant meal, there were many other firsts as a result of being the state champs. Different civic organizations around the city invited the team to special ceremonies in order to celebrate our victory. The mayor called us “Indianapolis’s Crispus Attucks” in public, whatever he might have said privately. People’s willingness to honor us showed me that winning might not completely eclipse race, but it did rebalance the equation some. Our athleticism had always elevated our status in our own neighborhood, but now we had a chance to experience what it felt like to be welcomed and treated special outside our home turf.

  While I was thrilled to be state champ, and while many of the experiences that came with victory were wonderful, I wasn’t about to get complacent. I kept visiting the Dust Bowl and the Y, working on my shots, improving any weaknesses I could discover, doing what I had always done. I wasn’t a little kid practicing with a worn-out basketball anymore. Now I was on the threshold of adulthood, and I had experienced what it felt like to win, both the sweet and the bitter. And if winning titles carried a tinge of disappointment, I sure didn’t want to come close to losing.

  My senior year, I was the sole returning senior player. But up from the eighth- and ninth-grade teams came Sam Milton, Bill Brown, and James Enoch, as well as a player I called “my defense,” Al Maxey. I moved to a guard position. We won every regular-season game and extended our winning streak to forty-five games, a record for Indiana high schools. Nothing and no one could stop Crispus Attucks. Remember that Indiana is the basketball-craziest state in the nation, and there is a major college basketball prospect on just about every high school team. Even so, we completed the first undefeated season in the state’s history.

  The state playoffs were as easy as the season, and our average margin of victory was more than twenty points. I still have a copy of the telecast of the title game. The label on the tape reads, “Silent Film, Final, 1956 Basketball, Crispus Attucks vs. Jefferson Lafayette.” Watching it, there is our team, a group of black boys in white uniforms. We appear about equal in height. We are fast and agile. Lafayette is a team comprised of white youths wearing dark jerseys. They play an antiquated half-court game that seems to have been dusted out of mothballs. Their players usually take one or two dribbles before passing, then throw the ball around the perimeter before someone launches a twenty-five-foot set shot. As the game proceeds, our defense becomes more aggressive, our two-three zone pushing their offense out farther and farther from the basket. Meanwhile, we claim defensive rebounds and take off. Our attack includes running hooks and thirty-foot jumpers. There aren’t as many offensive sets; we crash the boards repeatedly, our 20–11 lead growing, turning into a rout.

  On the videotape I am wide shouldered and muscular. I seem to play every position, bringing the ball up court early, and then posting up like a center at select moments. I make a string of long jumpers from a range that seems farther than I ever remember shooting from. If three-point shots had existed back then, who knows how much higher our score would have been?

  Midway through the first quarter, I take a pass just over half-court and slow the ball up, letting the defenders catch up and pass me by. Before they are set, I put a move on my man, stutter stepping to get him out of position. A quick crossover dribble and I am past him, moving into traffic, cutting at the top of the key. I crouch and dribble low and slide by a defender who tries to take the ball. Then I spring, gliding toward the basket and throwing in a running hook.

  When the final buzzer sounds, the scoreboard reads Crispus Attucks 79, Jefferson Lafayette 57. Crispus Attucks has become the first school in Indiana history to take an undefeated record into the tournament and win it all.

  After we cut the nets down and celebrated in the locker room, the team once again piled into the back of a fire truck. Our motorcade followed the exact same route as the year before. I had a strange sense of déjà vu as we moved past the cheering crowds on Meridian, heading down to Monument Circle, around all the statues and memorials there, and then up West Street. I knew the outcome of this, realized exactly what was going to happen. Maybe we’d eat downtown again the next day, but on the night of our victory, the parade once again bypassed the heart of Indianapolis and headed back to Northwestern Park.

  After the state championship game, I was named Indiana’s Mr. Basketball. That made me officially the best player in the state. I was honored, but I didn’t have much to say. And when they asked me for a comment, I think I became self-conscious, my shyness taking over once again. The only thing I could think to say was, “Thanks.”

  When Attucks won its second consecutive state title, it had much more far-reaching consequences than introducing my team to the joys of restaurant meals and public ceremonies. The Attucks-Lafayette game was broadcast across the entire state, meaning that people had just seen an all-black school take home the title for the second consecutive year. I think this made people afraid that maybe Attucks would be unbeatable in athletics if all of Indianapolis’s black students were concentrated there. In Indianapolis as well as other areas with a concentration of black students, white schools started encouraging black students, mostly athletes, to attend. Yes, legal integration of Indianapolis had already started, but until Attucks proved unstoppable, it was just a trickle. By the late 1950
s, the school systems in Indianapolis were much more open. Other schools simply grew weary of trying to stay on the same court with Ray Crowe. Crispus Attucks played a huge role in that change, and I’m proud to have been a part of that.

  After winning the state title, we had one more tournament to play: the Indiana-Kentucky series. I can’t adequately relate how important this series is to the basketball fans in each state. Both states claim the game of basketball as their own and follow high school and college games with a fanaticism that borders on religious. In 1940, they started playing a series, matching the best Indiana high school seniors against Kentucky’s finest, with all revenues going to the Blind Fund. During the first fourteen years, they played just one game a year, in the Butler Fieldhouse. Indiana won all but one, and of course Kentucky fans raised holy hell, citing a home-court advantage as the cause of the lopsided record. To this day the series is still going, one game played in each state, and each contest is sold out and played before a totally partisan audience. As it happens, in 1955, the same year the series went to two games, Kentucky also started naming black players to the squad.

  In 1956, my senior year, the series was being billed by reporters as a battle between opposites—me and “King” Kelly Coleman, a braggadocious white boy from the Kentucky hills. Coleman had broken all Kentucky state scoring records, and he told reporters that the real contest might not be between him and me, but whether he’d score fifty in each game. He wasn’t shy about telling them that he had averaged more than forty-six a game during his senior year at Wayland, and he was certain that a bunch of Indiana players could not guard him. When he showed up late for practice, he told reporters, “I didn’t think I needed any practice against Indiana.”

  I didn’t say anything to the press, but certainly read his comments. Before the first game, which was in Indiana, our team had steaks at a restaurant called the 500 Club and discussed strategy. Our coach was a man named Angus Nicolson, my brother Bailey’s old college coach. When he asked who wanted to guard Coleman, about half the team raised their hands. Angus looked at all of them, then at me. “Oscar, you’ve got him.”