The Big O

by Oscar P Robertson

  Butler Fieldhouse was again packed for the first game. The papers say it was humid in the arena, and I knew from memory that when the place was packed like that, it didn’t take much for your shirt to stick to your back. Coleman and I both wore the traditional number one, which is awarded to each state’s Mr. Basketball. Before the opening tap, I shook hands with him. “Talk is cheap,” I said.

  Kentucky continued the tradition of teams getting off to comically fast starts against me. Their squad came out onto our home court and scored the first seven points. We regrouped enough to tie the score at 10, then took a 12–10 lead. Throughout, I worked pretty hard on defense, crowding Coleman and denying him the ball. He ended up with three points in the first half, and we stretched our lead. During the second half, whenever Kentucky threatened, I either drove and hit someone for an assist, nailed a jump shot, or finished a play myself. We took the first game going away, 92–78. I ended up with thirty-four points, breaking the single-game scoring record by six.

  Coleman finished with seventeen, most of them coming during the fourth quarter.

  The second game was more of the same, only this time it was played in Louisville, Kentucky. We scored thirty points in the third quarter and blew their doors off, 102–77. This time, Coleman ended up with all of four points, from one of nine shooting. I broke my new record, scoring my fortieth and forty-first points, when our coach reinserted me into the game with seconds left, for a shot at the buzzer.

  After that second game, Coleman said he was out of shape and had a bad leg and, considering his condition, would never have made those kinds of predictions. But the coach for the Kentucky all-star team thought Coleman’s performance had less to do with his leg than with me. He told reporters that I was “a pro playing with a bunch of high school boys. He’s the best high school basketball player I ever saw.” Indianapolis Star columnist Bob Collins wrote, “If there’s anyone who doubts now that Oscar Robertson is the best high school player in the world, he’s speaking in very faint tones.” Most of his colleagues agreed. Of the 108 sportswriters voting for the Star of Stars in 1956, 106 voted for me.

  By the time I graduated from high school, seventy-five colleges had recruited me, in one form or another, with at least forty schools contacting me directly. Only Wilt Chamberlain, who had signed the previous season to play at Kansas, had received more attention. Colleges had been in touch with me since my sophomore season, but during my senior year things got crazy. Calls came to my home and school on a daily basis. Indiana, Purdue, Notre Dame, Illinois, Duquesne, Kansas, New York University, Duke, Connecticut, Marquette, UCLA, Arizona State, Kansas, Nebraska, Cincinnati: All these, and more besides, were calling.

  Maybe other athletes have enjoyed the recruitment process. There’s a lot to enjoy: the attention, the constant praise, the promises. To some degree, everyone likes being romanced. Make that almost everybody. I wasn’t at ease with the process. In fact, I was extremely cautious about it, wary of all these people I didn’t know. I saw them as part of the other world, the white world, a world that had made very few sincere overtures to me. Moreover, I had heard of situations where other black players felt awkward simply because of their unfamiliarity with the way things worked. There was the story of a player who took a recruiting trip to Nebraska. On the plane he asked the stewardess how much it would cost him to have a sandwich. Well, the sandwiches were complimentary, they were the in-flight meal, but he’d never been on a plane. He didn’t know. And he came back from a recruiting trip with money in his pockets to pay for his trip back home. His mom thought they were buying him like a slave and made him send all the cash back. Then there were the stories of black players, like Bill Scott, who went to white schools and excelled, only to be run from the team by their teammates who thought they were being shown up.

  I was by no means afraid of the future, but I also wasn’t in any hurry to commit to anything. I started planning. I realized that where I attended college was a huge decision, and I wanted to make it carefully, on my own terms. I was going to play college ball somewhere, that was for sure, and wherever it was going to be, I allowed myself to believe that the school I would choose would celebrate greatness in the same way for everyone, regardless of skin color. Maybe I was looking through rose-colored glasses, to believe there was such a place. But that’s how I thought. If there were a college where merit mattered more than skin color, I’d find it. That would be where I would attend college.

  NCAA rules were that colleges couldn’t legally talk to me until after the Kentucky-Indiana all-star game, when my eligibility to play high school ball expired. So that bought me some time. And once basketball ended, I was busy all spring with the track squad—I qualified for the state championships in the high jump. I also played around with the baseball team (in one game, they let me pitch, and I went the distance for the win, striking out ten, allowing only five hits). So long as I was involved with high school sports, recruiters weren’t supposed to contact me. Of course, they still did. My dad disconnected his phone three times. Guess all those recruiting folks didn’t realize how little pull my dad had with me. Those recruiters could have become his best friends, and it wouldn’t have affected my decision.

  A publicity guy named Haskell Cohen, who worked for the NBA, wanted me to go to Duquesne. But that school turned me off when they suggested I be a bellhop at Kutsher’s in the Catskills and play basketball all summer. They said it was the way to become an All-American. I told them I would like to develop into an All-American, but I had to work in the summer, and not as a bellhop. Cohen didn’t care. He spread rumors that I was virtually pledged to Duquesne. There was even a rumor that our house on Boulevard Place was part of a deal made so that I would play ball at Duquesne. I heard that I had been given a $250 watch and a wardrobe of clothes. I used to look at my wrist to see if it was true, but there was never any watch. I used to stare down at my clothes, shirts that I’d had for years and years, and laugh at my stunning wardrobe. One rumor, spread during the height of the recruiting competition, had a FOR SALE sign appearing in our yard. Absurd.

  When my friend Don Brown got in some trouble with his father and couldn’t drive, I drove us to school in Don’s car; of course that sparked rumors that I’d been given a car. The truth is, I didn’t get my first car until after I graduated from high school, after I had made my decision, once recruiting was over. I got my first real job working for a businessman named Swanson that summer. I called him Swanney. He had a car wash and a construction crew. I worked on the crew, putting in asphalt all day long. It wasn’t any harder than throwing hay into a moving wagon all day, so I didn’t mind it. Swanney told me if I worked to make my money, at the end of the summer he’d help me get a car. At the end of the summer, I had maybe three or four hundred dollars. I found a used Mercury for sale, two-tone brown, for about five hundred dollars. He made up the difference, and boom, I had my first automobile.

  Imagine going through your senior year of high school, trying to live a normal life while all these rumors that you’re for sale to the highest bidder are flying around. Meanwhile, you’re about to spend the summer putting in pavement and saving up money for a used, two-tone Mercury. Yes, people were trying to wine and dine me. But I wasn’t on the take, so there wasn’t much they could give me.

  Indiana University’s coach, Branch McCracken, was famous for recruiting Indiana high school players through a statewide network of clinics. High school coaches took the clinics, where they learned how to run fast-break plays using something called the McCracken System. Then the coaches would take that system back to their schools and teach their teams how to play that way. The best players were then funneled into Indiana University. Just about anybody who grew up in Indiana and played nothing more than recreational basketball had a dream, at one time or another, of playing for Indiana University. I was no different. Sure, I had reservations because of the way McCracken had refused to recruit my brother Bailey and then had wasted Hallie Bryant’s talents by having him
sit on the bench. I also knew that although Indiana had five black players on the team, they did not play more than one or two at a time. If they had all those guys on the bench, it followed someone wasn’t going to play. I knew a lot of guys who had their careers ruined because of that, and it wasn’t going to happen to me. So, yes, there were all kinds of potential problems. I knew that. They didn’t eclipse the mystique that being a Hoosier held for me. I wanted to go to Indiana University.

  My senior year of high school, Branch McCracken was nursing a heartache about losing Wilt Chamberlain. In 1954 to 1955, the seven-footer came out of Overbrook High in Philadelphia and set off what was then the largest recruiting war in college basketball history. More than two hundred schools approached him. Indiana was one of the three or four finalists. In his first autobiography, Wilt, Chamberlain said that when he was making his decision, rumors reached him that McCracken wasn’t all that fond of blacks. Chamberlain went on to write that although Indiana recruiters later told him they would double whatever any other school offered to pay him, he signed with Forrest “Phog” Allen and Kansas. McCracken’s version of events was different. He would tell at least one reporter that Chamberlain had been offered to him for five thousand dollars, up front. In McCracken’s version of the story, he refused to pay Wilt, and lost him for that reason. “We thought we had Wilt. He announced he was coming here. Phog Allen stole him away from us.”

  Well, I was the most hyped recruit since Chamberlain. Maybe that made McCracken distrustful of me.

  When track season ended, I became free of varsity obligations and could legally make home visits to universities. The first place I wanted to go was Bloomington. One cloudless spring day, Coach Crowe drove me there. I got to McCracken’s office expecting a certain warmth; after all, they were one of the schools sending me information and saying they wanted me to play for their team, and I was the state’s Mr. Basketball.

  McCracken’s secretary said he was busy. Could I please have a seat and wait?

  Well, after I sat there for thirty minutes or so, McCracken’s door finally opened. He invited me into his office, and I sat down. He was quiet for a moment, looking at me, sizing me up. Finally he said: “I hope you’re not the kind of kid who wants money to go to school.” I did not know that kids got money to play at schools. I grew up religious and was taught to do the right and honest thing. I didn’t want money to go to college, I just wanted to go.

  I didn’t answer him and just walked out of his office, back to the car, seriously insulted.

  If that man had said, “Oscar, we would like you to come to Indiana and play for us,” I would have taken a pen from my own pocket and signed with him right there. Instead I came away thinking that I wouldn’t play for Indiana University if it were the last place on earth.

  “I got to leave,” I told Ray.

  My first choice was off the list, so I started going down the rest of them. I thought hard about Purdue. Willie Merriweather was there, but it was not to be.

  John Wooden at UCLA had sent me one of his “Pyramids of Success,” but he hadn’t really started winning his titles yet. And when I thought of being out in Los Angeles, so far away from my family, I felt my heart drop somewhere underneath my stomach. I decided to stay close enough to home so I could ride a bus back home if I needed to. That helped narrow my choices some.

  The University of Michigan was far enough away to necessitate an airplane ride, but also close enough that I could ride home on a bus if the situation demanded it. I decided to visit and rode in an airplane for the very first time. I was more nervous about the plane ride than meeting the coaching staff. The plane touched the ground in Detroit, and I felt like the rest of the visit would be a piece of cake. I got to the terminal and looked for someone to come forward and introduce themselves. I watched the rest of the passengers meet their parties and wander toward the baggage claim. I kept waiting, unsure of what to do or where to go. After half an hour, I called the coach. They’d forgotten I was coming. I got on the next plane for home.

  A novelty salesman working out of Cincinnati by the name of Al Hutchinson was a major fan of the University of Cincinnati’s basketball team. By chance he also had seen me play during my sophomore year at Crispus Attucks. Al was the first man to tell Cincinnati coach George Smith that he had to see the Attucks team. Smith went down to see what Willie Merriweather could do on a court, but he left interested in me. During my senior year, I was at the top of his list of students to recruit, but somehow Cincinnati’s pitch hadn’t made such a huge impression on me.

  It was late March, awfully late to be thinking about recruiting for September enrollment, when a conversation took place in George Smith’s office. Dick Forbes, a sports columnist for The Cincinnati Enquirer, was talking with Tom Eicher, UC’s sports publicity man. Walter Paul, an executive for Queen City Barrel and Astro Container of Cincinnati, was also there. Paul recruited for the University of Cincinnati’s basketball program, partly as a hobby, and partly because they had such a limited coaching staff. Walter Paul sat in the office, listening, as the reporter and the sports publicity man talked back and forth about me. One of them said, “I bet this guy couldn’t be had for less than ten thousand dollars.”

  This was the first time Walter Paul ever heard of me. Years later he told me, “That comment triggered me. You know, you sustain a certain motivation all through life. But there are some things you want worse than anything else. That—and convincing the woman I married—were the two things that I worked hardest at in my lifetime over a short period of time.”

  Without George Smith knowing a thing about it, Walter Paul went out on his own, trying to find out how to learn about me.

  He started out by talking to the black truck drivers who worked for him and then going into Kingan’s, the meat-packing plant where my dad used to work in Indianapolis. The workers there told him that my father would have very little influence on me. Then he found a meat inspector who said he knew my minister. That too was a blind alley. Finally, via the process of elimination, he determined that the key people in my life were Ray Crowe and my mom. (It’s amusing, thinking of him working so hard to find out who could influence me.) Later, both Ray and my mom told me that neither one of them felt they had a hold on me. Each suspected that the other one had control. George Smith thought it was my mom who was the major factor in my decision as to where to attend college, and said, “Nobody else in his life even came close.” But in the end, as Smith and Paul found out, I was my own man.

  Paul’s first approach to Ray Crowe didn’t get him anywhere. Then, he happened to meet a Wilson Sporting Goods distributor who called on Crispus Attucks. Paul complained to the distributor that he couldn’t get next to this guy Ray Crowe. The distributor mentioned that Ray Crowe liked to play golf, so they arranged a match one afternoon. That brought forth a warm letter of thanks from Ray and led to the two of them and their wives going out socially a couple of times.

  Next, Paul contacted my mother. “We had long discussions about the poverty, the holes in the roof, the tacky linoleum, no showers for the kids, and all that. I listened, no comments. Just listened. Then she played me some spiritual numbers that she wrote in hopes of recording. They had a great beat to them.”

  My mom told Walter Paul that she wanted two things. One, she wanted to get on the 50-50 Club—a midday variety show piped out of Cincinnati WLW-TV into Indianapolis, Columbus, and Dayton. Two, she wanted to get somebody with some clout to listen to that music. She wanted to try and have it published.

  My mom told Paul that the apartment owner next door to us had been authorized by a wealthy Indiana University alumnus to offer the family five thousand dollars for my enrollment at Bloomington. But she also said that Bailey had been cold-shouldered by IU, and there was no way I would go there. Furthermore, she said that I wasn’t for sale. That stuff had gone out ninety years ago. She also told him about Haskell Cohen, that publicist for the NBA who also seemed to be scouting for Duquesne, bothering the dev
il out of her and trying to get me to a Catskills basketball retreat. So Paul told her all kinds of stories about how the Catskills was a terrible place, filled with gamblers and who knows what else.

  Next, Paul, with Bearcats coach George Smith in tow, visited Crispus Attucks. They wanted to talk with Principal Lane, but he was out of town, so they had a long chat with the assistant principal. Not only did Paul and Coach Smith come away impressed with the cleanliness and the atmosphere of the school, but the assistant principal gave me high marks on character, scholarship, and moral fiber. He told them that my desire to be a great player kept me out of trouble; I avoided anything off the straight and narrow, and even stayed away from teammates who were headed the wrong way.

  After they got the tour of Attucks, they met me. Two or three months of intense work had gone into the project at this point. Walter Paul’s dad was furious at him, claiming that his son had neglected the family business to run around chasing a basketball player. But finally, Paul laid eyes on me.

  It was my first time in a hotel suite. Of course I was shy, didn’t say two words to the man.

  Paul and Coach Smith made their presentation. They said, “Look. You are the most-sought-after basketball player in the United States. No matter where you go, you will be looked upon skeptically. At the University of Cincinnati we have a co-op program in the business administration school. We have arranged a double-section version of our regular co-op program, where you can actually go to school for fourteen weeks and then work for fourteen weeks and legally be paid for it and not made ineligible as an athlete. You will work at Cincinnati Gas and Electric on a regular wage scale.”