I sat still, stayed quiet.
When Paul got back to Cincinnati, he contacted Professor Newman in the English Department at UC. Newman’s wife was Ruth Lyons of the 50-50 Club at WLW. Soon enough, my mom appeared on the 50-50 Club. Paul also arranged for her to cut an audition tape at King Record Company, which was big in country and western at the time. My mother never breathed a word of any of this to me; I had no idea it was going on. In fact, it wasn’t until years later that I learned about all these plans and machinations. In any case, the morning after Mom’s audition, Ray Crowe called Paul and asked, “What in the world did you do with that woman yesterday?” Paul told Ray about the studio visits and also how he gave my mom a tour of his plant. He had introduced her to several of his longtime black employees who had grown up with him and were almost like family.
“Well,” Ray said, “She just called me and told me, ‘Look, I know you control my son, but I want to tell you that he just has to go to the University of Cincinnati.’”
As if this wasn’t enough, Walter Paul then set up a visit. I went to Cincinnati and met Jack Twyman, a forward who was the leading scorer on the Rochester Royals and an NBA all-star. We worked out together, one-on-one, at an old school gym. Afterwards, Twyman told Paul that I was the greatest player he’d ever seen. That night the Twymans, the Smiths, and the Pauls took me to dinner. They dropped me off at the Cincinnati Y after dinner. Apparently, Twyman told Paul, “If I were George Smith, I’d go to bed with that boy, keep an eye on him, and let Mrs. Smith go on home by herself.”
The next day Walter Paul took me to Crosley Field to watch a Reds game. There, I met his old friend Jake Brown. He was a UC booster who had gone through its undergraduate and law programs. When I met him, he was the senior partner in his law firm of Brown and Gettler. All I knew at the time was that he was kind to me without seeming fake or overly deferential, but later I found out that he was a major power broker in Cincinnati and had quite a reputation throughout the Midwest as a civil libertarian. He told me to call him J. W. We watched the ball game for a while, and I didn’t say much, as usual. Jake’s son Robert, who was about thirteen or so, was there, and I chatted mostly with him.
I know that the bleachers at Crosley Field were segregated—I had taken a few trips to Cincinnati to see Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers play—and I can’t exactly account for how we all sat in the same section, except to wonder if it was a private box. But I remember being surrounded by friendly faces. I remember feeling that if Jackie Robinson could play in Cincinnati, with the whole Negro population turning out to greet him, then maybe I had a shot of playing there without problems.
Maybe it was another rose-colored vision. A lot of people who sat in those same bleachers had memories from years before of shouted obscenities and a threat of violence in the air. Many people remember that in 1952, death threats had brought armed bodyguards to Crosley when Robinson and the Dodgers had visited. But to me, being at a major-league game had been such a kick that, as naïve as it makes me sound, I didn’t really notice any warning signs that day.
Near the end of the game, J. W. started talking to me as if just the two of us were at the game. “Oscar,” he said, “I want you to know that if you come to Cincinnati, I will not just see you through college. I will give you business assistance. I will see you into your pro career. Help you handle your finances. Give you business advice. Be a friend of some importance to you, even after you leave the university.”
Something about Jake’s demeanor told me that I could trust what he said. With some people, you don’t have to spend much time with them to know that you can take them for their word. And that promise for the future seemed to offer me something that no one else had: respect for me beyond my basketball abilities and a real concern for what was best for me as a person regardless of what I could do for them.
I hadn’t actually investigated the university itself. Cincinnati was two hours or so south of Indianapolis on Highway 52.1 knew the city was about the same size as Indianapolis and had about the same demographics. The Bearcats had an all-white team and a white coaching staff, and they weren’t exactly basketball legends, so I hadn’t placed them high on my list. At the same time, my choices were really narrowing. If I wanted to stay close to home, there weren’t too many choices. These people seemed to be honest and sincere. Plus, there was the matter of the coach, George Smith.
George had grown up on an Ohio farm and had a style that put people at ease. Recruiting was one of the things he was good at. He was a charmer, but in an easygoing way that didn’t make you feel like you were being charmed. When we sat down for our first interview together, I was prepared. He asked me the question that everyone asks, “What do you want out of college?” I answered him promptly: “One, naturally I want a good education. Two, I want the opportunity to play major-league basketball for exposure in the large cities. Three, I want no black problem. Four, I want to be close to my family and friends in Indianapolis. Five, I want to play in Madison Square Garden. They say that’s the mecca of basketball, and that’s where I want to play.”
I wasn’t trying to make a good impression. I was just answering honestly and being myself. I had thought plenty about what I wanted out of college, and I knew that none of it was negotiable. My friends always said, even way back then, that I was driven. A friend once told me, “At seventeen you knew exactly what you wanted by twenty-seven. At twenty-seven, you were getting right on target for thirty-seven.” I might not have phrased it that way, but I couldn’t disagree.
Coach Smith seemed impressed by the clarity of my list and the lack of hesitation I showed before giving it to him. He smiled at me, nodded, maybe gave a little laugh.
My trip had other memorable parts. Ted Berry, who later became Cincinnati’s first black mayor, had a reception for me. I will never forget how nice he was to me. On another recruiting visit, Ross Hastie, a wealthy university supporter, led a private tour around his home for me and a teammate, Al Maxey. The house had a pool and tennis and basketball courts. As they showed me around, I kept shooting Al looks, Can you believe this? I keenly felt how little I knew about finance or culture or international relations. I couldn’t add much to any conversations, so I stayed quiet.
At some point, while I was sitting by the pool, Ross Hastie’s young son, who must have been six or seven years old, turned to me and said, “Gee, you sure are black.”
Well, it got quiet. Really quiet.
I smiled at him and calmly explained that my ancestors came from another continent. It was very hot there, and dark skin was the norm. That answer was probably more words than I’d said all day, and after it came out of my mouth, it felt like the whole room exhaled.
On June 8, 1956, I wore my cap and gown along with 170 other seniors graduating from Crispus Attucks. I was sixteenth in my class, which put me in the ninety-first percentile, and a member of the National Honor Society. The next day, I announced my intention to enter the University of Cincinnati.
CHAPTER FIVE
Collegiate Life
1956–1958
NOWADAYS, SOME GUYS jump straight from high school into the NBA. The time when Moses Malone, Bill Willoughby, and Darryl Dawkins defied convention and logic is long past. The individual and collective success of Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, and Tracy McGrady burst open the floodgates. When Kwame Brown went straight from his high school graduation to the number one pick in the draft, it solidified the trend, turned what was once a rarity into a rite of passage. This past year, anyone with cable television and even a moderate interest in sports watched LeBron James become a SportsCenter celebrity, with special segments about the Hummer his mom got him and the replica jerseys that the boy was given, with announcers all the while lecturing and pontificating about exploitation, even as their network was broadcasting his games.
Coming from the kind of poverty I did, I certainly can understand someone making the leap right into the professional ranks, especially when there are millions of do
llars involved. Hell, if someone had offered me a Jackie Robinson jersey when I was in high school, rules or not, I would have taken it.
Having said this, I also know that there’s a difference between being physically capable of doing something and being mature enough to understand everything that comes with what you are doing. The NBA draft has become something of a futures market, with teams taking young, raw players and relying on the idea that they will develop gradually, blossoming into stars three or four years down the line. Kids are being put in a situation and a life they aren’t prepared for. Part of playing basketball is having the game experience, maturity, and smarts to know what to do. But every year, there are more guys running up and down NBA courts with no idea how to play or handle themselves professionally. On the one hand, good for them; they made it into the big time. But the flip side is, once you get enough guys on the court who don’t know how to play or conduct themselves, who throw tantrums and scream at their coaches and get into trouble and are generally too young and self-centered to know what they’re doing, the end result is that quality of the game gets diluted. The state of professional basketball is adversely affected.
But my experience wasn’t a textbook example on the way things should be either. In 1956, when I enrolled in the University of Cincinnati’s School of Business Administration, freshmen weren’t eligible to play varsity basketball in college. Schools had freshman teams. The idea was to give incoming student-athletes a year to adjust to college life, at the same time allowing them to assimilate gradually into their athletic program, mature physically, and get ready for varsity competition. That was the idea, anyway.
If you had told me then that I’d spend the great majority of my adult life living in Cincinnati, I probably would have laughed at you. Yet I have spent forty-three of the past forty-seven years living here. Shortly after I graduated from Crispus Attucks, I packed up what few shirts I had, two pairs of pants, my sneakers, and moved to Cincinnati for the summer. Walter Paul helped set me up at the Cincinnati YMCA and got me a job in the shipping department of Queen City Barrel. Walter’s brother ran the production line at the plant, and he had me working down on the line, in the factory’s bowels. Someone had put up a basketball hoop at the end of the line. One day I started shooting during lunch. Soon enough Walter’s brother called him long-distance. Wanted to know who I was. Everybody was stopping work to watch me pop them in from all over the lot. He told Walter I was disrupting production. He wanted to fire me.
“For God’s sake,” Walter screamed, “don’t do that.”
Soon enough he called the supervisor, and disaster was averted.
But things were far from perfect. The summer was less than a month old when I’d tired of living at the Y. My room was hot and terrible. I didn’t know too many people in Cincinnati, the campus was pretty much closed up, and the people that I did see walking around there weren’t anything like me. So I quit the job on the production line and spent the rest of the summer working for Swanney on his construction crew.
When I was being recruited, people from the university may have taken me into their homes, George Smith may have walked me through the Cincinnati Armory Fieldhouse, where the basketball team played, but the one place I didn’t spend much time was the campus. Turns out, there was a reason for this. The University of Cincinnati had a small campus, for the school was a private institution, only accepting the cream of applicants, the top ten percent or so. I had no idea of the difference between a private and public school or how something like a high-end admission policy would affect the racial composition of the student body. Maybe I sound naïve. But when I sat in the stands at Crosley Field and watched the Reds play against Jackie Robinson, I saw all those black faces. I figured that if this was how things were in the stands, this was how things were in the city of Cincinnati.
I had told George Smith that I did not want any racial problems at the school I attended. He had agreed, as did all the other people I talked to. I’d figured that this meant there was some sort of balance, that problems were already dealt with. I’m not saying I expected some sort of utopia—however naïve I was, I wasn’t that naïve. I am sure that, somewhere in my mind, I understood that I was still the exception, not the rule. Bradley University had a few black players back then, NYU had three or so, and a few other teams had black players. But Louisville was all white, for example—Louisville. Mississippi State’s basketball team had to sneak out of the state just to play against a team with black kids on it. When you got down to it, the recruitment of any African-American player by a white college at that time was a clear statement against segregation. And while I may not have known all the numbers and details involved, I certainly understood that this was the case. I was aware of the lay of the landscape.
Having said this, I certainly did not expect to be one of the five black athletes who, basically, desegregated the school, nor to bear the brunt of that action. I did not expect that a graduate student named William Flax would write letters to the campus newspaper saying it was degrading to import black student-athletes, that it was insulting to the campus community. I could not know that during my time at the University of Cincinnati, I would be discouraged from entering a bar-and-grill where other players hung out, and I definitely did not expect that I would be attending a school where—though the majority of the professors were honorable, dedicated people who graded students on the quality of their work—it seemed a few professors did whatever they could to prevent black students from graduating.
School started in fall, and as I put away my misgivings about my summer job, I moved into an all-male athletic dormitory. I’d always loved school and was eager for classes to start, excited to be starting out for myself on my own two feet at a place that had gone to such lengths to welcome me. But when I walked into certain classrooms, immediately I sensed a reaction. I saw that a lot of people were uncomfortable with my presence. I had been comfortable at Crispus Attucks and felt at home, but now I was a walking anomaly. The only students I knew were my teammates and Ralph Davis and Ron Dykes. I wasn’t going out of my way to meet people. I didn’t know how to handle this new world and backed away from it, keeping to myself, relying on the cautious introverted habits that made me feel safe. It was a confusing, lonely time.
I’d met Austin Tillotson at the theater one evening with some teammates. Austin introduced himself. He was an older man. He’d played pro basketball in the 1930s, had heard about me from friends in Indianapolis, and went out of his way to help me. Austin and Gladys Tillotson’s home turned out to be a blessing for me throughout college—a sanctuary and a refuge. I can’t tell you how many Sunday mornings I went over there, had a morning meal, and joined the family for services over at Zion Baptist Church.
I remember going over to the Tillotson house once, really frustrated. Blacks just caught hell in class, and I couldn’t take it anymore. It wasn’t only me, I told Austin. There was one other black guy, a guy named George Welch, who was in a lot of my classes. We took a lot of abuse, and nobody did anything about it. An economics professor told me that I wouldn’t pass. So I had to take an economics exam from a professor at another college, just to prove to the university that I knew the work. I was sitting there explaining all this bull to Austin. He gave me a look and laughed, a kind of bitter laugh. “Man. Black people don’t go to school here.”
Austin was one of few to sit me down and be completely honest with me. That day he explained the real deal with blacks and the university I had enrolled in, and I sat there, listened, and thought about it.
I already knew there were certain things I couldn’t do. I knew that in high school, I had to watch where I went, who I was with, what I said. I knew that anyway, because that’s the world of an athlete. But I also knew that being black meant there always would be extra burdens on your shoulders. Being black meant you had to be better than someone else to get by.
It’s been written I never smiled in games. Never smiled during practice, never during a scrimm
age. That’s not strictly true, although, yes, I was an intense competitor. One Saturday morning, we were in a pickup game. Some money was riding on it. A college football player hit a wild shot and danced back up the floor. I told him to sit down in the bleachers, that I could get some kid watching on the sideline who would not pull that kind of junk to play instead of him.
“It’s only a game, Oscar.”
“Game, hell, I’ve got my money riding on this game.”
“Ten cents. A lousy dime. If we lose, I’ll buy the beer.”
“You’re missing the point. Any time I get out here at nine o’clock on Saturday morning to play basketball, I’m playing to improve. And I’m playing to win. If you don’t want to play, go over and sit down.”
I was driven, moved by something more powerful than I am. I think that’s why when another exam—this one in marketing—came around, and everyone on the basketball team had a tutor available to him, I did better on the exam than my tutor. I remember that the head of the department called Coach Smith, and I was called into the athletic office. Coach asked how I could do better than the guy tutoring me. “Man,” I said, “I just went and let him do all the talking. The guy taught me everything he knew, but I didn’t tell him everything I knew.”
I made no apologies.
When Austin Tillotson sat me down and explained to me that black people did not go to the University of Cincinnati, I could have left. I was a shy country boy, and the last role I was ready for was a barrier-breaker. I was the most-sought-after player in the nation, and schools would have been falling over themselves to take me. The easy thing would have been to walk away, transfer schools.
But I thought about what Austin said, swallowed, and said, “Okay.”
In retrospect, I’m glad I did. Glad they picked me and glad I hung in there. I’m proud that I was successful both in the classroom and on the court.
The Big O Page 9