The Big O

by Oscar P Robertson

  I didn’t do it alone, of course. Art Hull, a good friend, also helped me with the transition. Early in my freshman year, Jake Brown came to see me on a visit that helped me sort things out quite a bit. It had been a few months since we’d gone to that baseball game, and we met for lunch or something. I guess he heard that I was having problems adjusting and still feeling the sting of not being allowed into those off-campus theaters and restaurants. Immediately he welcomed me, greeting me with open arms, and before I knew it, he’d invited me to his home. Other than maybe in the South when I was a boy, it was the first time I’d ever been invited, by myself, to any white person’s house. About all I could do in response was nod yes to the invite.

  His home was in the Cincinnati suburb of Avondale. Jake—I’d learn to call him J. W.—and his wife Shirley met me at the door and introduced me to their three daughters, Barbara, Penny, and Debbie. Penny and Debbie—the youngest daughters—put on a skit for me before we ate, and then J. W.’s son, Robert, about fourteen then, joined us.

  During my time at the University of Cincinnati, J. W. Brown, Austin Tillotson, Walter Paul, and Art Hull acted as a support system, a second family. They let me pick their brains, bounce ideas off them, and presented me with different ways of looking at things. They provided me with a generous share of help and guidance.

  For instance, as part of the school’s co-op program, I worked forty hours a week, counting conduit cable in the treasury department of Cincinnati Gas and Electric. On Walter’s advice, I took every dime I made from the treasury department job and invested it in U.S. Savings Bonds, as well as stock in Kroger and Cincinnati Bell. Walter helped me on certain other financial matters, things that might require a delicate touch. Nothing immoral or illegal, mind you; I didn’t get free cars or anything. But when I was having problems at the cafeteria—the food was bland and uninteresting—I called Walter, and he figured out a solution. He also was there for me on other matters and taught me lessons I needed to learn, even those I did not want to learn.

  One night I’d taken the train back to Indianapolis to visit my parents. I came back to town, didn’t have cab fare, and needed a way back to the dorm. I called Walter, and he came with his wife to get me. He was dead tired and, I think, was wearing his bathrobe. I did not have the heart to tell them that my older brother took my taxi money from the top of the dresser. Much later, Walter Paul told an interviewer that I was hungry that night and asked if they could get me a burger and a shake. I don’t remember that. But do remember that when I got in the car, Ms. Paul snapped. “Look, Oscar, I don’t know who you think you are. I wouldn’t take this from my own child. I don’t intend to take it from you. From here on when you make a phone call at some unearthly hour of the night, stop and consider other people.”

  Another night, two years later. I was standing with Walter and his wife. We were in front of the fieldhouse. There were a few boosters present. Walter told them he wanted to introduce his son.

  Then he motioned toward me. “Oscar.”

  Before George Smith took over the University of Cincinnati’s basketball program in 1952, the Bearcats were an awful team with a losing record. George was six feet two inches, a good-size man. Reporters liked to call him Big George. He had been an assistant football coach for eight years, coached the freshman squad, and been a physical education instructor before that. If he wasn’t exactly a basketball guy, he wasn’t an awful coach either. Parents really liked him, and he made players feel safe and comfortable, like he was on your side. When he got you on the court, he was strict, a disciplinarian. It took George about two years to recruit some real players and turn things around. From 1954 until my enrollment two years later, there may not have been tremendous fan interest in the program, but the Bearcats showed a definite improvement, playing a fast and loose style of ball and winning seventy percent of their games.

  Having said this, when I got to Cincinnati, I wasn’t sure how things would go on the court. Time was important. College coaches used all their practice time installing offensive and defensive sets. They didn’t have time for working on footwork and stuff like that. Once you get out of high school, you had to work on those things yourself. That was fine with me. I put in my hours and ignored the myths swirling around campus. I was embarrassed by the circulating word that my workout with Jack Twyman during the recruiting period was actually a game of one-on-one.

  Basketball season was always inaugurated by the freshman squad’s game against the varsity. On a blustery winter night, more than six thousand fans turned out to watch the varsity double-team me the whole game. Although I did manage to find enough openings for thirty-seven points, seventeen rebounds, and eight assists, the varsity won, 87–83. However, during that season, it wasn’t uncommon for fans to show up at the Cincinnati Gardens to watch our game and then leave before the varsity squad took the floor. I guess they weren’t particularly compelling that year. Until I twisted my ankle and missed the last two games, I averaged thirty-three points a game, and our freshman squad finished an uneventful year with a 13–2 record.

  College basketball wasn’t the same game back then. No three-point shots, no forty-five- or thirty-five-second shot clocks. No cable television with games on twenty-four hours a day. No coaches trying to make themselves bigger than the game for the sake of endorsement deals. Only sixteen teams went to the NCAA tournament at the end of the season, so if you did not win your conference championship, you were done for the year.

  In my sophomore year, the games really mattered. Ralph Davis, Spud Hornsby, and Larry Willey were among the sophomores who came with me from the freshman squad. Connie Dierking was the top returning player on a Bearcats squad that had a 13–12 record and averaged a shade less than a hundred points a game. We didn’t have any size, so whenever possible we ran, pushing the ball up the court after fast breaks, making baskets off out-of-bounds plays, you name it. It was a good bunch of guys; I got along with every one of them. That’s important, because one of the binding principles of a locker room is that we’re all in the same boat, that a team is united. Corny as it sounds, a locker room of tightly connected teammates who like one another is a special place. Almost anyone who played college or pro sports will tell you that once their playing days were finished, they missed locker room camaraderie as much as anything.

  Before my first varsity game, the story goes that Coach Smith held a special team meeting, one at which I was not present. Supposedly he said, “I want you fellows to understand something, and I don’t want Oscar to hear what I have to say. You were a good team before, but with Robertson you can become a much better one, maybe a great one. He’ll get all the headlines and all the publicity. You might as well make up your minds to that. But if you play with him, he’ll take you further than you’ve ever gone before.” I don’t know if that meeting ever happened. Smith claims it did, but when starting center Dave Tenwick had a chance to write his own column for the student newspaper, he felt otherwise. “Well, if we did have a meeting like that, I sure don’t remember it.”

  This much I can tell you: on December 6, 1957, a little less than four thousand people turned out for my first varsity college basketball game. Wish I could tell you everything that happened, but I don’t remember a thing about that game. The box score says we beat Indiana State, and that I hit on eleven of sixteen shots, and hit six of eight free throws for a total of twenty-eight points. I also dished out fourteen assists. For twenty-eight minutes of playing time, that’s not too shabby.

  The only other thing I know about that night comes from a column printed years later. In it, a sports editor says that this was the night when Bearcats play-by-play announcer Dick Baker, broadcasting on WSAI-AM radio, first referred to me as the Big O. At first when I made a play, he called me O. “O does it again.” In recollection he would say he had been doing it since my freshman season, while watching me play, but that this was the first time he had a chance to share the nickname with listeners.

  Days later we played
a strong Temple team led by All-American Guy Rodgers. Dozens of writers from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington covered the game. I had thirty-six points and eighteen rebounds in another win. After the game, Temple coach Harry Litwack called me the greatest sophomore player in the country. Then we were at home for our holiday tournament. My thirty-six points against St. Bonaventure helped us pull away in the second half. A night later, another big game against Xavier led us to the tournament title. Four games into the season, I led the nation in scoring, and our team was ranked fourth nationally. After ten games, my average had leveled off at about thirty points a game. A sportswriter with a hangover and too much spare time gave us the nickname, “the Firehouse Fo’ Plus the Big O.”

  The next game took us to New York City.

  Playing in Madison Square Garden is special. New York City is the center of the media world, and a good performance there means untold possibilities and national exposure. In 1958, this was even more true than today. Without cable television, players weren’t seen by fans as they are now. Visiting athletes were known only by reputation. When I was in college, few people had actually seen Wilt Chamberlain. I mean, everybody knew there was a seven-foot giant who played at the University of Kansas. We all were awed by the idea of Wilt. Maybe someone had even seen a few seconds of footage of him. But most fans didn’t know what he looked like. In New York, the media and wire services saw everyone. An appearance in New York meant that you, Wilt, or me would be playing on the biggest imaginable stage, in front of all of the people who would report to the world, tell the nation who you were or were not, what you could or couldn’t do.

  I didn’t know that much about the history of Madison Square Garden. I’d read briefly about it. I knew, vaguely, that college basketball was still recovering from the point-shaving scandals of the early 1950s, and that New York’s college basketball scene had been devastated by the problems with CCNY, Long Island University, and NYU. I guess, to generate a spark, the Garden would bring in big-name college teams and players for a two-day, four-game tournament. That was about the extent of what I knew.

  If anything got to me, it was riding in a taxi. Coming from the Hotel Paramount, up Eighth Avenue to a pregame workout, I was dumbstruck by the majestic chaos of New York City, and gaped and stared out the window. “Look out,” I told the cabby. “Man, you’re worrying me with the way you drive.” “Look at all those big buildings.” “Never saw so many movie theaters in my life.” “Man, this is a big town.”

  On January 9, 1958, under the headline “Cincinnati to Meet Seton Hall Tonight,” The New York Times ran this story:

  Cincinnati, one of the strongest collegiate basketball teams, will meet Seton Hall in the second game of the doubleheader at Madison Square Garden. Another team, Xavier of Ohio, will play against Iona in the opener at 7:15.

  The Bearcats of Cincinnati have won eight of ten. It wasn’t until Connie Dierking was sidelined by a broken bone that Cincinnati lost a game. That was a week ago, and Dierking, though traveling with the squad, will probably not see action.

  The star of the Bearcats, Connie (sic) Robertson, will be making his first appearance in the Garden. The six-foot-five sophomore is averaging thirty points and sixteen rebounds a game.

  Whatever marketing plans the Garden execs had, they didn’t exactly bring out the fans that night, because our game tipped off in front of a mostly empty building. Connie Dierking, our center—whose name the Times juxtaposed with mine—made a surprise start as our other forward. I took my first shot thirty-five seconds into the game, a midrange jumper that missed. A minute and fifteen seconds after that, I used my height and my muscular body to back a defender down, then spun off him and leaped and hit a scooping layup.

  There must have been something in the air that day. Not only had the paper juxtaposed my name with Connie Dierking’s in print, but Seton Hall’s coach kept yelling, “Get Robinson!” His yelling did not help. They were overmatched, and we quickly outran and outscored them. Holding the ball in my right hand, far above my head, releasing and following through on a virtually unblockable shot, I hit jump shot after jump shot. I posted up, ran fast breaks, filled the lane, and finished with one scooping layup after another. By halftime we had blown open the game, and the second half was more of the same. My game wasn’t long-range shooting; I think I only took three shots that night from beyond the top of the key. But whether they were layups or running hook shots or those rare deep jumpers, the ball kept going in the basket. Sometimes you find yourself in a game where everything flows, where there’s a rhythm to your passes, your shots. I didn’t know how many points I had, how many baskets I’d made, how many I’d missed. It’s impossible to count your points during a game and keep track of what’s happening on the court. I was having a pretty good shooting night, sure, but the whole team was playing so well, running up and down the floor, scoring almost at will, that there really wasn’t any reason to think anything of it.

  With two minutes and fifty-six seconds left, Coach pulled me, and I sat out the rest of the 118–54 shipwreck. It wasn’t until afterwards, when I was cornered in the dressing room, and an eager group of reporters started asking me about my record night, that I asked for a stat sheet and saw the following:

  Field goals attempted: 32. Field goals made: 22.

  Free throws attempted: 12. Free throws made: 12.

  My fifty-six points that game were more than the entire Seton Hall team scored, and set not only a Cincinnati record, but a record for the most points that any single player—college or professional—had scored in the thirty-year history of Madison Square Garden.

  I didn’t have time to process this news; the questions were coming at me at a machine-gun pace:

  “When did you realize you might set a Garden record?”

  “I didn’t realize it.”

  “Well, after you learned you had set a record, how did you feel?”

  “I felt good.”

  “Was this your biggest thrill?”

  “No, my biggest thrill was in helping Crispus Attucks High School to two Indiana state championships.”

  They continued shooting their questions, and I answered most of them in the same terse manner, with quiet one- or two-word sentences. It was overwhelming. One writer asked me something, and I mumbled something in return. While three or four others reporters interrupted and fought with each other for the next question, the first one stood there and wrote down my comment and let everybody else swarm. He had dark hair and glasses and stood behind the rest of the mob. Finally, everything was over. I finished with my shower and sat in front of my locker and started drying off. The guy came over and sat down.

  “You know,” he said, “I want to talk to you. My name’s Milt Gross. I’m a writer for the New York Post.”

  I shook his hand.

  “You know,” he said, “if you’re going to be a star, you’ve got to talk to the press.”

  I looked at him. “But I don’t know them.”

  Well, Milt got to know me. He befriended me. That first night, he explained the nature of the media and reporters to me, and from that point on, whenever I came to New York, we’d meet. Milt took me out, introduced me to Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella. For the next seventeen years—the entire course of my basketball life—I knew if I said, “Milt, this is off the record,” he wouldn’t write it. I knew if I had something that I wanted to get printed, he would get it right. It was an important friendship, one that was mutually beneficial, and also one that would eventually cause problems for me with local reporters in Cincinnati.

  When I finally dressed and left the Garden, it was late; the streets were empty and glowing. A light snow was in the air. I was with my roommate, Chuck Machock. The team bus had long gone, so we walked back to the hotel, talking about the game we’d just played and everything that had happened afterwards.

  From Jimmy Cannon’s column in the New York Post on January 10, 1958: “They knew right away, soon as the kid handled the bal
l. It was the way he dribbled, crouching, shielding the ball with his body. There was the quickness of his hands, the agility of his body . . . Not many were there either, but as Oscar Robertson’s legend increases, the liars will put themselves in the Garden on the big night of Thursday, January 9.”

  John Griffin of UPI: “Not since Hank Luisetti came storming out of the West with his amazing one-hand shots has a basketball player rocked New York in his debut like Oscar Robertson.”

  Fred DeLuca of International News Service: “An historic performance that brought back memories of the greatness in the arena that was once the mecca of the nation’s hoop sport.”

  Louis Effrat, covering the game in The New York Times: “He’s merely wonderful.”

  Word was out, and now the publicity machines moved into full gear. Supposed analysts compared me to Willie Mays, and name coaches—like Joe Lapchick—declared that I could become the greatest player of all time. Playing in Philadelphia’s famous Palestra, a bunch of reporters and fans sat anticipating my performance, treating me as if I were a show pony about to do tricks. St. Joseph held me scoreless for the first seven minutes, but I found a rhythm and managed to eke out forty-three points, and we cruised to another blowout, breaking the century mark yet again. A man who worked with my mom used to tell her that when I was playing, whether it was in Manhattan or in Philadelphia, he could hear the radios and the screaming and shouting all over town. Twelve games into my first collegiate season, I was declared the front-running candidate for the Gold Star Award, traditionally given to the player of the year. Our home games sold out for the rest of the season. Our road games, too.

  Children used to stand on the sidelines before games, watching me shoot, and usually I made the time to throw some passes or kid around. Teammates joked about me wearing shades to avoid my adoring public. I knew they were kidding, and laughed along with them, but didn’t really know what to make of it all. My mom has always claimed that no matter how much I protested, I actually enjoyed the attention, but that I was too humble to ever show that I enjoyed it. I’m not one to disagree with my mother, and certainly not in my autobiography. But I can tell you there is nothing exciting about having crowds following you into the men’s room to ask for an autograph.