The Big O

by Oscar P Robertson

  In retrospect I understand things a lot better now. Baseball was still the most popular sport in the nation back then, in no small part because of how well it translated to radio broadcasts, newspaper stories, and box scores, the dominant modes from which people received their sports information at the time. Television was still developing as a medium, and the broadcasting of sporting events developed slowly. (If you can find a tape of it, try to follow the ball during Bobby Thompson’s famous home run off Ralph Branca. Hell, try to find the ball.) As the quality of pictures got better, the sports that best translated onto television screens would grow in national popularity.

  At the time, however, basketball was a series of blurred images and still photos; it was bulky men in crew cuts lumbering across the lane for hook shots, short athletic men darting around; it was underhand free throws and long-range set shots. Big men played close to the basket. Little men handled the ball. This was how the game was played.

  I don’t know if I was the first six-foot-five, two-hundred-pound athlete to handle the ball as much as I did, let alone play the way I did. I do think it’s safe to say that my performance at Madison Square Garden was a touchstone moment for the sport of basketball. I think that watching someone with my athletic ability, size, skills, and basketball knowledge gave experts a sense of the future. Along with Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Elgin Baylor, Jerry West, and a host of other players who would dominate the upcoming decade, I represented a step forward in the game’s evolution. To a large degree, I think that’s what people were responding to.

  Does this mean that from then on my life was coming up roses? Attention goes both ways. The day after our team returned from New York, I was in the Cincy cafeteria, walking through the food line with a friend, Wilmington College’s John Bryant. A black woman behind the counter named Priscilla was ladling out meat and potatoes. When I showed her an excellent, slick black-and-white photo from the Seton Hall game, she said, “Oscar, I want that picture, with your signature.”

  “Sure, I’ll be glad to get you a copy.”

  “No, no, I want that picture. Right there.”

  “Priscilla, I guess you don’t understand. This is an original photograph of a great moment in my life, and I intend to keep it. I’ll speak to the university sports publicity department. I’m sure we can get you a good copy.”

  “I understand all too well, Oscar. You’re getting pretty high and mighty. Well, in two or three years, you’ll be right back here with me, washing dishes.”

  I surveyed her and measured my thoughts. “Priscilla,” I replied, “One day I’ll be playing professional basketball, and you’ll still be right where you are now.”

  I was an intense competitor. My face could be calm and smooth. Just as easily it could contort. I talked to refs. I was competitive. “He can’t be such a Superman if he complains so much,” one referee told a reporter, though he made sure to keep anonymous when he said this. The truth is, most of the time, when I looked mad, I was mad at myself. I knew I should have been doing better. But I was a rough player. I knocked guys around, and got knocked right back. You just had to expect it, up to a certain point.

  Of course, that line got crossed.

  I broke the color barrier on the University of Cincinnati’s basketball team the same year the school entered the Missouri Valley Conference. Our conference schedule called for our team to visit to St. Louis, Houston, and Denton, Texas, all racially charged cities. In St. Louis, for example, racial tensions had caused the Hawks, then the city’s NBA franchise, to trade away the draft rights to Bill Russell. In my mind that’s about the single worst front-office mistake in NBA history, right up there with picking Sam Bowie ahead of Michael Jordan.

  One road trip had us playing a game in Houston first, then up to Denton, Texas, for a game against North Texas. In Houston, we stayed at the Shamrock Hilton Hotel, a plush, downtown hotel. At around midnight the hotel manager called Coach Smith’s room. Said they had to get that black kid down from the end of the hall and out of the hotel.

  “I called Harry Faulk, the athletic director at Houston, and asked him what the hell was going on,” Smith recalled for an interviewer. “He told me they were expecting Oscar at Southern University for the night. The thought crossed my mind to pull the whole team out of the hotel and forfeit tomorrow’s game and get on the next plane back to Cincinnati.”

  I was in my room. I’d been lying down on the bed for a little while, when a knock on the door interrupted. Coach Smith came in and said that I couldn’t stay here. Well, I thought the whole team was moving. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Where are we going?”

  Coach explained that we weren’t going anywhere. I had to go over to Texas Southern, a local blacks-only college. “They don’t want blacks staying here,” he said.

  I didn’t know what to say or do. But I went. The Texas Southern basketball coach got out of his bed in the dead of night, helped me out, and found me a spare dorm room. Decades later, at a funeral for Wilma Rudolph, that man who’d coached TSU told me who he was. I was glad to meet him again, and I told him that I appreciated what he did for me that night.

  In that dorm room, I laid down on a little bunk bed.

  As much as it bothered me that the hotel wouldn’t let me stay there, I was just as bothered at being the only person who had to move. All this talk about being a team and winning and losing together, staying together and doing things together—as a team. What just happened? I asked myself. What the hell’s going on here?

  I had forgotten momentarily that this was America.

  The next day, nobody said anything to me, not anyone from the school, not a teammate. I didn’t say a word to them either. We flew from Houston to Dallas, then took a silent, tension-heavy bus ride into Denton and the arena, where I discovered a black cat loose in the locker room, apparently some kind of small-minded comment on me playing there.

  The shock of that discovery wore off, and I composed myself, figuring that they put the cat there to rattle me. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction, wouldn’t let myself be rattled. I dressed, then went onto the court for warmups. The place exploded. It was a packed house, and maybe they did not know about what had happened the previous night, but if they had, they probably would have been happy about it, at least from the way they screamed, booing, questioning my ancestry, yelling every name in the book. Programs flew from the stands. Hot dog and cinnamon buns. All of it raining down. All of it directed at me. Even in the smallest Indiana high school I’d never seen anything like it.

  I didn’t take any warmup shots or get loose, but just stood in the middle of the court, my arms crossed. I didn’t know if I was going to play, did not know what to do, but the longer I stood there, the angrier I became. It’s probably good that none of my teammates came up to me or said anything. I was so disappointed that if someone had put a hand on my shoulder, I don’t know what would have happened.

  Something inside me said, Play the game. So I did. I scored only thirteen points, my low for the season, and some papers would make it out as if this kid named Gary Phillips had a lot to do with stopping me. The truth is, under the circumstances, it was one of my best performances in college. I hadn’t gotten any sleep the night before, hadn’t warmed up, and was mad as hell, really not in the right state of mind to play the way I usually did. We still pounded them, 70–53. “Beat them and made them like it,” as Coach Smith put it.

  Afterwards, a newspaperman asked how it felt to be the star, yet be forced to live away from his teammates. I answered, “How would you feel if you were me?”

  Then I waited until we were back in Cincinnati and went to see Coach Smith. I told him that I did not think he had anything to do with what happened. If I thought he had anything to do with what happened in that hotel that night, I would have left school and never come back. But, I also said, he’d checked me into that room. The university and the athletic department and, yes, the coaching staff, all of them knew the travel plans; they were responsib
le for making and okaying them. I said that I did not ever want to go anywhere again with the team and yet be kept separate from them. I did not want to attend any civic functions or any public team functions. I didn’t blame any players on my team for what happened, but if I couldn’t stay with them, I wanted nothing to do with team functions that promoted this school, and I didn’t want any questions about it. If anything like this happened again, I told him, I would leave UC.

  From that day forward, I grew up fast.

  On the last night in April, I scored twenty-four of our last twenty-six points, and fed Larry Willey on a floor-length pass for the other basket to lead Cincinnati back from a nine-point deficit in the final ten minutes of regulation play. In the last ninety seconds of the game, I made six consecutive free throws, helping us to clinch the 86–82 victory over Wichita, securing the Missouri Valley Conference championship in our first year in the league and earning the school its first berth in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Championships. It was a big feat. You could be the second-best team in the nation, but if you didn’t win your conference’s title, you weren’t going to the NCAAs.

  When we returned from Kansas, more than three thousand fans were waiting at the airport.

  We were 24–2, ranked in the Top Ten, and heading into the postseason. It was a two-hour trip to Louisville, Kentucky, for the Midwest Regional. Our fans drove down in a caravan, and we easily won the opening game. This meant a day of rest before we played top-seeded Kansas State for a berth in the final four. The game took place on the same day as the Indiana state high school basketball championship. Just before the opening tip-off, I walked over to press row and spotted a reporter I knew named Bill Staubitz. Bill was from Indiana and was a big basketball fan. I knew he’d listened to the high school finals on his car radio, so I asked how Attucks was doing. Bill told me they won.

  A sold-out crowd booed me on three particular plays when, as Kansas State broke ahead for a fast break, I stood with my hands on my hips or jogged up court. Each time I ended up with the defensive rebound after a missed shot, one time driving back down the length of the court, where I scored on a driving layup.

  Bob Boozer led a Kansas State team that was much larger in the front-court than we were. It was a physical, grueling game, played to their strengths. With less than a minute left, we were trailing by two, and I was at the foul line. I hit the first shot, then began my normal ritual on the second, breathing deeply and composing myself. The rules say that from the moment the referee hands you the ball, you have ten seconds to shoot, but that you can hand him back the ball, at which point the count will start over.

  A teammate yelled: “He’s counting, Oscar. Shoot it.”

  Well, I hurried the shot, missed, and Kansas got the rebound. We ended up going into overtime, where I fouled out in the first minute or so, the first time in my college career that I was disqualified from a basketball game. That was the end of our season. Looking back on that game still vexes me a little. It wasn’t that the referee was wrong. It was the rule. I could have just tossed the ball to him, stopped the count, and stepped off the line. A bunch of us from the team later reviewed the game on a movie screen a dozen times. The ref was letting free-throw shooters, myself included, take long counts, sixteen to eighteen seconds’ worth, through the whole game. Inconsistency is one of the things that I’ve always hated about referees. Throughout my entire career, it always got to me. At the same time, the fact of the matter is that the ball was in my hands. And nobody missed that free throw but me.

  Bob Boozer and I would be teammates on two different NBA teams, and in the years to come, he would kid me endlessly about that free throw. What could I do but laugh? One of the things that sports does is teach you that loss is part of life. It doesn’t teach you how to deal with loss, how to be graceful in defeat, how to accept the idea that sometimes you will lose, or how to look at your mistakes and learn from them and improve. That’s up to each person. Some things are easy to get over. If you do your best and lose, you can accept that. Mental mistakes and moments where you weren’t given a fair chance, the chance you deserved, those are harder to swallow. Nothing is more irritating than the mistakes you make on those matters within your control.

  Afterwards, George Smith said to me, “Forget about it, it’s over. Over for me and for you. You can’t win them all.” At that time, when you reached the final eight, the NCAA tournament had consolation games, where the losing teams played one another. We stayed in Louisville for a day, sulking, and then took the court against Arkansas.

  My fifty-six points in that game equaled my Madison Square Garden performance and set a then-NCAA tournament record. It didn’t really ease the sting of the original loss.

  Our team ended the season with a school-best 25–3 record. My season total of 984 was the most points by a college sophomore in basketball history, as was my 35.1 points per game scoring average. I was only the third sophomore to be voted a first-team All-American, making the team with Wilt Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor, Guy Rodgers, and Don Hennon. With five more votes than Wilt, I was also named the college player of the year, the first sophomore to win the award.

  During the next months, I attended sixty-four sports award banquets and ate more rubber chicken than any one person should ever be exposed to. This wasn’t easy for me. Award events are usually a mixture of the uneventful and the boring. And getting up in front of a group of people that I didn’t know anything about, and talking about this and that, wasn’t something I was comfortable with. In the end, I think the whole process was good for me. I did a lot of hand-shaking and, slowly, my social skills began to grow.

  Sometime that spring, the Cincinnati Royals selected me under the NBA’s territorial rule, but I didn’t pay attention. I still had two years of college left. Besides, other things were happening.

  Austin Tillotson’s wife Gladys taught elementary school in Cincinnati. One day I was at Austin’s house, and he told me about a lady his wife taught with, a woman he’d met a few times and thought quite highly of. He felt I should meet her, maybe get to know her. I got her number and gave her a call.

  Yvonne Crittenden was her name. And she doesn’t remember things that way. According to her, I saw her at a fraternity dance as I was passing through the building on my way in from practice. I asked my friend John Bryant for her phone number.

  Either way, we ended up on a double date with John and his girlfriend. We went to see Carmen McRae at some smoky little nightclub.

  Yvonne was petite and reserved. I thought she was lovely, a true lady. But I was so shy that I really did not have much to say to her. If she didn’t talk about sports, there wasn’t going to be much of a conversation. I spent most of the night talking to John.

  But during the intermission, Yvonne and I did talk a little basketball.

  A posed shot in 1959.

  ©AP/Wide World Photos

  From left, Henry, Bailey, and me.

  Me at an early age.

  My eighth-grade team with Coach Tom Sleet.

  The state champion Crispus Attucks Tigers, 1956.

  Outmaneuvering an opponent as a high school junior.

  Courtesy of The Indianapolis Star

  Oscar Robertson, Indiana’s Mr. Basketball, up against Kelly Coleman, Kentucky’s Mr. Basketball.

  Courtesy of The Indianapolis Star

  Setting up for a free throw, 1956.

  Easing the ball into the basket against Kansas State in 1958.

  ©AP/Wide World Photos

  A jumper against Indiana State in the 1959 season opener.

  ©AP/Wide World Photos

  Dancing with Yvonne at home.

  The record-setting game in Madison Square Garden.

  ©AP/Wide World Photos

  CHAPTER SIX

  “What They Eat Don’t Make Me Fat”

  1958–1959

  IN 1959, a fourteen-year-old Negro boy was appointed as a page in the House of the Representatives, marking the first t
ime since Reconstruction that a black man, woman, or child did any work besides sweeping or cleaning in that building. Jesse Jackson was a freshman at the University of Illinois, and like every other guy in the colored dormitory, he followed basketball. One day his dorm erupted in an argument over whether I could be a player in the National Basketball Association. One of my old Attucks teammates, Edgar Searcy, also lived in the dorm, and he insisted I would make it. He passed around a magazine photo taken my junior year during Cincinnati’s tournament rematch against Kansas State. “It showed Oscar coming down with a rebound,” Jesse told an interviewer. “Both of his legs were spread-eagled, and both of them were higher than the other players’ heads. With that one photograph, Edgar finally convinced us. I had no doubt that Oscar would be successful.”

  I guess he wasn’t the only one, because my junior year was barely underway when Abe Saperstein came courting. The owner of the Harlem Globetrotters, Abe was in a quandary. When Wilt Chamberlain had left college after his junior season and turned pro, a rule prevented college players from playing in the NBA until their class graduated. So for the then-astronomical sum of sixty-five thousand dollars, Wilt had spent that 1958–59 school year as part of the Globetrotters’ famed magic circle. But now Wilt’s class was moving toward graduation. Soon “the Stilt” was going to be playing for the NBA’s Philadelphia Warriors. Abe needed a new meal ticket, and I guess he thought I could be it.