Willie Gardner played on the Globetrotters. Abe knew that Willie had grown up with my brother Bailey, playing on the same Crispus Attucks team together. He also knew that Willie had introduced me to several Trotters, including Marques Haynes and Goose Tatum, and that these two had watched me play since high school. Abe called Willie and told him to bring me up to Indianapolis, where Abe had offices for the Globetrotters and also the Indianapolis Clowns, a barnstorming Negro baseball team.
I knew Abe had Willie on the carpet, and he must have been pushing on him pretty hard. That was the only reason I agreed—because of Willie. Once I got to his office, Abe made a pitch about playing with the Globetrotters and painted me a pretty picture of all the opportunities I could have, including the chance to travel around the world and visit every continent while playing basketball. Then he offered me seventeen thousand dollars.
I might have had a great time playing for the Globetrotters. I did know and like the guys on that team, and it would have been fun to travel the world with them. It might have been a challenge too. It’s no secret that I played textbook basketball, fundamentally sound, without a lot of unnecessary flash. In his book Elevating the Game: Black Men and Basketball, Nelson George wrote that the musical equivalent of my game was Nat “King” Cole, the smooth, understated, yet swinging vocalist, a man who blended the crooning big-band singing tradition with the slick blues he played as a pianist. Meanwhile, the Globetrotters were all flash and fun and gimmicks, the basketball equivalent of Tommy Dorsey’s drummer, Gene Krupa. I could have adjusted, of course. I had the skills to do any and every possible thing with a basketball, and it would not have been hard to learn how to play the Globetrotters’ way. It’s actually a lark to imagine myself in the middle of a magic circle, spinning the ball on my hand and bouncing it through my legs, off my knee. Wilt always said his time with the Globetrotters broadened his game. Maybe it could have done the same for me.
But not for seventeen thousand dollars.
“Abe,” I said, “you’ve got to listen. First of all, no. Second: I made the dean’s list a couple of times. I’m successful playing basketball. Why would I want to go to the Trotters to make seventeen thousand dollars?”
He said, “What if you get hurt playing college ball?”
“I can get hurt here with the Trotters,” I replied.
Willie took me back to Cincinnati, and that was the last time I ever spoke to Abe Saperstein about that.
With all the publicity I’d received during my sophomore year, there was no doubt I was going to be a marked man; other teams were definitely going to try to key on me, so of course I had to stay sharp. During the summer, I’d honed and evolved my practice routine, throwing some strange new drills in along with all of my basics, going so far as to seek out the right man to guard me, one-on-one. I experimented against the highest leaper and pole-vaulter on campus, against guards, burly forwards. So much of my game repertoire was impromptu—stuff I made up once I got into a situation where the defense dictated the move—that I felt I had to be prepared for any situation, especially if teams were going to be keying on me and throwing junk defenses my way. I figured it was like being a guy out on a diving platform, where after you’ve done a dive so many hundreds of times, any move becomes second nature. Or a boxer who has been in a ring so long that his reflexes become accustomed to feints and punches.
Connie Dierking had graduated and moved on to the NBA. But with me, a very talented point guard named Ralph Davis running the show, and Mike Mendenhall at guard, expectations were so high that capacity at the Armory Fieldhouse was expanded to eight thousand and all tickets were sold out well before the 1958–1959 season began. Sophomore John Bryant, the basketball program’s second black player, gave us some depth, along with Mike Mendenhall.
Although we were a preseason top twenty team, and deservedly so, I think that in the long haul, the fact that Cincinnati was a private school hurt our national championship hopes. As a private school, the university accepted only top students, and I don’t think the basketball program could recruit the kind of athletes that we really needed to go ahead and win. (Indeed, it wouldn’t be until after I’d graduated that the school became a completely public institution, and this was rectified.) Moreover, Coach Smith was a stickler on moral matters—he used to try to keep us away from reporters he felt drank too much. Before I came to school, one player on the team was married and had a kid every year that he was in college. George kicked that player off the team for having so many children, and then he instituted a rule that if you were married, you were off the team. My junior year, a talented player named Spud Hornsby was kicked off the team for this very reason, basically killing any chances we had at a national championship.
The fact is, we were still one of the best teams in the nation. Ralph Davis and I got along really well, we talked a lot and spent a lot of our time together on the road. But all the guys were supportive during what was to be a contentious and difficult season. I think they knew how hard it was for me. One problem after another seemed to erupt that year. It was a season of brush fires and storm clouds and controversies. I didn’t have much of a social life—basically all I did was play ball, practice, and go to class. When class gave way to the work-study program, I worked. I was a member of the team; at the same time, I was not allowed to join an honorary sports fraternity for varsity letter winners. I was a star, yes, but a black star; it set me apart, whether I wanted that or not.
Everyone called me “Oz,” short for Oscar. It’s an obvious and simple nickname, one that is associated with more than the word wizard—which I guess is what people considered me with a basketball. To me it meant the Land of Oz, a separate, alien world where I spent the 1959 college basketball season—isolated, in a combination of hothouse and fishbowl. Due to a mixture of fame and shyness, I was virtually unable to go outside, and I didn’t spend too much time hanging out with my teammates. Instead, most of my friends were older—the Tillotsons, the Browns, the Pauls, Art Hull, people with the experience and maturity to advise me. I remember that Yvonne would come to my games and I would go over to her house sometimes, but if we went to a restaurant for dinner or to a movie or just walked around campus, I had to be able to spot con men. Once in a while I might have a beer with the guys over some pizza, talking about school or basketball.
One time, friends from Attucks came up to see me play. Afterwards, we went to a local restaurant named Frisch’s. My buddies were in a good mood and started goofing around, grabbing handfuls of the complimentary candies out of the bowl on the front counter. I turned to John Bryant. “We can’t be too close to goofy stuff like this. Sooner or later, for some little incident, we are going to get nailed for just being around when something happens.” Not long after that, a teammate and a bunch of people barged into my room, drunk. They woke me out of a sound sleep. I made myself a cup of coffee and waited until they left. The next day I found the guy and took him aside and told him, “Don’t you ever come around to my room to make your scene. I don’t know who may have seen you come in. I don’t know the stories that might circulate, where they might go. Pick someone else’s door to bang on, okay?”
I had an expression back then. What they eat don’t make me fat.
The season was about a month old when our team flew to North Carolina for the Dixie Classic, a three-game holiday tournament. When I got off the plane at the Raleigh-Durham Airport, the first thing I saw was a pair of water fountains, one marked “Colored,” the other, “White.” We went to the campus for a practice, and then the bus drove through downtown, past the hotels where the other teams were staying. Coach explained that no hotels downtown would accept black people as guests. Our team was going to be staying in an unoccupied fraternity house at North Carolina State.
I still have mixed feelings about that. In the days after that earlier trip to Houston and Denton, I’d sought out Coach Smith and made it perfectly clear that I did not want to be kept separate from the rest of the team. So to so
me degree I appreciated the gesture and unity. But until my dying day, I will believe that all my school would have had to do was tell North Carolina State and the tournament planners, If Oscar Robertson and John Bryant can’t stay at the hotel in downtown Raleigh, we’re not going to play. If they had shown some backbone and said that, I expect that everything else would have taken care of itself. But they did not. Instead, a conscious choice was made in the other direction. We backed down and capitulated. I’ve heard the minutes from the University of Cincinnati’s board meetings when this trip was discussed. It is undeniable. The trustees knew about the racial climate in North Carolina. Why else would they have had to vote that it was okay to go down there, unless there was a tacit knowledge that black players would have to stay separately from the team? They made this decision, and the athletic department and Coach Smith knew all about it. They were on the trip with us, and they stayed downtown, in the hotel. (To the credit of my teammates, we all stayed together in a fraternity dorm that was empty for winter break, where we were joined by all four of the black players from Michigan State University.)
Before our opening game, I received a letter from the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, reading “Don’t Ever Come to the South.” It’s just amazing what some people do, and how they can continue with their lives afterwards as if nothing happened.
When I went out on the court, the arena was in a racist frenzy. Countless times during our opening game against Wake Forest, shouts of “nigger,” “porter,” and “redcap” reached the court. Wake Forest’s forward, Dave Budd—who would go on to play for the Knicks—made things worse, getting in my face and guarding me tight all night. Budd meant no malice. He was playing the game as hard as he could, the best way he could, but his antics only seemed to make the crowd crazier, and the crowd seemed to rile him up even more. When he’d guard me, he’d grab at my jersey, elbow me, and take more shots at me. It’s part of the game, and I understood that. But I also knew that an official’s job was to keep control.
The main referee working the game that night was a guy named Jim Enright. Enright was reputed to be the best official in the Big Ten conference and was also a sports editor of a major Chicago daily newspaper. He had a great reputation throughout the basketball world. But that night Jim Enright did a terrible job. A player kept putting his hand out in front of my face when I had the ball, almost hitting me around the face with his hand. Of course, face guarding is illegal. I dealt with the face guarding by smashing the ball against Budd’s fingertips, which had to hurt like hell.
Midway through the first half, there was a loose ball. Budd hit the floor, diving for the ball, and so did I. Our legs and bodies tangled up, and we rolled around and started wrestling for control of the ball. Other players thought we were fighting and gathered around. The crowd went insane, just like in Texas. People were screaming every curse word in the book. Coins and hot dogs flew out of the stands and onto the court. When I got up, there was a circle of players around me, and Budd was standing, too, right in my chest, huffing and puffing. I wasn’t a big ruffian when I came up in the ghetto, but I was going to take care of myself. I grabbed the ball. I don’t think I was speaking to Budd so much as to everyone in the arena when I said, “Man, I ain’t going nowhere.”
I don’t know how many points I scored that night, but I contributed enough to help us win by twenty. Afterwards, Coach Smith stormed into the officials’ dressing room and cussed them something fierce. Then he went into our dressing room and hugged me and started crying. It was a big moment. Even if I didn’t believe that the man understood me, I also knew his heart was in the right place. A cynical friend of mine used to tease me that George’s tears and hugs that night kept me at Cincinnati for the year and a half until graduation. He might be right.
Meanwhile, my brother Henry had driven down to the tournament with some friends. He was in another part of the locker room, remonstrating with a few members of the Cincinnati athletic department. Any remarks about how I’d been treated on the court fell on deaf ears. My brother was bluntly told he had no business being at the game. He should have stayed home in Indianapolis.
When I got back to the dormitory at the end of the night, I compared notes with Johnny Green and some of the other guys from Michigan State. Johnny said he’d gotten the hell beaten out of him too, and that the refs hadn’t done a thing.
The rest of the tournament was filled with tension and punctuated with verbal outbursts. Afterwards, when reporters asked me about one game, I just had to bite my tongue. “They won and we didn’t,” was all I said.
It was New Year’s Eve. Even though we’d lost two of three in the tournament, we wanted to do something to bring in the new year. So the black players from our team and from Michigan State’s squad had an impromptu party in the dormitory. I remember that we got some pizzas and some beer and hung out in the lounge until three or four in the morning, talking about the way the world was and why this shit happened to us.
By the time we got back to campus, the school was awash in gossip. My co-op job at the Gas and Electric Company was rumored to be nothing more strenuous than going to the factory, turning on a calculator at the start of the day, and turning it off when I left for home. When Walter Paul brought my mother to a home game in his private car, of course word spread that Mom had a private limousine and chauffeur taking her up from Indianapolis for home games. I heard about these second- and third-hand from friends and from other, less reliable sources. It wasn’t long before I heard from the NCAA as well.
They sent a letter to the athletic department saying that Cincinnati could no longer use its co-operative employment course in connection with certain grants-in-aid. My name wasn’t mentioned, but now students would have to pay their own room and board during the weeks they worked for Cincinnati Gas and Electric, Procter & Gamble, or the Hudepohl Brewery—all offices that in one way or another were connected with Walter Paul. That was fine with me though, because soon enough I got hired as a trainee by the Thomas E. Wood Insurance Company. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that Wood was the major stockholder of the Cincinnati Royals. Soon enough the NCAA called again. Now I wasn’t allowed to participate in the co-op program anymore. Never mind that other players on the team could keep their jobs. I couldn’t work, and the case was closed.
Walter Paul called me up one day, and we met in his office. He knew the co-op program had been one of the reasons I’d signed with Cincinnati. Over lunch, Walter and I discussed the school and getting ready for the NBA. I told him I wanted to stay in school. Walter said fine. I told him I would stick it out and stay in business administration and graduate in four years. “Nobody’s going to say I took the easy way out.” I don’t know how long we sat in his office talking that day, but eventually we came to an agreement. That was one of the things I always appreciated about the man. Even when we had different points of view, we never had a disagreement. We’d just talk through a situation and come to some understanding before we left the room.
Before our team hit the road for a trip back down to Denton, Texas, I reminded Walter—and anyone else who would listen—that if they kept the black players apart from the team, I wasn’t coming back to school. I even pulled John Bryant aside and let him know to take some money with him on the trip, because if there was a repeat of the shit that happened last year, we’d be paying our own way home. On the plane ride, I had a vague sense that something might be wrong with the guys. I didn’t know if it was because of the incident in North Carolina, if the guys were wondering about the NCAA stuff, whether they were worried about taking another trip back down to Texas, or if for some reason they thought I was mad at them. But something seemed a little off.
In any case, the entire team stayed at a university dormitory, and we won—commandingly.
From Denton we traveled to St. Louis. Our first night in town, John Bryant and I entered a restaurant together, and every eye in the place jerked toward us, and less than a minute later, the place was empty.
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At the same time, there are memories that more than make up for all the hate and problems: the lady in some other restaurant who came over to my table and said she was from Nashville, that everyone in that city knew I’d been born among them, and that the whole city was proud of me. And the scene in Denton, after a brutal game: People in the stands directly behind the bench had just spent two hours harassing me, calling me every name I’d ever heard, plus fifteen or twenty new ones that just about had me peeking out from the huddle, asking, Just where do you get this? The game was over, and then a twelve-year-old boy asked me for my autograph. I was in no mood and said no. John Bryant told the kid to hold on a few minutes. I cooled down, and Bryant brought me back out and, sure enough, I gave in and signed the kid’s program. He looked up at me. “We sure would be obliged if you would join us for a church supper at the Denton Methodist Church. We know you’d be welcome.”
Things like that made the whole night worthwhile. That, the forty or so points I scored, and the win we walked away with.
In the January 19, 1959, issue on page 54, Newsweek ran this story under the headline “How to Stop ‘Big O’”:
When Oscar Robertson, the “Big O” of the University of Cincinnati, grabs a ball near mid-court and starts driving toward the basket, a sudden shimmering attention grips basketball buffs. Here, the fans know, is sheer artistry. Tall and quick, Robertson squirms, dribbles, fakes, pivots, and finally, with infinite grace, he shoots. More often than any other college player in the country, when Oscar Robertson shoots, he scores.
As the current season entered its second month last week, Robertson was demonstrating that his sensational sophomore year (984 points, the most ever scored by a soph), was no fluke. In his first ten games, he had scored 322 points, an average of 32.2 a game. But Robertson, six feet five and 199 pounds of pure athlete, is much more than a scorer. He also leads Cincinnati (which has lost only to North Carolina and N.C. State in ten games) in rebounds and assists. “He does everything,” says Joe Lapchick, the veteran coach of St. John’s. “How can you stop a guy like that?”
The Big O Page 12