The Big O

by Oscar P Robertson

  How indeed, do you stop Oscar Robertson? No one has a guaranteed system, but last week a Newsweek poll of college coaches and players, whose teams have faced Cincinnati this season, produced these suggestions:

  Frank McGuire, coach North Carolina: “The only way to stop Oscar is to keep him from getting the ball. We put a tall man in front of him and a tall man behind him.” (Against McGuire’s double-teaming, Robertson scored 29 points.)

  Dan Englehardt, six-foot guard, North Carolina State: “I played between Oscar and the ball. I watched his eyes and kept my hands up, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He hit long jump shots with my hand in his face.” (Against Englehardt’s harassing, Robertson scored 29 points.)

  Gary Phillips, forward, Houston: “I played man-to-man and watched Oscar’s midsection. He can fake his head or his shoulders all he wants, but wherever that belt buckle goes, he’s got to go.” (Against Phillips’s man-to-man, Robertson scored 13 points, his lowest total of the year.) [That was during the awful game in Texas. I think Phillips had less to do with my point total than racial harassment did.]

  The only player polled who wasn’t overly impressed by Robertson was Tom Sanders, a six-foot-six center at NYU. “He’s not so tough. His fakes aren’t so good, and he’s not so fast.” (Against Sanders, Robertson scored 45 points, his highest total of the year.)

  Perhaps the surest method was offered by Lou Rossini, the NYU coach. “Put your four best men on Oscar. Then tell your fifth man to cover his teammates. That might stop him.”

  We weren’t too long into the new year when I got called to the coach’s office again. A guy named Jeremiah Tachs, from Sports Illustrated, had come to see me. Coach Smith told me he wanted me to talk with this guy. I said I really didn’t want to. Coach said, “Sports Illustrated, is the most influential sports magazine in the country. You’ve got to talk to them.” So I said okay. Jeremiah came to my dorm room, and I sat down with him. First we talked about Bill Russell and how people in Boston were treating him, even though he was a great player for the Celtics. We talked about how Bill’s kids had problems going to school in Boston and went over the story about Bill driving back after one season through Mississippi to Louisiana, where he’s from, and how he couldn’t stop and eat, and was harassed, and what a shame that was.

  I’d say we talked about Bill for a good half-hour or so. The reporter seemed to be a decent guy, so I started to loosen up a bit. Then he asked about the University of Cincinnati.

  I said that sometimes school is great. And then sometimes it’s not so great.

  He asked if I was thinking about leaving school early to go to the Globetrotters.

  The question stopped me cold. I had no idea that people even knew about my meeting with Saperstein, let alone how much they knew. I’d turned down the Globetrotters’ offer, but the NCAA was watching my every move. I told the reporter that I wasn’t going to play for the Globetrotters. I told him that I’d met with the Globetrotters. He nodded and asked me about that some, and we talked for a while, back and forth. I guess our whole conversation lasted a bit more than an hour, and then we shook hands and, after making arrangements with their photographer, parted.

  I didn’t read Sports Illustrated back then. I didn’t see the article when it came out, knew nothing about it, really. I found out about the article the way I found out about most bad news back then: Coach called me.

  “What the hell’s going on?” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We’ve got this article.”

  “What article?”

  “Come over to the office.”

  Coach Smith was waiting, along with Tom Eicher, our PR man, and the university’s athletic director. The room was silent and tense as they sat down and pushed the magazine at me. It was opened to the article. Two pages, with a separate full-page spread. “What Price Glory For Oscar?” About a third of the way in, I read:

  In the wake of these achievements, an unprecedented tidal wave of publicity has engulfed him: an endless stream of press, radio, and television interviewers; magazine and newsreel cameramen; bids for personal appearances and award presentations; to say nothing of the pressing crowds who simply want to meet him, shake his hand and get his autograph. He has been serialized, eulogized, taped, televised, photographed, biographed and recorded. Not a day goes by without at least one interviewer trying to catch him in his one free hour between classes and team practice, or meeting him at an airport en route to a game, or phoning to request such a session. And the remarkable thing is that, in all the reams of copy, so little of Oscar Robertson has emerged other than his ability as an athlete.

  If you have to know, reading that part gave me a perverse sense of pride. I almost smiled. But Coach wasn’t smiling, and I knew this was serious and kept reading.

  There were paragraphs about my quiet nature and background about where I was raised. And then:

  In those two items lie the keys to Robertson’s personality and his future actions. He is highly sensitive to the problems he faces as a Negro, and he is wholly dedicated to becoming a professional athlete and making a lot of money at it. As noted, these facts have largely been unexplored, likely because they lead relentlessly to the conclusion that Robertson is not happy at Cincinnati and wonders whether he soon will have any reason for staying there . . .

  I was getting pissed off at Sports Illustrated and their conclusions. I kept staring. The words did not change, but sat on the page:

  . . . A guest reporter on campus, well treated by Basketball Coach George Smith and Public Relations Man Tom Eicher, both hospitable men and devoted to their athletes, is reluctant to come away with a story which will cause distress to such hosts—indeed, to all of Robertson-worshipping Cincinnati. But the facts are inescapable.

  In his Coke-bottle-cluttered dormitory room the other day, Robertson tried to explain this. As he spoke—haltingly, one careful word at a time—he tossed, bounced, and fingered the basketball he always keeps in the room. It wasn’t, he said, the mere fact that on certain trips with the team he was obliged to take segregated quarters, or that “Hell, there’s a café and a movie house just a few steps off campus where I’m not welcome,” or the abuse he takes from spectators on certain road games. It was that and more, which he summed up as, “There’s no real social life for me here. . .”

  Robertson does not believe that he’d be better off elsewhere, and he does not care to fix the blame. He is the shining star of a team of basketball players, among whom he cannot forget he is not an equal, though he will not be quoted in the words with which he expresses his true feelings.

  Would he be happier playing with the all-Negro Globetrotters? The answer is obvious. “Sure, I’d like to play with them. When they come to town I go down and sit on the bench, and when I come back afterwards people say, ‘Hey, we hear you’ve signed to play with the Trotters.’ Well, it’s not true. But they’re a swell bunch, they get to travel all over the world, they put on a good show, have a good time together . . . and make money. Sure they don’t play real basketball. They’re putting on a show and they know it—man, you can’t be serious all the time—and they’re enjoying themselves.”

  Watching Robertson’s animated face as he says this, it is difficult to doubt that he will one day choose to do the same as Wilt Chamberlain did last year—leave school for a year of fun and companionship (even more than for Globetrotter cash) before joining the pro basketball league.

  The likelihood is increased when it becomes clear that he has lost interest completely in his studies. “Statistics, theories of economics,” he says, with a wave at the books on his desk. “I can’t work at that stuff. It bores me.” He was, it should be noted, an excellent student in high school, a fair student last year and a poor student this year. The decline is the direct result of his growing and now firm conviction that his future spells out basketball and nothing else.

  Finally, it is abundantly clear, though he will not be quoted on this, either, that h
e has learned everything he can as a college player and has already achieved more fame than he could have hoped for in order to enhance his value as a professional. This last, he will admit, was the real reason why he chose Cincinnati over the 75-odd schools that bid for him. Though many other reasons have been offered, Robertson says, “I did want a college close to home. But I also wanted to play with a team that played in New York and Philadelphia and some of those other big places in the East. That’s where you get the prestige.”

  The eyes were on me. I began, dimly, to understand, to see the thread connecting the tension I had felt after those problems in North Carolina and the rumors on campus when we’d returned. I’d thought that nobody knew about my meeting with Abe Saperstein. But everybody did. Some on campus thought I was going to leave the school early to play for the Globetrotters. I sat in the office and three pairs of eyes were bearing down on me, and I understood that each person in the room believed I was leaving as well. Seeing my feelings about race on paper, in black and white, reading about my problems with the campus, it made them sure that I was unhappy. It confirmed all their fears. They read about me jumping to the Globetrotters and were ready to believe I was going to jump, that every worry they had about me was true. I clenched my jaw and kept reading, pausing over the final two paragraphs.

  There is, Robertson apparently feels, no room further up for him in his present situation. There is only a way out.

  If he takes it, much of the glory that is Cincinnati’s today will turn to ashes. But it is ashes in Oscar Robertson’s mouth already.

  I am now mature and levelheaded enough to be able to separate my words in this piece from the author’s intent. Looking over the article right now, I can clearly see where I am paraphrased on the page, saying I do not want to leave school, and do not care to blame anyone on the campus for the racial situations that have arisen. I also see a place in that same paragraph where I am not quoted, but the author has decided my true feelings, and speaks for me without compunction or responsibility. But my words never prove his ideas. Rather, he used my “animated face” to decide that I was going to leave college for the Globetrotters. This, even as I was telling him I had not talked to the Globetrotters, was not going to play for them. I see where he used phrases like “apparently feels” to couch more of his conclusions, putting them in sentences that all but shout “fact,” as if they were my actual words and thoughts.

  I looked straight at Coach Smith. “This is not true,” I said. “I didn’t tell this guy any of these things.”

  “You’ve got to apologize,” Coach told me.

  “Apologize?”

  “You’ve got to answer to the public, tell them you are sorry for saying the university is racist. Say you’re not going to the Trotters.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, “Coach, I never said this stuff to begin with. We talked about Bill Russell’s situation and about Abe Saperstein. I told that man I didn’t want to go play for the Globetrotters. I’m telling you what’s in this article is not true. Why should I have to go and tell the press that I’m sorry for what I did not say?”

  “No,” Coach said. “You’ve got to go tell the press—”

  “This guy writes this garbage because he wants to cut me up, and I tell you that I didn’t say these things, and now I’ve got to go explain to the press that I didn’t say them? I don’t want to do that. I’m not going to do it. I’ll tell you what happened and I’ll tell the team, but I’m not going to apologize for things I didn’t say.”

  Something you’ve got to understand about athletes and the media. You don’t see all the good things a newspaper writes about you. You don’t see every complimentary feature, especially if you get the kind of attention I did. If you are checking your clippings all the time, there’s no way to keep your head on straight. People are coming to ask you questions constantly, and that’s what you deal with, the person and his or her questions; rarely do you see what they write about you. About the only time you truly know what’s being written about you is when something bad comes into print or gets put on the air. Then coaches and sports information people are ringing you like crazy, asking you what’s going on and, more importantly, making plans for damage control.

  That’s what happened here. After the Sports Illustrated piece, every local sportswriter and columnist was salivating, knocking on the door for a response. A lot of them were used to my short after-game comments and didn’t seem to hold them against me, because they sensed I was naturally quiet and sincere. At the same time, maybe they were a little irritated because I seemed to open up more for reporters from New York newspapers and national magazines. It didn’t matter that I talked to Milt Gross of the New York Post because I trusted him. It didn’t matter that I’d been forced into talking to Sports Illustrated, and then was misquoted and used. These local guys had never taken the time to know me. And Coach Smith kept me away from most of them. One columnist had even refused to write anything when I’d told him about finding a black cat in my locker, and half of them showed the same provincial, small-minded racist attitudes that made my life so difficult in Cincinnati, so it was impossible to trust them.

  But none of this mattered to them. All they knew was that the quiet black kid talked to national papers and not to them. I’d gone and caused big news, come out in one of the largest forums there was at that time for sports, slammed the school, and claimed I was leaving early. Those guys were in a frenzy to get the word from me themselves on what my plans were.

  But I said nothing to them. Did not address the article in the slightest.

  If I had spent my NBA career with the Celtics or the Lakers or in any city but Cincinnati, none of this would have mattered. I would have had a chance to establish new relationships with the sports reporters in that city, would have moved on without a beat. But the Cincinnati Royals already held my professional rights, so I ended up spending ten years—the majority of my career—playing pro ball in Cincinnati, dealing with the same reporters and editors. The Cincinnati Enquirer, the largest paper in town, wrote yards of column inches about the article.

  Let them write what they want to write about me, was always my attitude. But what happened in the game? Tell me what happened in the game.

  Over time, this became my strategy/philosophy. In the end reporters could write what they wanted. I still played. They couldn’t change what I did, no matter how they described it.

  If the university administration did not understand my needs or rights, I think that the guys on my team, more than anyone, saw what I went through. I believe they knew even more about some of the things I went through than I did, because they got to witness them firsthand. Nobody was ever jealous of the national attention I received, in part I think because they also saw the downside, the weight of the glare, all the obstacles that were put in my way. And while the guys and I did not hang out all that much, I think that in some ways all the tensions and controversies that swirled around me made us a closer team when we hit the floor.

  On the whole, the basketball court was the one place where the craziness didn’t reach us, almost as if we were safe out there, untouchable. Playing great ball, we took the conference for the second straight year and went into the NCAA tournament with a winning streak of sixteen games, where once again, playing to get to the final four, we met our old foil, Kansas State.

  During our pregame meeting, I told John Bryant, “If the rest of you guys play a little bit, we’ll win this game.” He looked at me, speechless, maybe a little hurt. But he knew I was serious. I went out there and once again fought and clawed against Bob Boozer, lighting him up for twenty-four points and seventeen rebounds. The game was tight throughout, but with three and a half minutes left I hit a jumper to put us up by five, giving us firm control. It wasn’t going to come down to free throws this time.

  I remember being at the free-throw line and, during those final seconds, the sense of relief and joy. I remember the clock counting down, fans mobbing the court, and me and my
teammates hugging one another and celebrating. And I’ll never forget that my teammates raised me on their shoulders that afternoon. The whole crowd was standing and clapping, and it was really one of the best feelings I’ve had in basketball. We were going to the final four.

  Next up for us was the University of California. But Pete Newell, their Hall of Fame coach, decided that I wasn’t going to beat them. If I was playing outside, he made sure to double-team me on the perimeter. If I was posting up, he had a guy fronting me and zone help sagging in, so there would be three or four men around me. This left other guys on our team open, but Newell decided that he would rather have those guys taking open shots than me. Newell also made sure to hold the ball on offense, reducing the number of possessions in the game. This meant we had fewer trips down the court, fewer shots, and more pressure each time I had to decide whether to pass or shoot.

  Playing in front of the largest crowd of the tournament, California’s star center, Darrall Imhoff, tore us up, putting up twenty-two points and getting sixteen rebounds. As for me, I had a decent game, scoring nineteen points and grabbing nineteen rebounds. But I didn’t hog the ball. Since grade school, I’d been taught to pass when guys were open. I passed. We ended up losing by six, and California went on to win the national championship, beating tournament MVP Jerry West and West Virginia in the title game.

  We finished the season ranked in the top five, with a 26–4 record and two straight conference titles. I led the nation in scoring for the second straight year, and my two-year scoring total was the most points anyone had scored during two years in college basketball history. We averaged almost 7,800 fans in our 8,000-seat home arena, played high-profile games all across the country, and now had recruits wanting to come to play for Cincinnati. By all accounts it was a successful season. The program was turned around.