The Big O

by Oscar P Robertson

  Sometimes you get beat and that doesn’t mean you played badly. Sometimes the other team just plays better. If California’s shots hadn’t been falling, or if Imhoff had been off that day, then maybe we would have won. Sometimes the shots fall, and you’re meant to win. And if you’re not meant to win, you’re not going to win, no matter what you do.

  Imhoff totaled twenty-five points and eleven rebounds, and California took the game 77–69, ending my dream of a national championship. I finished with eighteen points and ten rebounds.

  A week later I was named the college player of the year for the third straight season, the only player to be so honored at that time. In the three years I played on Cincinnati’s varsity team, the Bearcats had a combined record of 79–9. I scored fifty or more points five times in my collegiate career and accumulated at least forty in twenty-three games: twenty-seven percent of the varsity contests I’d played. After my senior season, my jersey and number, twelve, were raised into the rafters, retired, never to be worn again. More importantly, now players wanted to come to Cincinnati. Paul Hogue, our sophomore center from Knoxville, Tennessee, said that part of the reason he came to Cincinnati was to play with me. Tom Thacker, George Wilson, and others felt the same way.

  I’d come to Cincinnati as the only black player on the basketball team; the year after I left, they had three black players in the starting lineup; the year after that, four. And while some people may have second-guessed me for constantly passing the ball against California, I think that the experience Paul Hogue, Bob Wiesenhahn, and Carl Bouldin gained from that game helped them during the following two seasons when they were led by a new coach. Cincinnati finally did win national championships, without me on the floor, and won them back-to-back.

  I graduated in June 1960, along with the rest of my class. Although I made the dean’s list a few times, I didn’t quite get to graduate with honors. Even though I’d had some difficult times at the University of Cincinnati, I also received a good education. My conduct in the classroom and performance on the basketball court helped to wear down some of the resistance to black students. While a student at the University of Cincinnati, I met people who would remain friends and advisors throughout my adult life.

  Perhaps my experiences would have been different if I had been a white athlete. Maybe people would have treated me better or there would have been fewer controversies. But when I was just a freshman, sitting in Austin Tillotson’s house while he told me that black people did not come to the University of Cincinnati for a reason, I decided that I was glad they chose me, because I could handle that responsibility. And I know that whatever problems I had during my four years there, I did handle myself well. I left things in much better shape than they were in when I arrived. And I met my wife there.

  Yvonne was born in Montgomery, Alabama, the eldest of four children. Much in the same way that my family had come to Indianapolis, the Crittenden family had moved to Covington, Kentucky, during World War II’s great migration. Ultimately, Yvonne’s father established a tailoring and dry cleaning business. She’s told me they weren’t a rich family, but solidly middle class, and that she never had to experience the kind of poverty in which I was raised. Her father insisted that all of his children go to college, and Yvonne graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1956, months before I arrived on campus.

  Yvonne is intelligent and gorgeous as well as being a talented artist and art collector, a pianist, and a voracious reader. In the two years we’d been dating, she’d become the person I went to with problems and bounced possible solutions off, who I laughed with and vented to and never got tired of talking with. She was the person I truly loved. Our wedding was scheduled for June, right after my graduation.

  Before graduation, I went out to Denver to try out for the Olympic team. The tryouts were different then. Invited players were put on teams. These teams played every night for five nights. The players from the tournament’s champion team got to place their starting five on the Olympic team, while the coaching committee chose the rest of the players from the other teams. I was on a team with Jerry West, Terry Dischinger, Adrian Smith, with Walt Bellamy as the fifth man. Ohio State’s starting five was there, along with some small-college teams, a university team, and a bunch of Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) teams. The AAU was a league of adults who were out of college but played competitive basketball, sometimes touring. People called them amateurs because the players held down jobs, working at Phillips, or some other oil company, or Goodyear tire, for example. But they were really pros; they got paid to play basketball, and the jobs were their front.

  It was a strange process. If my memory serves correctly, teams switched players during the tournament. After one AAU team advanced, they’d claim some of the better players from a losing team and use them to reconfigure their starting lineup. But with me and Jerry West at guard and Bellamy in the middle, we were strong enough to prevail. We ended up winning the tournament and making the team. Now Pete Newell wouldn’t be tormenting me anymore. Instead of figuring out ways for the University of California to shut me down, Pete would be coaching me and coming up with ways to get me the ball.

  Pete told me he stayed up all night with members of the committee, picking the team. A lot of the AAU guys ended up making it because the AAU was powerful in those days, and they used to control who went to the Olympics. So Les Lane, Burdie Haldorson, and Allen Kelley, all of them forgettable players from the AAU ranks, made the team. But John “Hondo” Havlicek didn’t make it. Lenny Wilkens didn’t make it. Tom Sanders didn’t make it.

  Still, with or without the AAU guys down at the end of the bench, we were one of the most talented amateur teams ever assembled. Three players from that team—me, Jerry West, and Ohio State’s great sophomore Jerry Lucas—ended up in the Basketball Hall of Fame, and Bob Boozer, Walt Bellamy, Terry Dischinger, Darrall Imhoff, Adrian Smith, and Jay Arnette also starred in the NBA. I think the only amateur team ever that could have given us a game would have been Bobby Knight’s 1984 Olympic Dream Team, with Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullin, and Alvin Robertson. I don’t know who would have won, but such a game would have been something to watch, especially with Pete Newell coaching against Knight.

  When I returned from the tryouts, I had missed two weeks of a class in sales cost and analysis. The professor wanted to fail me. He even told me, “You can’t pass this class.” Of course, this would have meant postponing my graduation and would have caused all kinds of problems—I had a wedding coming up and had to get ready for the Olympics, and this was the last thing I needed. I went to see the president of the university about it. I’ll always be grateful to Dr. Langsam; he made a deal with the professor. Since the final exam comprised the majority of my grade, I would receive whatever grade I got on the final. I scored a B-plus. The professor still gave me a D for the course.

  Yvonne and I were married on a perfect June day. Thank goodness for Gladys Tillotson. Out of the goodness of her heart, Austin’s wife, a teacher at the same school with Yvonne, ended up helping with most of the details and arrangements for the wedding, and she did a beautiful job. The ceremony took place at the Carmel Presbyterian Church in front of our parents, families, and friends. I was decked out in a morning coat with long tails and the whole nine yards. Yvonne was as lovely as I’ve ever seen her, and even now I can close my eyes and visualize the flowers and her veil.

  That summer, Yvonne and I stayed in New York for a while as she finished her master’s program. After a few weeks, I left to stay with the Olympic team, an hour away from the city, up at West Point. Meanwhile, Yvonne went back to Cincinnati. The Olympics were to be held in Rome, Italy, and we made a plan to meet there for our honeymoon. So Yvonne went to Rome alone, and our team went on a tour.

  We played exhibition games against AAU teams in New York and Cincinnati, but in Cleveland the floor was so bad because of condensation that we had to cancel the game. Then we left for Zurich and played a game there. We spent a couple of
days practicing in Lugano, Switzerland, and took the train over the Alps into Rome. I wish I could say that I got a lot of sightseeing done, but Coach Newell had us in battle mode, isolated and getting ready for the task ahead.

  The 1960 Olympics were the first Summer Games to be televised in the United States. CBS paid $394,000 for the broadcast rights to what became a two-week coming-out party for some of the biggest stars of the new decade. Coach Newell did not want us to be tired or carousing in the Olympic Village, so our team arrived in Rome one or two nights before we were going to play. He didn’t let us walk in the opening ceremonies for the same reason. Never mind that most of us were twenty-one-year-old basketball players, superbly conditioned and in the best shape of our lives. Walking around a track might tire us out.

  Yvonne arrived in Rome before us. And while Coach Newell knew that we were recently married, it goes without saying that he didn’t want anything to break my focus. She couldn’t stay at the Olympic Village and instead stayed at a hotel in town. As for me, I roomed with Terry Dischinger, Purdue’s six-foot-seven forward, who spent an inordinate amount of time sleeping.

  The biggest star to come out of the Games that summer was Cassius Clay. He hadn’t yet changed his name to Muhammad Ali when the Olympics started. He wasn’t a favorite in the light-heavyweight division. Nobody knew who he was. But already he was saying he was the greatest. At first he wasn’t boisterous about it. He was just a boxer, and he wasn’t very well educated, and he thought this was a strategy to promote Cassius Clay. So he said he was going to win. “I’m going to win the gold medal.” Even then he was really something, just great. And the more he went around talking, the more people he had following him around. He loved it. Then he went out and proved it, pummeling his Polish opponent for the gold medal. That was how the nation first discovered him. And Cassius was so proud that he didn’t take that medal off for two days afterwards. Who would have guessed that just a few months later, he’d be so infuriated by the way blacks were treated in his hometown that he’d throw that medal into the Ohio River?

  I was amazed at the way he could talk and make predictions like that. I’d been a boxing fan since my childhood, when my brothers and I used to listen to Friday night fights on the radio. So one day, we were in the Olympic Village together, and I asked him about the secrets to being a great fighter.

  “Angry boxers don’t win,” he said.

  “What do you mean? You’re getting hit. Don’t you get mad?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he answered. “You have to remain calm. When you get upset, that’s when you get beat.”

  That made an impression on me. I took that into my game and always tried to remember it on the court.

  Another person I met at the games was Wilma Rudolph. After Ray Norton lost in both the one hundred meters and the two hundred meters, Wilma became the heart of the team when she won gold medals in the one hundred and two hundred meters and anchored the winning four-hundred-meter relay team. She was a tremendous, graceful runner, and just as graceful and lovely as a person.

  I’d known of Wilma before the Games. One of twenty-two children, she hadn’t been able to walk without braces until she was nine, but once they came off she started to run. She’d become a star at Tennessee State University in Nashville. I’d heard and read about Wilma whenever I used to go back and forth to visit my grandparents in Tennessee.

  When we met at the Olympics, we immediately understood each other. We were from the South and the country, and we talked about Tennessee and Nashville and the life there. We were dear friends from that point on and would remain so for the rest of her life.

  It’s quite something when you think about it. Cassius was from Louisville, Wilma from Nashville, and I was from tiny Bellsburg. That’s three of the Olympic Games’ major stars growing up 150 miles from one another.

  Jerry West and I were named the co-captains of the basketball team. He talked even less than I did, although by now I had started to come out of my shell, especially on the court. There are people who you admire, players you respect, and Jerry was one of them. Pete Newell always has been one of my favorite coaches, and the Olympics were one of the few times in my life I played for someone I considered a great person. I’d always respected him for the defenses he came up with to try to stop me. And when I was on his team, I appreciated the way that he trusted my knowledge of the game.

  Basketball has since become an international game, but in the early 1960s, it’s safe to say that no country played the game at anything close to the level that America did. We played five games to get to the title game and won easily every time. In the semifinals, we were matched against the Soviet Union. The Cold War was underway, and our two nations were mortal enemies, so the hype for the game was unbelievable. In the columns of untold reporters, it was depicted as more than a contest between teams: more a battle between ways of lives.

  Naturally, the international officials were in over their heads. Afraid that real war was going to break out on the floor, they called all kinds of fouls: even the slightest contact drew a whistle. We still were in control and led by eighteen at halftime. But foul trouble hurt us in the second half, and Russia drew to within ten.

  Coach Newell called time-out. In the huddle he told us to press, pick them up full court, and get right into them.

  Well, we went out there again and just destroyed them. Their guards simply couldn’t handle our quickness, and we jumped and trapped them and caused one turnover after another, outscoring them 25–1 in what I am proud to call one of the greatest displays of pressure defense of all time.

  The final score was 81–57. Two days later we destroyed Brazil in the gold medal game. Jerry West and I stood on the top rung of that podium representing our team and our nation. Jerry was so nervous that he felt his pants shaking. I remember standing there and looking out into the crowd, searching for my wife. During the game I hadn’t thought about anything but winning, and afterwards I was happy because we did. But when the first notes of the “Star-Spangled Banner” played over the loudspeaker, I really felt it. I remember wishing that some of the guys I’d played ball with in high school could have been up there, all the people that pushed me, who I played against, who helped me get to this point. I remember thinking about all the sacrifices I’d made and all the hell I’d been through. And now I was on the podium, representing my country, accepting an Olympic gold medal. It was overwhelming.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Rookie Stardom

  1960–1961

  PROFESSIONAL BASKETBALL leagues date back to 1898, just seven years after James Naismith, a Canadian, invented the modern basketball in 1891 and nailed up that peach basket in the gymnasium of the Springfield YMCA. As I understand it, basketball was almost barbaric back then. Steel cages were erected around the court, and players armed themselves with knee, elbow, and shin pads, which they used as both padding and weapons. Often, games were played in conjunction with concerts or dances. At halftime, fans would get drinks at a bar and socialize; afterwards, bands would play, and there’d be dancing. There were untold small-time professional leagues and touring teams, including the American Basketball League, the Metropolitan League, the Philadelphia League, Tri-County League, and the Eastern League. A barnstorming team called the Original Celtics featured Joe Lapchick and was thought by many to be the best team of the time. Most of this activity took place up and down the Eastern seaboard.

  During the late 1920s, the American Basketball League (ABL) emerged as the strongest of these early leagues. Along with the Midwestern Basketball League (founded later, in 1937), the ABL provided part of the foundation for what would eventually become the National Basketball League (NBL). The NBL had franchises in New York, Boston, Chicago, and Indiana. Initially, it was a regional, almost provincial league. Three of its eight teams—Buffalo, Rochester, and New York City—were within New York State. Other teams based in relatively small and obscure towns (Oshkosh, Dayton, Fort Wayne) came and went. In those days, the Nat
ional Basketball League’s status was national in name only.

  The NBL and a few smaller leagues eventually consolidated in 1949 to become the league we all know today as the National Basketball Association (NBA). At the end of World War II, however, the NBA was a fledgling and struggling organization. CBS’s broadcast of a double-overtime game between the Boston Celtics and the St. Louis Hawks for the 1956–57 NBA finals was the first nationally televised basketball game. For the following season, NBC paid five hundred thousand dollars to televise Saturday games into the twelve million homes with television sets. But their broadcasts generated so little interest that Nielsen reported the ratings as IFR (Insufficient for Reporting)—the numbers were too small to be measured.

  Things began to change in 1960 when the Lakers moved their franchise from Minneapolis to Los Angeles. For the first time, the league had a truly coast-to-coast, national presence. Just as importantly, 1959 to 1960 marked Wilt Chamberlain’s debut with the Philadelphia Warriors. I’ve always thought that his gargantuan appeal had a lot to do with that season’s attendance figures jumping twenty-three percent.

  The Rochester Royals had taken the NBA crown in 1951. A pair of brothers, Jack and Les Harrison, owned the team but were losing money in Rochester. The town was too small to support a professional basketball franchise. Three cities were on their short list for relocation—Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Kansas City. A Cincinnati group was lobbying the NBA for an expansion franchise. They had $125,000 pledged toward the NBA’s start-up entry fee of $200,000. At a February 1957 meeting, Maurice Podoloff, then the commissioner of the league, scheduled a test game, held at the Cincinnati Gardens, between Rochester and the Fort Wayne Pistons. The game almost sold out, and the Harrisons agreed to play thirty-one home games in Cincinnati. On April 3, 1957, the terms of the deal went public, and the Cincinnati Royals were born.