We played so many games, traveled so much, that a trench mentality set in. Dark humor was evident. I remember being in the airport once, waiting for a plane. A confused fan came up to me. He knew I was an athlete, but couldn’t figure out how he recognized me. When he asked who I played for, I deadpanned, answering with the name of a hockey team: “The Chicago Black Hawks, of course.”
Our lineup of new faces played as an aggressive, cohesive unit and won five of our first six games. A month into the season, we’d played five home games and attracted more than sixty percent of the Royals’ total audience for the previous season. Now, for the first time we traveled to Boston Garden. A lot of hype accompanied our matchup.
For a decade, Boston’s Bob Cousy had been the league’s definition of a point guard. Hell, he was an NBA all-star when I was still in junior high school. At six feet one, Bob all but created the model for tough, flashy floor generals. He was a consummate floor leader, always pushing the fast break, passing the ball behind his back and whipping it through his legs, finding the open man or crease. If you played off him, he was deadly with that antiquated set shot of his. By contrast I was the new kid on the block, six five and strong, solid and not flashy, all control and economy of movement, the first guard to really use his size and body to take defenders where he wanted to go. Where Bob was the grizzled, cagey white veteran, the leader of the defending world champions, I was the young black stud, leading a squad of upstarts. How would Cousy respond? How would I?
Six hours before game time, people were lined up for tickets. While Bob drove to the Boston Garden in a gray 1960 Cadillac and, in order to avoid fans and admirers, entered the arena through a “secret” entrance, I packed up my gym bag and walked to the arena from my hotel. A reporter from Sports Illustrated was on hand to cover the event. I refused to talk to him, beginning a ten-year boycott of any Sports Illustrated press men. Instead, the reporter focused on Cousy, who admitted to looking forward to the game. “Pride?” he said, minutes before taking to the court. “Of course, it’s about pride. I’ve thought about this game all week long and talked to myself about it. ‘Better get yourself up, Bob. Better be at your best, Bob. Oscar’s coming to town to play in your arena before your crowd for the first time.’”
What the reporters—and I guess Bob—never really seemed to understand was that he was not really in competition with me, not in the traditional man-on-man way. I never guarded Bob. Arlen Bockhorn usually guarded him. I took the Celtics’ bigger shooting guard, either Sam Jones or Bill Sharman.
It’s been written that Bob never made more than thirty-five thousand a season when he played. Maybe he had issues with my salary. Maybe the problems we had in later years were due to nothing more than our being in the wrong place, on the wrong sides of the fence. I don’t really know.
The Celtics did not play well that night, according to game reports. We pulled away from them in the second quarter, and withstood a late run to take the game 113–104, for our franchise’s first win in the Boston Garden in six seasons. Cousy played forty-five minutes, scored twenty-seven points, and had seven rebounds and seven assists. In forty-six minutes, I scored twenty-five points and had six rebounds and seven assists. Afterwards, Bob said I played as though I’d been in the league for ten years. But Bill Sharman, who had guarded me for a good part of the game, marveled over my ability. “He has three or four fakes all in the same move. He’s bigger than most men you usually have to guard in the backcourt. He is a big man with the moves of a really tremendous little man, and he is always ready to whip off a pass that will lead to a basket if a teammate gets free.”
We may have won that game, but the Celtics were a far superior team that season. Jack Twyman averaged twenty-five a game for us. And Wayne Embry was solid, turning in more than fourteen points and eleven rebounds a game. But beyond that, we didn’t have much. Guys like Arlen Bockhorn, Larry Staverman, and Win Wilfong were decent players; they had singular and specific skills. One could hit outside shots, another hustled and defended, but they weren’t exactly names that would be celebrated in the annals of basketball. Compare that with a Celtics team that had Hall of Famers at all five starting positions—Cousy, Sam Jones, Tom Heinsohn, Bill Sharman, and, of course, Bill Russell. Three of these players were named among the top fifty players in basketball history. They had a great defender and floor leader in K. C. Jones coming off the bench. Their coach, Red Auerbach, is to this day considered the best professional coach of all time. It goes without saying that we weren’t going to beat them consistently.
The real secret behind the Celtics lay in one man. Forget about the stories of magic leprechauns in the rafters of Boston Garden and how the cramped visitors’ dressing room and psychological games created some sort of Celtics’ mystique. The fact is, no matter how good the players surrounding him were, no matter how competitive his coach was, Bill Russell was the Celtics’ mystique. He was the truth, a genuinely great player. Bill was six feet nine, 220 pounds, with long, gangly arms; you could watch him play and think he wasn’t doing anything much. Meanwhile, he’d dominate the game.
Bill Russell was a great player and true competitor. On defense he clogged everything up in the middle for Boston. He was so gangly and quick off the ball that he could double-team and trap you at a moment’s notice or jump out to help a defender on a pick and roll. And when you beat your man off the dribble and thought you had a free lane to the basket, here came Bill, not just blocking your shot, but making sure to keep the ball in bounds, control it, and pass it out to start a fast break the other way. He took pride in stopping people, and mentally he was one of the toughest, most hard-nosed players in the league. His defense carried Boston in the playoffs and, I believe, was the reason they won championships.
I’ve always thought that this country doesn’t often understand or accept the greatness of certain people. Bill was not one of the sheep, wasn’t even a member of the flock. Race has always been one of the key problems in America, and Boston has historically been a particularly segregated and racially divided, troubled city. Bill was not treated kindly in Boston, even though he was the star of the Celtics.
Jackie Robinson had demonstrated beyond any doubt that a black athlete could play baseball intensely, intelligently, and with heroic dignity. Thanks to his success, other black athletes followed him into the game. But basketball had integrated more slowly. Though there had been a few Negro players in various eastern leagues as far back as the 1920s, in 1950, Earl Lloyd, Chuck Cooper, and Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton became the first three black players in the NBA. Bill Russell joined the NBA in 1956 and in many ways became the league’s first black superstar. He was the acknowledged core of the Celtics, the league’s most valuable player five times, a twelve-time all-star, and had more playoff MVPs than anyone could shake a stick at. But the game was owned and refereed by white men. Most of the players were white, the men who wrote about the game were white, and the vast majority of the paying audience was white. So Bill Russell had trouble getting endorsements that far-lesser white athletes easily procured.
When Bill would drive from Boston back to his home in Louisiana in the off-season, he had to wonder where he could eat on the highway, where he could stop. If he drove a Cadillac, the cops would stop him. “Where did you get this car?” they’d ask.
Anyone who knows him knows how bright and funny Bill is. But over the years, the press portrayed him as brooding and gruff. One year, though, Sports Illustrated actually managed to pick him as their Sportsman of the Year. Usually, they picked golfers.
Between the grind of the road, our collective inexperience, and the fact that the Cincinnati Royals weren’t all that good a team to begin with, we faltered. By the all-star game, I’d missed a few games with a twisted ankle, and we’d long slipped from first place in the Western Division and were sinking fast. This did not stop fans from voting me into the all-star game, the only rookie to start.
The night before the game, Bill Russell was in a restaurant wit
h a friend, cutting into a steak. A man came up to his table, asked for an autograph, and put a menu under Russell’s nose. Bill signed and the man took a long look at the menu. He said something and walked away, a disappointed look on his face. Bill’s eyes followed him with amusement.
“Did he think you were Chamberlain?” his dining partner asked.
“No. Robertson.”
That year at the all-star game, I started for the West, along with Gene Shue, Clyde Lovellette, Bob Pettit, and Elgin Baylor. The team from the East started Wilt Chamberlain, Bob Cousy, Tom Heinsohn, Richie Guerin, and Dolph Schayes, with Bill Russell coming off the bench. All-star games were one of the few times that Wilt and Bill actually got to play on the same squad, but they rarely were on the court together.
With me throwing passes to Bob Pettit and Elgin Baylor, we jumped ahead and led 47–19 at the half. I made all five of my shots in the first half (most of them patented fallaway jumpers), and was voted the game’s most valuable player—an honor which back then people used as the measuring stick of the best all-around player in basketball. I must have really played well, because they gave me the award even though I sat out the second half. Afterwards, the entire locker room seemed to be abuzz with my performance. A reporter asked Detroit Pistons coach Dick McGuire if he thought he’d ever see the day when another guard could compare with Cousy. A former point guard himself, McGuire was regarded by many as the second-best play-maker in basketball history, rating just behind Bob. Dick told the reporter, “O is better than Cousy ever was. O is the finest player in basketball.”
Amid the bustle of reporters, Bill Russell found his dining partner from the night before and laughed: “Now you know why that man was so annoyed. That number fourteen is quite a rookie, isn’t he?”
On January 14, 1961, Elgin Baylor and I put on a show at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. Elgin was the first real high-flier in the league. His aerial dynamics predated Connie Hawkins, who passed the torch to Julius Erving, who was the forerunner of Michael Jordan. Elgin and 1 each scored forty-five points and broke the old arena record in a nationally televised 123–114 shoot-out. Not long after that, our team got into another scoring war, this time with the Philadelphia Warriors. Wilt nailed us for fifty-three. I scored forty-two on them. My all-star performance, followed up by such an explosion of points, brought more attention my way, and with it, a singular honor.
In 1961, though, there weren’t any competing around-the-clock news channels. Network and local news existed, but television’s reach was still limited. There wasn’t any Internet, no personal computers, and the average attention span had not yet been completely destroyed. Even the most serious of reporters did not have to worry about watering down their coverage or appealing to demographics. Time and Newsweek were the country’s highest circulated news magazines at that time. They still are. Time was one of the magazines that set the tone for a national dialogue on important issues. When anything made it onto the cover, it mattered.
A reporter from Time visited Cincinnati and scheduled interviews with me. When we met, he told me that his magazine was planning to do a cover story on the NBA. They’d commissioned an artist to do a painting of me and were planning to use it for the cover. He was shocked when I didn’t react, or show any excitement, but dealt with him in the usual staid manner I used on the other dozen or so reporters who, every so often, flew in out of nowhere and bothered me.
The publication date was February 17, 1961, four years after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. first made the cover, two after Harry Belafonte, and a little less than two years before Dr. King was declared Time’s Man of the Year. It was the first time a basketball player made the cover of Time. The February 17 cover indeed featured a painting of me. Russell Hoban, a noted African-American artist, painted the portrait, and I assume he used a still photo of me as his model. It’s a beautiful painting, one of dancing colors. I am in action during a game, underneath the basket, shooting the ball. Around me abstract players are leaping. The air seems to swirl. I’ve been told that as he worked on the painting, the artist told a friend that it was curious; if you took the basketball out of my hand and replace it with a sword, you’d have the classic stance for a soldier. I’ve always appreciated that.
The piece began:
In almost every way, Cincinnati’s Oscar Robertson is a pure product of the sport of basketball as it has developed in the U.S. The game was invented in 1891 in Springfield, Mass., by a gym instructor named Jim Naismith, who wanted to give his bored classes a switch from the daily grind of calisthenics. Today basketball is played with eager enthusiasm and improving skill by some 50 nations from Chile to China, but it has remained a distinctly American game. Its virtues are obvious: any number can play, indoors or out, in all seasons. It requires nothing more than a ball, and a basket that is much the same whether it hangs from a backboard in Madison Square Garden or a barn door in Kentucky. This season an estimated 150 million Americans will watch games played by some 20,000 high schools, 1,000 colleges, and swarms of amateur teams composed of players ranging from scurrying schoolboys to gimpy grandfathers.
In the course of four pages, I was the focus for a piece that went on to explore the growing popularity of basketball. The writer reported my life story and singled me out as an exemplar of the best of basketball. However, in doing so, he also made a special point of noting that I was indicative of a new generation of players. “Gone is the day of the glandular goon who could do little more than stand beneath the basket and stuff in rebounds.”
Thanks to Wilt, Bob Pettit, Bill Russell, Elgin Baylor, myself, and others, the league was changing. It was evolving much the same way that the face of all major professional team sports would evolve during the 1960s, the way that Jim Brown’s dominance altered the face of professional football, and Hank Aaron and Willie Mays changed the landscape of baseball.
Indeed, African-Americans took over professional sports during the 1960s, even as the struggle for civil rights raged; and I’ve always believed that we, as players, affected that struggle, helped it. Bear with me for a moment.
I will never forget when my wife phoned me in Boston and said she was going to march in Selma, Alabama. This was in 1965. Martin Luther King Jr. and hundreds of marchers were planning to protest racist voting laws by crossing Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. I paused before responding. I asked her who was going. She said that Terry Embry (Wayne’s wife) and a lot of people from Cincy were going to Selma for the march. I said okay, and they got a charter and flew down.
On March 7, 1965, police attacked the marchers. Yvonne wasn’t hurt, thank God, but the brutality of the attack was severe enough that it prompted Lyndon Johnson to sign the Civil Rights Voting Act into law.
I knew Dr. King and did a lot of things to support the struggle. But in those days it was extremely difficult for a basketball player to be a public figurehead of the struggle, no matter who you were. It didn’t matter if you wanted to be a public figure. It didn’t matter if your heart and sympathies were with the marchers. Dr. King and everyone else knew the ramifications of picking a man like me. My career would be over; it was that simple. No owner was going to have on his team an outspoken black man making political statements. You can’t compare this to modern-day players who refuse to step forward and take political stances because they are afraid of losing endorsement money from a soda company. The fact is, back then, if you stepped forward and spoke out, your livelihood was cancelled. I believe that once the movement had gathered momentum, there were specific venues with which Dr. King and others asked people to be involved—I seem to remember that Bill Russell went down to see Dr. King, specifically because he was asked—but otherwise, they wouldn’t ask you to do it. It just wasn’t thought of to use athletes for political purposes. Not until Muhammad Ali got involved with the black Muslims in the later part of the decade did any of that really happen.
We were players. The only thing we could do was play. The only place we could make a statement was on the cour
t.
Having said this, there is no doubt in my mind that the black man’s proficiency on the basketball court and baseball and football fields had its impact on the civil rights struggle. Competitive sports occupy a special place in the American heart. I’d say that a solid majority of people who rooted for their favorite teams cheered whichever players got the job done for them, regardless of race. Yes, there were people who may have been happier if the white guy did the job better than the black man, who may not have wanted to have the black guy live next to them, or date their daughters. But if the black guy helped win a game, then, just as people accepted Bill Cosby because he was funny or Charlie Parker because he was a great musician, that black athlete was accepted, however gradual, grudging, or even conditional that acceptance might have been.
During the 1960s, when blacks took so not just as star players, but also as utility and nickel-back safeties. We helped teams win, so over time we got jobs, and, over time fans accepted us. It’s perhaps sad to say that this actually represented a step forward. But it did. And it was an important step, I think. One that, in some significant way, affected what came later, made it possible.
Looking back on things, I think it is safe to say that my appearance on the cover of Time represented a small step in this direction.
The scantest breezes had blown when I’d been in high school. It had gusted a bit during my college years. The February 17, 1961, issue of Time magazine, I believe, was a weather vane, pointing toward the idea that those winds of change were truly beginning to gather momentum.
I averaged 30.5 points a game my rookie season, which topped the team in scoring and made me one of three players—along with Wilt and Elgin—to average more than thirty points, the first time that three players had averaged that many points over the course of one season. I was second on the Royals team in rebounds at 10.1 a clip, and first in the league in assists (9.7 a game). Cincinnati improved from nineteen wins to thirty-three that season. We weren’t a playoff team, but we seemed headed in the right direction. Our home attendance increased from an average of fourteen hundred a game to more than five thousand two hundred. For the first time in the club’s history, fan annual attendance broke the hundred thousand mark—a figure that not only helped triple the previous year’s box office take but also accounted for a huge chunk of the league’s twenty percent jump in attendance.
The Big O Page 17