The Big O

by Oscar P Robertson

  But I had a different style—someone once suggested it might have been because I grew up in a time before television controlled everything. It wasn’t flashy. At the same time, if you watch Michael Jordan’s patented fadeaway jumper, or his back-to-the-basket fallaway, now that’s Oscar Robertson’s shot. If you pop in a videotape of Magic Johnson protecting the ball with his body as he runs a half-court offense, then isolating his man on one side of the basket, bulling and backing him down, and then spinning off his man, that’s Oscar Robertson. My play influenced them. And I did these things before they were around to watch them.

  Admittedly, I didn’t do them with double-pumping flair and primetime charisma. It wasn’t because I couldn’t do tricks with the ball. My coach in high school never allowed me to play that way. And if you wanted to review my game films, you’d find a few occasions where I might have swung the ball behind my back—freezing a defender for just long enough to allow me to feed the post, or drive. But I simply wasn’t a person for doing tricks and showing off. I wasn’t going to consciously hog the ball and keep shooting and shooting to see how many points I could score. Running up sixty or seventy points in a night wouldn’t prove anything, first of all. More importantly, it wouldn’t help our team win. Instead, I came out every night and provided our team with what one observer called a “utilitarian and crystallized ruthlessness.”

  Say I’ve caught the ball at the top of the key again. Say that the last time I caught it here, I made a bounce pass inside for a layup. Now the hours I spent as a child and teen and college student pay off: all the jab steps and first steps I’d practiced, my understanding of the game and other players. Depending on what I see from the defender, I might fake a bounce pass (the last possession should have set him up to the point that he should be worried about it). In a fraction of a second, I observe how his feet are set, the position of his hands, how far away he is when I catch the ball, and then make immediate judgments. If he’s worried about another pass inside and sags into the post, I might just shoot in his face. I might jab step and shoot. The next time I might jab step and fake a shot; then, when he’s off balance, drive. This might be followed by a jab step, a pump fake, and a quick crossover dribble. I’m not consciously thinking about this stuff. It’s a dance, with each possession furthering my opportunity to exploit him and whatever uncertainties I have planted. If I’m on top of my game, just catching the ball and squaring up on my defender should be like having a cat on a string.

  But it’s possible the defender stayed with me through my fakes and the play hasn’t worked out.

  When I played, games were won from inside the foul line. You played to get fouled and to get people in foul trouble. Even now you can shoot all the three-pointers in the world and make a lot of them, but it’s fool’s gold; if you don’t get to the foul line and inside the paint, you’re simply not going to win. I square up on my defender and start toward my right. I’ve got my hip between the defender and the ball and have my head up. As I dribble, I read the court, maneuvering my way toward the paint. I dribble harder—giving one head and shoulder fake to my defender, then another. I feel his position with my body, and bump against his hip. His wrist and elbow are in my lower back. All this helps to determine my next move, the next bump. Two dribbles. A third. As I grind him down, I wait for him to commit himself in one way or another. If he’s taller than me, he probably isn’t as strong, fast, or as coordinated, so I take it for granted that when necessary I’ll be able to spin past him. Smaller guys I’ll simply wear down, using my strength and height on them, just backing them down, jumping over them, then crashing the offensive glass.

  Dick Barnett made a statement that received national circulation and became the catchphrase description of my game: “If you give Oscar a twelve-foot shot, he’ll work on you until he’s got a ten-foot shot. Give him a ten and he wants eight. Give him eight and he wants six. Give him six, he wants four, he wants two. Give him two, you know what he wants? That’s right, baby. He wants a layup.”

  It may not be flashy, but it’s true. One of my favorite tricks was to spin by my guy with my arm out so fast he didn’t know what happened. It used to piss off Alex Hannum, who was a Hall of Famer. “Someone is going to grab that arm someday and throw Robertson into the third row.” Bill Russell was more philosophical. He called the move my free foul, saying, “I knew that whenever I guarded him on a switch, Oscar would be dribbling with one hand and trying to club me to death with the other. Oscar’s free foul was in keeping with his attitude toward the game. He’d gobble his way up your arm if he could. He always wanted something extra.”

  Jerry Sloan was one of the best defenders of my era. Physical play and flopping were big parts of Sloan’s repertoire. At six seven, he was long-armed and really physical and just a bitch to deal with; he’d get great position and crowd you, not so much as allowing you room to move, let alone make a first step toward the hoop. Then he’d let you bang into him and flop for the charge. Of course, this also was suited to the way I played, and we had some real wars out in Chicago: with me letting him get set, then making a fake. As soon as he reached for it, I’d drive right into him. My body was solid enough that some people said that crashing into me was like being hit by Jim Brown. I’d crash into Jerry and jump over him and release my shot. By the time the ball was in the net, several players would be on his ass and the ref would have blown his whistle. Refs didn’t give flops often when I played. Instead I’d head to the foul line, and an upset defender would bounce up from the ground and start complaining. Next possession we’d do it all over again.

  No flash was involved. No heat. No complicated terminology or superlatives. Just good, hard basketball and a concentrated, calculated effort. They play off you, you make the jumper. They crowd, you go around them. When it’s time to pass, throw hard, precise passes that demand to be converted. When it’s time to rebound, do so with passion and determination. It’s not physics, but it works.

  “If he couldn’t pass, you could play him differently,” Tom Heinsohn told a reporter, after I’d rung up the Celtics for a loss. “But if you double-team him for a second, you gamble. That calls for a pass, and he’ll pass it.” Bob Cousy felt the same way. “O’s such a threat that you’d like to double team him. But if you do, that means that there’s somebody free, and he’ll hit him every time. If you don’t double-team him, he’ll take his shot when he gets it, and he’s a terrific shooter.”

  When the ball game was on the line, I was going to be aggressive. If the game was close, at the end of the game I was going to force the issue more. I was going to make them stop me. Sometimes I dribbled too much or got the ball stolen. I did miss a few big shots in key situations. But I wasn’t afraid to fail. If the ball was taken away once, it didn’t mean it would happen again. I’d worked hard enough and believed in my game. I knew that I’d make the right decisions with it. My teammates did as well. When push came to shove, they wanted me to have the ball as much as I did. That’s what being a leader is all about. I wanted to win. I expected everyone to be as dedicated as I was. If someone didn’t live up to that expectation, he heard about it.

  If the referee on the other side of the court blew his whistle and called a foul on me for something that by all rights he was in no position to observe, and if there was another ref five feet away and he saw everything squarely and did not call anything, you’re damn right I said something. No longer the quiet, shy kid I’d been at Lockefield, I challenged the referees. “What the hell’s going on?” was my usual phrase. Without even realizing I was doing it, I’d slap my foot on the hardwood and hit the palms of my hands against each other, emphasizing my frustration.

  Sometimes words failed, so I’d just tilt my neck and give a long hard stare. Guys dreaded that. But I didn’t have patience for teammates who messed up our plays. If we’re running a pick and roll, and you have a chance to roll toward the basket, and you don’t do it, we miss our chance. So why’d we run the play in the first place? Either you sh
ould do it right, or we shouldn’t call the play, or you shouldn’t be out there. That there’s a right and a wrong way to play basketball is my point, and I don’t think there’s any point being out there playing if you aren’t going to do it the right way. You aren’t helping anybody.

  Wayne Embry actually got into his first NBA fight because I was so demanding. To understand just what a feat this was, you have to know Wayne. At six feet eight, 250 pounds, he was a wide-trunked eagle of a man, with such a huge wingspan and long hands that he ended up with about the same reach as Bill Russell. Wayne was a lovely, funny man. He played with as much desire and endurance as talent. Well, we were playing Detroit, and Wayne was being held illegally by Ray Scott. The official missed the foul twice, and both times Scott stole the ball on pick and rolls. I slapped my hands together and said, “Dammitt, Wayne, how long are you going to let Ray Scott mess up our plays?”

  The next trip down the floor, sure enough, Ray reached and held Wayne. And Wayne promptly turned and coldcocked him.

  “I had to,” he told a friend after the game. “You know what it’s like to have Oz on you.”

  (I think Wayne just wanted a little respect, was all.)

  The stories go on.

  Red Auerbach used to throw three waves of guards against me—Sam Jones (who had speed), K. C. Jones (a defensive specialist), and John Havlicek (a big, rugged player). Auerbach hoped they would wear me down by the end of the game. When Bill Russell took over for Auerbach, he said it didn’t make a bit of difference who covered me. He let the guards decide who would guard me. They decided that whoever had the worst excuse had the job.

  Frank McGuire had a similar thing happen to him when he took over the Philadelphia Warriors. A college coach for many years, he was still adjusting to the league and asked his players to work out individual matchups for themselves until he better understood player matchups. Before their first game against us that year, the Warriors went around the locker room, deciding who would guard whom. Nobody wanted to guard me. Coach McGuire supposedly smiled and said he thought someone ought to be assigned to Oscar, “Just to make it look good.” Tom Gola said he’d do it, “. . . but he’s probably going to get thirty-six points off me.” (According to Wilt, that’s exactly how many I ended up with.)

  There’s the one about the college coach who gave his team a fire-and-brimstone speech before a game. “And remember,” he said, “Robertson puts on his jock the same way you guys do.” We went out there and beat them by twenty-five. Afterwards, their team dragged themselves back to the locker room. A guard told him, “I don’t care what you say, that guy has to put his jock on different.”

  One NBA coach claimed I was worth sixty to seventy points a game. Bud Olsen, who rode the bench with Cincinnati for a couple of years, used to say I always had something new, something different. He’d sit on the bench and watch my moves and punch the guy next to him: “You see that? You see that?”

  Even Wilt told his coach, Frank McGuire, “If I had my pick of all the players in the league, I’d take the Big O first.”

  My stats often get brought up in comparison with modern players. I think a true comparison is impossible, however, because of the changes made in the game. Three-point shots didn’t exist in the NBA until the mid-1980s. If they had existed in 1962, I would have scored more points (I wasn’t known as a long-range shooter, but if there had been a three-point shot back then, you can bet I would have been). Assists are also counted differently today. When I played, an assist was “without a dribble going to the basket.” If I passed the ball inbounds to you, and you dribbled the ball once, that pass was not counted as an assist. I was the all-time leader in assists for almost twenty years, until the early 1990s, when Magic Johnson broke my record (Utah’s John Stockton has since shattered that). But again, the rules are different now. These days, the rules allow you one dribble, but everyone knows that I can pass you the ball inbounds, have you dribble it the length of the court and hit a jump shot, and there’s a fifty-fifty chance that I’ll get the assist. If assists had been defined this way back in the early 1960s, I would have had another six or seven thousand.

  Moreover, Magic had a far better situation when he was with the Lakers. With a minute or thirty seconds left, Magic Johnson could look right or left and see James Worthy on one side, Byron Scott on the other side. In the same situation, I looked to my left, and there was a guy who couldn’t hit free throws. I looked to my right, and there was a guy who couldn’t go to the basket. You can’t pass to a guy who can’t shoot free throws or take the ball to the basket at the end of a close game. So I had to pull up and look for the trailer.

  Of course now we’ve gone from one extreme to another. Where it took more than twenty years for people to even know that I had a triple-double season, these days everything is a stat. We didn’t keep steals in those days. Loose-ball rebounds are given to somebody now. It used to be a team rebound. If a power forward gets eight rebounds, he’s an all-star now. If you only got eight rebounds when I played, you sat on the bench.

  During the tail end of the 1962 season, Wayne Embry twisted his ankle and had to miss five games. One game was at home, against the Detroit Pistons. Two of the Pistons starters, Bailey Howell and Ray Scott, played the entire fourth quarter with five fouls apiece. Nobody on the Royals could do enough to make either man pick up their sixth and eliminating foul. We were up by eight in the fourth quarter, but then the Pistons started to come back. Two field goals by Howell late in last forty-one seconds finished us off, 119–118—meaning that a guy who should ordinarily have been out of the game a long time ago ended up beating us. Without Wayne, we didn’t have the frontcourt to win that game.

  When I had to sit out with a messed-up ankle, the Royals inevitably lost by twenty-five points or more. We finished with a 43–37 record that season and made the playoffs, but got bounced in the first round. That summer, our front office made another in what would become a tradition of draft mistakes, acquiring Ohio State’s Larry Siegfried, then losing him to the American Basketball League, a fledgling rival league, which had taken up the old moniker of the ABL and which was founded by Abe Saperstein.

  I wasn’t around to watch that happen. As soon as the season ended, I packed my bags and headed for Camp Pickett, Virginia. I’d been sworn into the army during the regular season, at halftime of a televised game against the Celtics. I spent my whole off-season in the Army Reserves that year. I wasn’t thrilled about it, but being on reserve was much better than going on active duty. It was a seven-year commitment, but it only required active duty for six months, and you didn’t get shipped overseas. In those days they were drafting blacks left and right and putting them on the front lines. Of course, the military denies it. But America has a history of offering black military personnel great peril and minimal recognition. My peril was Fort Jackson, South Carolina.

  During a summer camp, I went in uniform with two white soldiers into a restaurant for some sandwiches. No sooner had we sat down than the manager walked over and said that I couldn’t eat there.

  “But I’m in the U.S. Army, in camp outside town.”

  “If you want to eat here, go on back to camp and get your general. Then we’ll see.”

  When he said that, it was like a little gear clicked into place in my head. I remember saying to myself, “I can sit down and eat at the Cliff House in San Francisco or Berman’s Steak House in Detroit. But this little jerk tells me I can’t have a drink of water in the Virginia boondocks?”

  Some things about this country were just insane.

  After the 1962 season, the Philadelphia Warriors moved to San Francisco and became part of the NBA’s Western Division. That meant someone in that division had to shift to the East. Cincy was the natural choice to balance the league because it was geographically closest to the other Eastern Division teams. So the Royals moved into the same division as Red Auerbach, Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, and the four straight titles of the Boston Celtics. If we wanted to play for a champ
ionship, now we had to go through Boston. With a starting lineup of me, Wayne Embry, Bob Boozer, Jack Twyman, and Adrian Smith, we went 42–38 and finished third in the East.

  However, in April 1963, just as the team was preparing for the playoffs, Tom Wood, the owner of the Royals, passed away. The Wood estate wanted to sell its interests in the Cincinnati Gardens and the Royals in a package. Louis Jacobs, a Buffalo-based concessionaire whose fifty-million-dollar family company, the Emprise Corporation, had their fingers in the pies of many major-league sports franchises, was the prime candidate to buy up everything, especially as Lou Jacobs already owned eighty percent of the Gardens.

  A second candidate soon emerged, however. Jake Brown, my lawyer and advisor, decided he wanted try to buy the team. J. W. teamed up with Warren Hensel, a Cincinnati booster and a huge basketball fan. They agreed with the Jacobs family on a deal where Jacobs could keep the Gardens, but J. W. and Warren would purchase the Royals.

  Jacobs agreed to make the bid to the Tom Wood estate on behalf of Brown and Hensel. In a matter of weeks, the bid was accepted, and Brown and Hensel began to take charge of the Royals.

  Warren Hensel could not stand head coach Charley Wolf and fired him. On the basis of Jack Twyman’s recommendation, he hired red-faced Jack McMahon away from the college ranks to be our new head coach.

  Just as it looked like the Royals had their new leadership in place, however, the Jacobs side of the negotiations began stalling. Laborious conferences took place regarding the Gardens’ lease. Soon the NBA representatives demanded to see the Brown/Hensel agreement. For some reason, Jacobs wouldn’t show it to them. The Jacobs people then became cold to Brown and Hensel and refused to answer their calls or letters. J. W. told me that if the deal had gone through as agreed upon, he and Hensel would have made a million dollars each out of the franchise. I’m sure Jacobs realized that and changed his mind. In any case, Jacobs lobbied with NBA president Maurice Podoloff and several other owners—arguing against his own deal. He didn’t even tell his own attorney, Bro Lindhorst, that he was trying to sabotage the deal.