The Big O

by Oscar P Robertson

  Seconds remained on the clock as we came out of the time-out and immediately mangled our set play. Somehow, amid the chaos, I found Bob open for a fifteen-footer. With the crowd screaming, he drilled it. Sam Jones missed a wild shot as the buzzer sounded, and we celebrated 93–92.

  In the NBA, you really can’t ever attribute too much significance to one game. The real mark of a professional team comes on a Tuesday in February, when you are in the middle of an eight-game road trip and find yourself in an arena you can’t recognize, playing against a team whose name has blurred into all the others. But it was obvious that Lucas was going to remove a lot of pressure from Wayne Embry. He provided our lineup with a third major scorer, improved our rebounding, and immediately solidified our frontcourt and our defense. I was also encouraged because the word on Bob Boozer had been that he’d lost confidence in his shot during the 1959 Pan-Am Games. If the offensive skills he’d shown at Kansas State were back, we matched up with the Celtics extremely well—especially as Bob’s combination of strength, height, athletic ability, and energy made him a perfect foil for Tommy Heinsohn, who was renowned for tricks like pulling on your jersey or strategically, slyly, shoving his elbow into your ribs. Bob played Tommy better than about anybody in the league, which we’d need if we were going to get past them in the playoffs.

  If opening night was any indication, and Bob was going to give us scoring and defense, were we going to cause some real trouble.

  Of course, there were growing pains. In San Francisco, Jack Twyman—who was so anxious to contribute that the previous game he’d volunteered to guard Elgin Baylor—fractured a bone in his hand. In Cleveland, Lucas and Happy argued over whether Happy should have passed the ball. They started yelling at each other on the court and kept at it in the locker room after the game.

  Despite our big win in Boston, we were trying to find ourselves; the Celtics, meanwhile, were destroying the league. With Bob Cousy retired, the rest of their team seemed determined to show that they could play without him. John Havlicek, Tom Heinsohn, and Tom Sanders were splitting time at the forward slots, and K. C. Jones had stepped smoothly into the point guard slot. The only guy in their top six who didn’t average at least ten points a game was K. C., and he was too busy playing defense and setting everyone up. With guys like Frank Ramsey, Clyde Lovellette, and Jim Loscutoff coming off the bench, the Celtics were still loaded, and they started the season on an unbelievable winning streak. Less than two weeks into the season, they were 7–1. It stretched to 12–1, then 17–1.

  Meanwhile, McMahon shifted us into an offense that featured two post men, thereby clearing the middle for my penetration and also allowing Jerry to play with his back to the basket, a position in which he was more comfortable. At 10–8, we went on a tear. Against Philadelphia I had thirty-eight points and sixteen rebounds; Lucas had twenty-one points and a club record thirty-one rebounds. The next night Jerry broke his own record with thirty-three rebounds and twenty-five points. I chipped in twenty-nine points in twenty-two minutes, and Jack Twyman, out there with a cast on his hand, had seventeen points. It was our fourth straight road win, a club record. We were starting to play together and get to know each other, gaining confidence. After a fifth straight win and then a loss against Los Angeles, we went back to Cincinnati for our second game of the season against Boston. Rising to the challenge, I played all forty-eight minutes and had a triple-double as we handed them their second loss of the season, 118–108.

  As the second month of the season progressed, Boston continued to lead the NBA with an incredible 22–3 record. Slowly, however, we were gaining on them. From 10–8, we’d run off to an 18–10 record, and then 21–12, the second-best record in the league. Still, we trailed them by five and a half games in the Eastern Division.

  Our season turned on Sunday morning, December 15, when our general manager phoned Bob Boozer’s home. The phone call represented the culmination of two years of simmering emotions. I think it also ended up costing us that season’s NBA title.

  There are different accounts of what happened. But one thing that’s not in doubt: This story begins with Tom Grace, executive director of Tom Wood’s insurance companies. Now, Tom Grace was a smart businessman, but he wasn’t a basketball guy. He didn’t play the game, nor was he raised on it. He’d become the team’s executive vice president in 1959, when Tom Wood took over the Royals and the Gardens from the Harrison brothers.

  During the first three of Tom Grace’s early years, two of Cincinnati’s number one draft picks had turned their backs on the Royals: Bob Boozer headed to the ever-powerful Peoria Caterpillars, and Jerry Lucas went to the Cleveland Pipers. This all but crippled the team’s playoff chances and also irreparably damaged Grace’s reputation, in that he had been unable to sign and deliver the players general manager Pepper Wilson had drafted. Ownership gradually gave Pepper more control. Around the league, meanwhile, our front office was viewed as a nice bunch of guys who could not successfully order an egg salad sandwich without having the chicken jump to another league.

  By 1963, however, Bob had returned from the land of caterpillars, and Lucas was on board.

  There was no question Jerry was going to start at power forward—he was that good. Jack McMahon gave Tom Hawkins the nod at the other forward spot. This meant Bob was going to come off the bench to play.

  Bob wasn’t thrilled about the situation. He went to Grace and said, “It looks like I’m the fifth wheel on a situation that is going nowhere.”

  From here on in, there are a number of opinions as to what happened.

  Tom Grace once told The Cincinnati Enquirer that Bob was a malcontent, Jack McMahon and others felt Bob could not accept that Tom Hawkins had beaten him out for a starting job. Hawkins started at forward because he was fast and finished well on the break. In addition, McMahon did not exactly have confidence in Bob and would sometimes put Jack Twyman in ahead of him as the first man off the bench.

  Logic says that the team traded Bob for basketball purposes, although press reports also said that the cash-strapped Royals convinced the Knicks to throw in some money—fifteen thousand dollars—as part of the deal.

  However, in an interview done in the early 1970s, Tom Grace gave other reasons.

  “Bob and I had become good friends. He asked if I could do something and I agreed. I pointed out to him, though I had lost whatever control I had of the Royals, I could get Ned Irish over with the Knicks to take him.”

  There. Bob Boozer asked to be traded. Didn’t he?

  “I never talked to Tom Grace about the deal,” Bob told me. “Despite all the hype about Lucas, I was playing as sixth and seventh man and kicked in fourteen, seventeen, and eighteen points in the three games just before the trade. I’d recognized the situation: Lucas and Twyman were going to play. I went to Coach McMahon and told him I’d play in whatever spot they needed me. Coach told me he really appreciated my attitude. He even told the press, ‘He’s our key man off the bench.’ But there had been reports in the papers saying Tom Grace regarded me as a malcontent, which was total bull. It was a political situation, and they traded me.”

  Whichever side you choose to believe, the end result was that Pepper Wilson called to tell Bob he’d been traded to the Knicks. Bob left for New York, fuming the whole trip at Jack McMahon, believing that the coach should have gone to bat for him and made sure he stayed with the club.

  Now, I don’t believe for a second that Bob asked to be traded. He loved playing in Cincinnati and knew how close we were to a championship. I also think that anyone who would claim that Bob was unhappy here is just plain, flat-out wrong. It’s a deal I never understood. But it also illustrates the reason your favorite NBA player constantly tells the local newscaster, “It’s a business.”

  When the season’s in full swing, it doesn’t matter if you understand the trade management just made. Doesn’t matter if you agree. You’ve got another plane to catch. Another game to play. And immediately following the trade, we played great ba
ll, beating the Knicks decisively. The Celtics came into Cincinnati for another showdown. (Before the game, Bill and the gang stopped by my house for dinner.)

  At one point during the game, Bill Russell had me trapped on the baseline. I went into a crouch and pump-faked. He stood there. I stayed in my crouch for a moment. Russell, confused, hesitated, and I shot from the crouch and scored. On the way back up the court, he laughed, “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

  It was only the fifth Celtics loss of the season, but the fourth at our hands, and even Red was getting frustrated.

  “We tried something new on them,” Auerbach said. “I told the boys to stretch their fingers out wide with their hands way up on defense, figuring every little bit helps. But you know what that Oscar did?” Red shook his head in disbelief. “He shot through their fingers.”

  In early 1964, Jack Twyman came to me. Jack was part of the inner circle of the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA), a fledgling union advocating players’ rights. Playing conditions at that time just weren’t appropriate for a professional league. Players didn’t have health insurance. We always stayed in second-class hotels. Teams refused to send their trainers on the road trips. Players didn’t get paid for preseason. And after the all-star game, you didn’t even have twenty-four hours before the season started back up. Jack came to me because drastic changes were necessary. He wanted to know if I’d take over the job of the Royals’ team rep to the players union.

  The history of the problems between players and owners was long and complicated. Bob Cousy had helped start the union in 1954. That year, players openly threatened to strike on the afternoon of the all-star game. An immediate meeting with league president Maurice Podoloff led to various improvements concerning contract and playing conditions, and an agreement was made to start an unofficial pension plan, in which teams matched the players’ contributions. The owners agreed to the legitimacy of the players union, and the players agreed to further negotiate matters of conflict. The game went on as planned.

  But the league’s promise wasn’t kept; there was virtually no headway in making the unofficial pension plan official. Whenever union leaders tried to meet with Podoloff, he stalled. Whenever he made a public statement on a labor matter, it was a lie. This happened for six, seven years. More than a few owners thought they were doing players a favor by having us out there, playing in front of people. Some players were signed for five thousand dollars—the same salary a guy would get for delivering mail. If an owner did not like a player for personal reasons, they got rid of him. Meanwhile, we were busting our asses up and down the courts every night, running our bodies into the ground, then traveling and living in pathetic conditions. It reached a point when players could not help but view what Podoloff and the owners were doing as anything but cold, calculating delays and lies. Keeping us at bay, patting us on the head, and paying us with pennies, even as they kept cashing checks written in our sweat and blood.

  All-star games were the only time when a significant number of owners and players gathered in one city, so negotiations usually took place before the game. In 1963, though the union had rules and regulations, it was still emerging as an organization. Tom Heinsohn was the second NBPA president, and Larry Fleisher, after a long “meeting” with Tom at Jim Downey’s Bar on Eighth Avenue in New York City, had just agreed to be our counsel. The all-star game that year was in Los Angeles, and one of our demands was to have Larry included in the meeting. The owners refused. They said he wasn’t a player, and they did not want any outside people in the negotiations—especially a lawyer. Never mind that we told them he was an elected official in our union. Never mind that any business negotiations should involve a lawyer. Never mind that owners sometimes insisted on being on hand for the players’ meetings. Our union had to fight with them tooth and nail just to get our own elected official to sit in on negotiations with them. But we fought and we clawed, and we came away from the 1963 game with the promise that when 1964 came around, Larry would be involved with the negotiations.

  In September 1963, Podoloff stepped down, replaced by Walter Kennedy. At the time, Tommy Heinsohn and Larry Fleisher told Kennedy they wanted to meet at the all-star game and discuss the pension plan—a plan to put money away for players when they reached retirement age, or in case they were injured and had extraordinary medical expenses, as was the case with Maurice Stokes. In November, Kennedy relayed Heinsohn’s request to the owners. They turned it down. The players got a letter from Kennedy saying that he’d inherited Podoloff’s files and correspondence. Supposedly, letters show that in 1962, Podoloff had forwarded Tommy Heinsohn a specific pension plan. Kennedy says that the plan never was accepted, nor rejected, and ownership was not going to meet with the players until they get a response.

  What Kennedy didn’t know was that Tommy had repeatedly tried to meet with Podoloff, but had continually been brushed off.

  The all-star game that season was in Boston. Walter Brown, president of the Celtics and the host of that year’s festivities, had assembled the largest collection of basketball stars in the game’s history. The original Celtics of the 1920s were going to be on hand, as well as young old-timers from the 1940s and 1950s, plus the game’s current top twenty stars. The league had worked strenuously to set this up and had managed a real coup: Television cameras would be broadcasting the story to viewers across the nation, live and in prime time. The commissioner and owners saw it as an opportunity for professional basketball to step into the limelight, for the league to prove it was a first-rate enterprise. All weekend there were meetings, with league and television officials doing whatever they could to make sure the night would be spectacular.

  The morning of the game, Tom met with Fred Zollner, owner of the Detroit Pistons, who represented the owners in whatever pension plan dealings there might be. While no lawyers for either side were on hand, John Kerr of the Philadelphia 76ers, the Knicks’ Tom Gola, and San Francisco’s Guy Rodgers—the union’s pension plan committee—sat in on the proceedings, during which a compromise was made and an agreement reached. If the league’s players voted to accept the plan, its implementation would be taken up at the next owners’ meeting—possibly in February, more likely in May. This was accepted by the four players at the meeting, and it looked like all was well.

  Except none of this had been done in the presence of Larry Fleisher—which we’d fought to have.

  Larry heard about the agreement and asked to see a contract. Tom told him nothing had been signed. That afternoon, Larry called Walter Kennedy three times, wanting to discuss this. Each time, he was told that Kennedy was in owners’ meetings, ostensibly to discuss changes to the league’s constitution. Walter Kennedy never so much as returned his phone call.

  As all this was going on, a snowstorm was ravaging the Midwest and sweeping up and down the East Coast.

  I’d been on hand for the birth of my first child, Shana, in 1960. Now my wife was expecting our second. But Wayne Embry, Jerry Lucas, and I had been voted into the all-star game. There was no maternity leave in those days. I didn’t like it, but there was nothing I could do.

  Wayne, Jerry, and I set out for Boston on Monday, the day before the game, but impossible landing conditions in Boston forced our plane to detour into Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. There, we were told, there was an eight-hour backlog of departing flights. A few reporters, as well as the Royals publicity director, were on the same flight. Now we all were stranded. Bailey Howell soon joined us. Detroit’s all-star forward also had been detoured into O’Hare, although, admittedly, Bailey was as concerned with who was paying his per diem as he was with getting to the game.

  All flights into Boston were eventually cancelled, and, after much wrangling, our group ended up on a plane to Washington, D.C., where in the wee hours of the morning, we checked in to a nearby hotel, just in time to get wake-up calls from the front desk.

  We headed to the train station for the 6:30 express. All told, it took thirty-two hours to travel fro
m Cincinnati to Boston.

  But the same thing was happening to players everywhere. Bob Pettit, the Players Association’s vice president, didn’t get into town until the middle of Monday afternoon. Same thing with Elgin Baylor. My group took a train to Boston, but it did not arrive until 4:00 P.M. Hardly any players checked into our hotel until 5:00 P.M., four hours before the game’s scheduled tip-off time.

  We’d already had meetings and discussed plans to strike the game. With or without the snow and delays, guys were prepared to boycott the game, if that’s what it took to get a signed deal for a pension.

  Once more, player reps arrived. Tom Heinsohn, John Kerr, Tom Gola, and Guy Rodgers met with Larry Fleisher, Elgin, me, Bob, and the rest for a hurried meeting.

  At about 6:00 P.M., Walter Kennedy heard a knock on the door of his hotel room. Tom Heinsohn and Bob Pettit demanded to see him. They said he had to meet with Larry Fleisher at 6:30, or else there wouldn’t be a game.

  Kennedy said he couldn’t, but if it was important, they could meet in ten minutes. So a bunch of calls were made, and soon Larry, Tom, Bob, Bill Russell, and Lenny Wilkens were in Kennedy’s hotel room, demanding a meeting with all of the owners. We wanted the promises of the morning—i.e., the discussed pension plan—put on paper, and we wanted that piece of paper to be signed.

  Walter Kennedy was at a loss for words.

  He assured the guys. In the course of the day, he had spoken to representatives of all of the clubs. It would all be taken care of.

  He spent a while telling the guys this, making sure that everyone was on board, and that the game was going to go on as scheduled. Finally, Larry and Bob and the rest left the hotel room.

  It’s been reported that at 6:30 P.M., the players union informed Walter that we weren’t going to play that day. That’s a lie. The game was scheduled for a 9:00 P.M. tip-off. At 8:00, every player was inside the Boston Garden, half-believing that a contract was going to be signed, half-expecting to play, but also prepared in case something went wrong.