The Big O

by Oscar P Robertson

  At 8:25 P.M. Kennedy came in. He waited until guys from the Eastern and Western squads all gathered in the same dressing room.

  “We have a problem,” he said.

  Walter stood there and fidgeted, obviously uncomfortable, and explained that he’d met with the owners. Walter began to retell the owners’ version of the entire history of our pension negotiations. He said that this afternoon, Fred Zollner went to the other owners and recounted everything that had happened in that first morning meeting. Based on that meeting—and on the assurances that Zollner gave during it—Kennedy said the owners felt everything was settled. They felt Fred, in conjunction with our committee, had reached an agreement. That was good enough for now. All documents would have to wait. There weren’t going to be any more meetings. Nothing was going to be signed tonight.

  Walter was sorry. He really felt bad about all this. But we had his word. This was all going to get taken care of. He understood our complaints. He was with us on the pension matter, on our concerns about having trainers with us on the road, and on other issues as well. Meanwhile, we had a game to play tonight. The place was sold out. A national prime-time audience was waiting. Walter kept talking. Legitimately impassioned, he kept on until finally, he was inspirational in tone, desperate in fervor.

  We thanked him and asked him to leave.

  Then we kicked everyone out of the room except for ballplayers.

  The union leaders—Tom Heinsohn, Bob Pettit, and I—stood at the front of the room. We said, “Look. This is where we are. This is what we have to do. If you want to go out there and play, we will never get anything. If we go on the court on their promises, we will never have anything at all.”

  It was quiet for a while. Slowly one person spoke up, then another. Soon guys were remembering just how much the owners had stalled over the years. Some guys weren’t so sure. Kennedy had said all the right things, hadn’t he? But then hadn’t Maurice Podoloff made promise after promise too? Was this new commissioner really different, or was he pulling a con? The energy of discourse rose through the room, with one person’s anger feeding off another. Frustration poured out. How long had we been trying to get this thing resolved? But nothing was resolved. Hadn’t we told them we wanted our lawyer in the meeting? Hadn’t they said yes? Yet they made sure to have the meeting without him. Those guys didn’t want us to have proper representation—then, when we asked for a pension contract, when we asked for basic rights, rights that we deserved, they could respond, “Sure, we’ll take care of it, just not today.” Plain and simple, they could not see far enough past their own bottom lines to understand that taking care of players was progress, a step toward the league moving forward. They didn’t want to see it. Did not care about the forest, so long as they had control of the trees.

  Every few minutes, Haskell Cohen, the league’s public relations man, tried to bust in the room. The game was supposed to start soon, he’d say. Television people were getting nervous. If we did not come out, they were going to kill the game. The league would never be on television again. This would be the end of the NBA.

  He left, and then Red Auerbach came in and threatened to fire his players. Bob Short of the Lakers threatened his stars, Elgin Baylor and Jerry West. If they didn’t come out and play, Short was going to fire them. They would never play in this league again.

  Introductions were scheduled for 9:00 P.M. It was 8:50, and we had to make a decision. Television executives were running back and forth between our locker room and courtside, where the commissioner and the other owners had gathered.

  Finally, Walter Kennedy left courtside and came into the locker room.

  “Larry can draw up the papers,” he said. “Have them sent to my office tomorrow.”

  He left, and we had another vote. Five minutes later, Bob Pettit came out of the dressing room and notified the league president that the game would proceed. The network delayed the start of the game by fifteen minutes, without saying a word to the viewing public at home.

  If we had had more time, we might not have played at all. I was still suspicious. We’d had similar promises from Podoloff. I told the press that if progress wasn’t made, it was possible there wouldn’t be an all-star game. “I know this,” I said. “I won’t sign my contract.”

  The game? Well, it didn’t have anything close to the drama we’d just been through. Some of the anticlimax could be attributed to the snowstorm and travel fatigue. A lot more, obviously, originated in the showdown we’d just been through—guys simply couldn’t get their heads into playing ball after that kind of drama. After all that planning, the league’s big showcase night was crowned by a truly lackluster game. Midway through the second quarter, the game was tied when my East squad went on an 11–2 run. We led by ten at half and ended up taking the game, 111–107. For the second time in my career, I received the game’s most valuable player trophy. I couldn’t have cared less, to be completely honest with you. My mind was on happenings back in Cincinnati and Bethesda Hospital, where my wife was delivering a healthy baby girl, Tia.

  Despite all the drama I just described, all-star games weren’t sideshows back then, though that’s what they’ve become now. The players come for all the parties before the game, and the league likes to busy itself with gimmick after gimmick: rookie games and guys dunking over chairs and the like. Then the game starts, and players show off and cruise. It’s a big popularity contest, and that’s a problem. Any time you get the fans to vote for players, you don’t get a real all-star game. Fans pick guys they like. Which means the guys who dunk the most on the highlight shows. In 2003, they picked Vince Carter, even though he’d been hurt all year. They picked forty-year-old Michael Jordan, just to put him on the team. They picked Yao Ming to start over Shaq. Yao’s got tremendous potential, but he’s a rookie, and right now nobody could possibly claim that he’s better than Shaq. Players don’t like it, but the league tells you to be humble when things like that happen. I’ll tell you what. If something like that happened to me, I’d say I don’t want to play.

  At the all-star game in 1963 in Los Angeles, a problem arose before the game started because Bob Cousy and I were on the same team, we’d both been voted to start, and we both wore the same number—fourteen. Some guy came in and told me that he was going to give me a jersey with the number twenty-four on it. This was right before the game. Everyone was in the locker room. I said, “Wait a minute. Twenty-four is Sam Jones’s number.” I turned to Sam, the great Celtics guard.

  “Sam. Isn’t this your number?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Don’t let anyone wear your number, Sam.”

  The equipment manager told me, “Well, Bob’s on the team, and he wears number fourteen, so we gave him the number.”

  I said, “Put fourteen-X on one, with tape. Put it on my jersey,” I said. “When the game is over, I can take the taped X off and have the jersey.”

  It might sound petty, but it bothered me that they were going to take it upon themselves to make the decision and not consult me, or Bob, or anyone, just treat me like a stepchild and think I wasn’t going to say anything about it. I mean, what did it matter if he had fourteen and I had fourteen? Everybody knew who we were. I’m a six-foot-five black man. Bob Cousy is a six-foot-one white guy. Nobody was going to confuse us.

  One thing I learned about organized sports was that if you let someone take advantage of you once, they were going to walk over you whenever they could. Even on something small like this, I wasn’t going to back down. If they thought I was, they had the wrong person.

  Anyway, we both ended up wearing number fourteen throughout the game. So it worked out fine.

  The season picked back up, and so did we. The Big O and Jerry Lucas led in scoring versus Los Angeles at home, with Arlen Bockhorn frustrating Jerry West into an awful shooting night and just eight points. In a matchup against a vastly improved Hawks team, I was in and out of foul trouble; we lost by one in a heartbreaker despite my scoring forty points. The b
ox score shows that we got our revenge. In a game against New York that was played in Detroit (don’t ask me why), I had eleven assists before halftime, on my way to eighteen, and we blew out the Knicks, our eighth win in nine games against New York. The next night we blew out the Celtics again. Two nights later we ran into Baltimore, winners of six straight. We beat them going away. Suddenly, we were riding our own hot streak. I could be proud of twenty-one assists against the Knicks. Put on a show in Philadelphia. Adrian Smith, my sly and dangerous partner in the backcourt, had sixteen points and ten assists, and we beat San Francisco, marking our twelfth straight win, enough to cut Boston’s lead in the Eastern Division to one-and-a-half games.

  One of the things you wish for as a professional athlete is the chance to play on a team with other talented guys. If I am going to play a pick and roll, I’d rather have Jerry Lucas out there, because I know that if they double-team me, I can pass to him with confidence that he’ll score. If they play behind his pick, I’ll be open. If they hesitate, we’ll be able to read the situation and properly respond. We’ve reached a point in today’s game where too many guys don’t understand this. They may already be millionaires, but they think the way to make a name for themselves—to get the bigger contract, the shoe commercial, the endorsement gold—is through stats. And the way to get stats, they figure, is to hog the ball and play for themselves. The truth is, if the game’s played correctly, by guys who understand how to play, everyone’s stats are going to be better, and the team is going to win.

  Prior to the 1964 season, I had routinely been in the top three in every statistical category, other than rebounding and blocked shots. But my performance that season was something else. I averaged 31.4 points a game, 11.4 assists, and 9.9 rebounds—missing another triple-double season by what amounts to less than a rebound a game. I also led the league in free-throw percentage and was among the leaders in minutes played. It was without a doubt my best season as a pro, and a huge part of that had to do with the guys I was out there with. Jerry Lucas topped the league in field-goal percentage, was fourth in rebounding, and averaged eighteen points a game, placing him fifteenth best in the league and good enough to net him rookie-of-the-year honors. Wayne Embry averaged just under eighteen points a game. Jack Twyman popped in fifteen and a half a clip. We were the highest-scoring team in the league, led the NBA in total points, points per game, field-goal percentage, and assists. We were second in rebounding. Third in free-throw percentage.

  I wish I could say that it was good enough to get us a title, that we were able to keep winning at the torrid pace we set in February. But during the final month of the season, we came back to earth. Without any legitimate bench help to relieve our forwards, we just didn’t have the legs to maintain the breakneck, high-speed offense. Though we still had high moments (mine included a game where San Francisco’s coach Alex Hannum tried to guard me with six-foot-ten Wayne Hightower), our big men ground down. We finished the regular season with a 55–25 record, the second-best record in the league, and ended up four games behind Boston in the Eastern Division. It was the best record in Royals’ history. We set a new home-attendance record and made it to the conference finals for the second consecutive season. But in the end, without Boozer, we had no answers for Tommy Heinsohn, and the Celtics took care of us pretty easily in five games, cruising with an average margin of victory of about ten points a game.

  Jerry Lucas has said that he’s thought that Royals team was one of the great teams in NBA history, and he feels it’s a shame we’ll never be considered an elite team because we did not win the title. I’d agree, but with a caveat: It’s a shame we didn’t have a chance to stay together and see if we could win the title.

  Tom Grace disagrees. He’s always claimed, publicly, that Bob Boozer wasn’t playing enough, and the team needed to try and make some sort of move to get over the hump. It was one of Tom Grace’s final big moves while in charge of the team, and he was criticized for years about it. And while I always liked Tom, I have to say, he should have been criticized. It was a bad trade. Cost us the championship. Instead, Boston won their sixth straight.

  Nonetheless, on March 22, 1964, I was awarded the President’s Trophy, the National Basketball Association’s most valuable player award. It was a special honor because other NBA players voted on the award (you couldn’t vote for a guy on your own team). I ended up with sixty of a possible eighty-five first-place votes, and 362 points on the scoring system (a first-place vote got you five points; second, three; third, one). Wilt Chamberlain placed second in the voting with nineteen first-place votes and 215 points. Bill Russell, who’d won the last three years, finished third with eleven firsts and 167 points. My margin of victory was the largest on record at that time.

  I have to say, the whole thing was a complete surprise. I’d been first-team all-NBA for four straight years and was pretty much recognized as the best all-around player in the game, but no matter how well I’d played, I never really thought about getting the MVP. For one thing, I did not think about personal awards—I was a team player. I worried about wins and losses. More significantly, I didn’t worry about the MVP, because it was impossible for anyone other than a center to get consideration for the award. For example, Jerry West never won the MVP. Not only because of the position, I think, but because Bill and Wilt were just too dominant. They were synonymous with the NBA back then, meeting in the NBA finals year after year, going at it in those battles that, even as you watched them being played out live, you just knew were legendary. In many ways, they were the league. And the players’ voting reflects this dominance—nine of the ten MVP awards handed out during the 1960s went to one of them.

  Obviously, I had a great individual season in 1964. Our team was a title contender, even if we fell short. I also had a significant role in the union’s all-star game showdown. So I guess there are decent reasons that Bill and Wilt didn’t have a clean sweep.

  At the same time, losing a chance at the title ate at me.

  That season represented a crux in my professional life in many ways, for it was a year of apexes, prophetic moments, and telling incidents. The best team in Cincinnati Royals’ history was one that lost a chance at the championship because of our front office’s bungles. The most valuable player of both the league and the all-star game moved to the forefront of the struggle for players’ rights. Over time that involvement would result in a major lawsuit filed against the league. It would also lead to my testimony before the United States Senate and result in previously unknown legal freedoms for basketball players and unparalleled changes in the business of basketball. At the same time, inside the league’s corridors of power, my union position would get me labeled as a malcontent and a troublemaker by the owners—and this label would cost me plenty. It would subtract years off my career.

  Meanwhile, the NBA was starting, slowly, to catch on with the public. In 1965, a decent television deal finally got signed. ABC agreed to broadcast games on a weekly basis for six hundred thousand dollars a year, with the fee jumping to a million a season if the relationship went on for the contract’s full five years. By highlighting big-city teams such as New York and Boston and stars like Wilt and Earl Monroe and Jerry West (a forerunner of a strategy that served NBC and Michael Jordan so well during the 1990s), the games started to generate interest—the ratings were respectable.

  The league expanded to twelve teams in 1966. The next year, in 1967, another league, the American Basketball Association (ABA), announced itself with an expensive booze-filled press conference, and a red, white, and blue basketball. George Mikan, who ran the conference and became the new league’s president, brought a certain amount of credibility with him because of his Hall of Fame career (he was the game’s first towering center) and because of his business acumen. The ABA ran for a raucous, turbulent ten years and transformed the game of basketball in all sorts of ways.

  When it started, the ABA was perceived as a rogue, outlaw league, with a wild, freelancing, playground
style of game (they could only manage to sign guards and had few quality big men) and that colorful, twirling basketball (someone once said it should be on a seal’s nose). Because the ABA did not have a television contract, they were dependent on ticket sales to stay in business. Their franchises tried everything and anything to get people in the stands. They introduced the three-point basket to the game, the dunk contest, and all-star weekend extravaganzas. Where the NBA was seen as a walk-it-up, pound-the-ball-inside game, the ABA was loose, flying, and freewheeling—all playground moves and three-point bombs. Teams may have folded, moved, or changed ownership constantly, but their front offices also set new standards in promotional creativity: giving out posters at games and thousands (if not millions) of red, white, and blue basketballs to children. They also delved into the realm of surreal and bizarre promotions. The Miami Floridians were the first to dress up pretty dancers in tight uniforms and have them perform dance routines, the Indiana Pacers had a cow-milking contest during one of their halftimes, and the New York Nets actually tried a Gerbil Night. The first five hundred fans received a free rodent.

  The ABA came out of the gate aggressively. They stole the flashy young star, Rick Barry, from the San Francisco Warriors. They broke with all established protocols, signing Spencer Haywood while he was still an underclassman. Julius Erving went to the unheralded University of Massachusetts, so few knew just what an important and charismatic star he would become. But when the ABA signed him after his sophomore season, the league found a savior. Artis Gilmore soon joined Julius, along with skywalking David Thompson and high school phenom Moses Malone. Because they needed quality players, the ABA also took on Doug Moe, Connie Hawkins, and Roger Brown—players whose alleged connection with a point-shaving scandal resulted in being (wrongly) banned from the NBA.