The Big O

by Oscar P Robertson

  The ABA wasn’t entirely made up of stars—not even close. For all their coups and major signings, they also had to scramble to fill out rosters, and that resulted in a lot of eccentrics and way-outs, like Marvin “Bad News” Barnes, James “Fly” Williams, Art Heyman, and Wendell Ladner. A combination of three-ring circus and publicity magnet, the league seemed to make news every day, every week, including multimillion-dollar contracts, one after another. It did not matter if a contract announced at fifty thousand dollars a season actually paid only five thousand dollars of it that year. The announcement was what mattered to the ABA and the newspapers.

  A lot of the ABA’s bluster was smoke and mirrors. Their league did not have much money. Teams were constantly rolling the turnstile figures ahead. And if you took a microscope to their agreements, you saw that the big contracts were phantoms. Let’s say a guy signed a million-dollar contract. He’s going to play eight years and be paid a million bucks. Do the math and that comes out to $125,000 a season. But wait. In fine print, the contract states that $80,000 of each year’s salary is deferred. So really, our supposed millionaire is only receiving $45,000 annually. That’s for each season, for eight years—during which time, you can bet that other players salaries will have jumped ahead, inflation will have come into play, and there will have been a cost-of-living increase. But he’s signed and sealed; his money is set. Once he completes his eight seasons, incremental, regular payments will begin. But even then, depending on the terms, the bulk of a player’s contract might be strung out over as many as twenty-five years. One guy, Joe Caldwell, jumped to the ABA, played for five years in the league, and was in court fighting about his contract well into the 1980s.

  Having said this, the ABA gave guys a choice. Until they came along, if you wanted to play professional basketball, the NBA was the only serious game in town. If the NBA had been fair in the way they ran their business, that would have been one thing. But NBA contracts had a clause known as the reserve clause that effectively bound a player to a team for life. The only way a player could leave was if he was traded; when a contract was up, the only team he could negotiate with was the team that held his contract. If your team presented you with a ridiculously low new contract, there wasn’t much you could do about it. Even if you were one of the best players in the game, your hands were tied. The salaries weren’t so high that you could afford to miss a year. So long as you wanted to play professionally and also eat, you had to make a deal.

  Such was the case in 1965. My original contract had ended. At this point, I’d been first-team all-pro for five straight years and won the MVP award. I visited with Jake Brown, talked with him about how things were going, and figured out a basic outline for what I wanted. J. W. had done my first contract with the Royals, and we always wrote my contracts. But aside from that first deal, I’d sat down with management and handled my own negotiations. Tom Grace, who I’d never had any problems with in negotiations, was out as the Royals vice president. Instead, about three weeks before the season started, I sat down with general manager Pepper Wilson.

  I asked for a ten-thousand-dollar raise.

  Royals management countered with an insultingly small offer, for basically the same amount of money I’d played for the previous season. Take it or leave it, I was told.

  At the time, Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell were the two highest-paid players in the game—Wilt had signed a contract for one hundred thousand dollars; Bill Russell, befitting their rivalry, for a single dollar more. I wasn’t seeking that kind of money. Rather, I based what I asked for on what I thought I contributed, what I thought my value was to the team. When we sat down to negotiate, Pepper told me that my income compared to the Royals’ gate was high. I answered right back that Wilt played on a team that wasn’t much more solvent than the Royals, and he managed to get paid top dollar. I said I wasn’t asking for his salary level; I’d taken into consideration the team’s overhead when I made my request. At the same time, I told management, I am in the same position as the guys who owned the team. Running a team is a business for them. Well, my business is playing. I’d performed as well as any player ever had, and the team needed to pay me accordingly. If they couldn’t, then they shouldn’t be in business.

  I was told the matter wasn’t up for negotiation.

  If there was another league (this was a couple of years before the ABA formed), I might have jumped to it as soon as I left the office. Instead, I did what I could do, which was to hold out. I didn’t call them. They didn’t call me. It was a cold war, and it stretched for days. For a week. Two. “Listen,” one anonymous Royal told Sports Illustrated, “they can cut me twenty-five percent and give it to Oscar if it means bringing him back. That’s how important he is to us.” It’s probably a good thing that the guy did not identify himself or repeat that sentence around the front office. They might have done it.

  I called one of the reporters I knew in New York and said I wanted to be traded.

  The way the Royals front office dealt with negotiations angered me more than their ridiculous contract offer. At this point in my career, I said, I deserved respect, not ultimatums. They had refused to negotiate. They’d come to the table with a crazy, ridiculously low offer and refused to budge. They were the ones putting pressure on me. If I want to make any deal at all, if I want to play ball and help the team, now I’m the one who has to cave. On top of this, management started leaking untruths in the press, inflating my demands and publishing my salary. In one statement, management would say it was unethical to discuss contract negotiations in the press. In the next sentence, the same general manager would discuss the details of my existing contract.

  Look, if you ask any of my friends, they’ll be more than happy to tell you how frugal I am. Believe me, they’ll pile on the stories. Art Hull has always said that I was the tightest guy with a buck that he’d ever seen. He once watched me spend an hour looking around for a nickel that I dropped on the carpet. He loved telling and retelling that story, but always was quick to add, “On the other hand, Oscar’s generous to a fault with his time, which is often much more valuable. If I asked Oscar to come over to the house and help me move out a piano, he’d be over and spend hours tugging and bending and hauling, maybe risking a shoulder injury.”

  I wasn’t going to be bullied or blackmailed by the Royals management. I told the press I was negotiating a barnstorming tour. I said I was going to play locally, out on the West Coast, maybe in Florida. It wasn’t true, but the Globetrotters were still around so there had to be some money to be made in touring. Why not find out?

  “They don’t seem to want me to play,” I told reporters. “They don’t seem to care. Maybe they figure they will penalize me. Maybe that’s their strategy.”

  Five days before the season opened, I came to contract terms with management. I signed for about seventy thousand dollars, various bonuses based on the gate, and the use of a car.

  Two seasons later, we went through the entire standoff again.

  That year I ended up missing training camp and the entire exhibition season. The press in Cincinnati started to heap abuse on me. Greedy was the word they chose.

  When I sat down with Pepper Wilson that year, I said, “If I am greedy, I learned from you.”

  Management just looked at me. What could they possibly say? Who is greedier—the guy who wants to get paid what he is worth, or the team that indentures its players through perpetually unfair and rigged contracts and refuses to pay those players what they are worth?

  The truth is, management in Cincinnati wasn’t very effective. Before I ever came into the league, they had a chance to draft Bill Russell, and they chose not to do it. They whiffed on Willis Reed. They had the number one draft picks for two straight years—Bob Boozer and Jerry Lucas. Those guys signed with other leagues; hell, the only reason they ever came to the Royals and made us a decent team was because the ABL folded and they had nowhere else to go. In 1967, when the ABA first formed, the first pick of their draft
was a six-foot-nine forward named Mel Daniels. Mel ended up being one of the best players in the ABA. I believe he won their MVP award in the league’s second year, and I know that his jersey was among the first to be retired by the Indiana Pacers. Well, guess what team had Mel’s NBA rights? Guess what team he abandoned so he could join a league that, at that point, did not even exist?

  Reporters always called Pepper Wilson one of the most popular general managers in the league. Pepper was a nice man, but maybe all the other general managers loved him so much because he couldn’t make a good draft pick, couldn’t swing any shrewd trades. If I gave you a list of the players Cincinnati drafted while I was with them, you’d have to be a hard-core basketball fan to recognize any of them.

  By contrast, the Celtics would reload and restock. Tom Heinsohn’s gone? Here comes Don Nelson. Sam Jones is retiring? Here comes John Havlicek. Here comes Jo Jo White. Some of it was luck. One year Tom Wood was sitting next to Red Auerbach at a draft meeting in New York. Boston had won the title again, so naturally they had the bottom choice. Auerbach turned to Wood and said, “What am I going to do? This is a pretty frail group left. . . . There’s some kid from Ohio State here with a funny name—Havlicek—what do you hear about him?”

  Wood told him, “All I know is that our scout claims he’s a better ballplayer than Lucas, but we’ve already got Lucas. So it doesn’t make any difference.”

  “Well,” says Auerbach, “he’s only six four and awfully short for the pros. I guess I’ve got no other choice. What the hell. I’ll take him.”

  So help me, that’s how the Celtics stumbled onto Havlicek.

  If you look at professional basketball and how a team builds a winning franchise, it’s pretty simple. You have to restock your team with good draft picks, and you have to make key trades. The teams that don’t, don’t win. Flatly put, we could not do it. After we traded Bob Boozer, we traded other key players. We got rid of Tom Hawkins. Fought with Happy Hairston. Management kept bringing in guards to replace me when we needed forwards and centers. We got rid of one forward, Bob Love, because he had a speech impediment. The team thought he was dumb, so they traded him to Chicago. Of course, he became a superstar there. We had one pick, Larry Chaney, from Arkansas, who wasn’t married. But we drafted Dave Zollner, who was married. Larry Chaney was a far better player, but we kept Dave, because he was white and was married. That’s how the Cincinnati Royals did things. We played almost a third of our regular-season home games in Cleveland because Lou Jacobs owned the arena there and wanted to sell hot dogs in Cleveland. That’s what mattered to our ownership.

  Our front office wanted it both ways. On the one hand, you weren’t going to receive proper medical attention if it meant missing a game. On the other hand, when it came time to negotiate a contract, they were more than happy tell you that your numbers were down. Clearly, if you’re playing injured, of course your numbers are going to be down.

  In the end, what the Royals wanted was that you help the team win, but always under their terms. They wanted you to do well, but not too well.

  If you want to number-crunch it, there can be no doubt of what I accomplished. Over the course of my first five seasons in the league, I had one triple-double season (1962) and was a fraction away from it a second time (1964). If you consider my totals for all five of those seasons, you’ll find that for five years of basketball, I actually averaged a triple-double—it comes out to 30.3 points, 10.6 rebounds, and 10.4 assists. After I’d averaged a triple-double for five seasons, the Royals hadn’t wanted to give me a ten-thousand-dollar raise. For my first six seasons, I still averaged a triple-double—but I had a holdout that season as well. Check the numbers through my first eight seasons, and I’m only a fraction away. Eight seasons.

  As for the Cincinnati Royals’ records: In the 1965 season, we finished the year with a 48–32 record. In the 1967 season, we slipped to 39–42. The next season, when I missed training camp, immediately pulled a hamstring, and missed some games early, we were 39–43.

  It’s not easy to show up at training camp each season and know in the back of your mind that you are on a team that is only good enough to go to the second round of the playoffs. The competitor inside of you thinks that you are going to get it done this season—this is the year you will play for the title. Every player in sports thinks that way. But to win you also have to have good management. If they don’t acquire the right players or make the right trade at the right time, you won’t win championships.

  If you are coaching a track team and considering a runner who runs a hundred meters in twelve flat, you can’t take him. He’s not going to win. When I was with the Cincinnati Royals, our front office loved twelve-second sprinters. I felt I was playing at the top of my game. I thought I was doing exactly my job, being a professional, all-pro guard. So eventually I thought, Well, if the guys running this team can’t see the forest through the trees, what can I do about it?

  My way of dealing with our mediocrity was to go on with my job, to take care of my own business. After a while, I started to find my own challenges inside the game, personal goals and ways to keep myself focused. Then when the road trips and home games ended, I went back to Eaton Lane, spent time with my wife, played with my kids. I rarely said one word to Yvonne about the Royals. She was busy with our kids and other problems. She still understood my predicament. “He doesn’t voice these things, even to me,” she once told a reporter. “But I have the impression that he’s competing against himself now, even more than against another player or team. Just to see how much better he can be, how he can do something a little differently and still do it well. Just to keep accomplishing and improving.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Sixties Continued

  1963–1968 (Part Two)

  I’M OFTEN ASKED WHAT I THINK of today’s player’s salaries. Well, when I played, I made a top salary. I had to fight for it, but I made it. And as the president of our union, I was fighting for all player’s salaries. After everything we went through, how could I possibly complain about the salaries guys make today? It’s true that today’s average NBA player makes more than two million dollars. It’s also true that guys at the end of the bench have million-dollar, multiyear contracts. And if you ask them, Are you worth it, I’d bet that most of them will answer, Yeah, I am. In years past, players strove to win championships. Now you hear more and more players say, “I got mine”—implying that they don’t care about anyone else, then proving it with extravagant lifestyles. But whether I agree with those guys or not, I’m never going to complain about a player making money. The fact is, the only reason a guy coming off the bench is worth millions of dollars is because some owner out there is willing to pay him.

  Right now, the league is in something of a flux, and finances are a big part of it.

  During the 1990s, David Stern and the NBA rode Michael Jordan’s popularity. But it also utterly aligned itself with corporate boxes and white-collar ticket holders. While there’s no shortage of charismatic young guys who can jump and dunk, nobody has captured the public’s imagination the way Michael did. Nor are there any rivalries like Magic’s Lakers against Bird’s Celtics in the 1980s, or Michael’s Bulls against Isiah Thomas’s Bad Boys. Meanwhile, in its drive to accrue television money and ticket revenues, the league has abandoned free television in favor of cable deals. They’ve priced out most people from seeing a game—except corporate America.

  In the last two years, professional basketball has seen two major trends: one, an influx of European players who coaches and commentators say are extremely well versed in the fundamentals and understand the game; two, the hyping of physically gifted high schoolers who eschew college for a chance at the pros.

  Kids want to dunk and shoot from deep and dribble through their legs a hundred times, and there’s nobody out there who is willing to teach them the right way to play or instill better habits. AAU and high school coaches don’t do it. They’re too worried about getting traveling teams t
ogether and playing in the best invitational meat-markets. College coaches are too busy promoting themselves and signing shoe contracts so that television cameras will capture their genius. Half of the coaches, whether it’s on the high school or college level, are afraid that talented kids will leave if they discipline them. Indeed, so many college programs have such small graduation rates and are so thoroughly corrupt and embroiled in scandals that it’s impossible to argue that kids shouldn’t jump straight to the NBA.

  Watch an NBA game tonight. You’ll see players who can’t make a reverse pivot. Can’t make a crossover dribble. And the NBA’s answer hasn’t been additional coaching for these young guys. Rather, it’s been to welcome top-notch high schoolers with open arms and shoe contracts and their own commercials.

  The best players get to sit on the bench for three years or so, and if they have the work ethic and commitment (like Kobe Bryant or Jermaine O’Neal), they’ll work hard and begin to figure things out for themselves. The rest? A developmental league was started for all the teenagers and college kids who make the leap before they’re ready. But that’s not a real answer, it’s a cosmetic fix. The league’s only a few years old, and already there are complaints that its coaches are like AAU and college coaches—more concerned with winning games and promoting themselves than with helping young players learn the game.

  The result is something akin to Starbucks. Once Starbucks has put one of their coffee shops on every corner in the neighborhood, they go to another neighborhood. Once they’ve got the fifty states covered, they go overseas. Well, now the league’s going overseas for players. Because those guys are being taught the game, for one thing. And then there are the marketing reasons. Why do you think the NBA went overboard welcoming Yao Ming? He’s a good player right now. He’s got potential, sure, but he’s far from great. Even Yao knows this. But the NBA’s thrilled to have an in with China.