The Big O

by Oscar P Robertson

  There are a lot of fine, just, and large-hearted people of every race and color in Cincinnati. The fans in Cincinnati were classy and supportive to me. Having said this, the city has always been known as a politically and socially conservative one, and you can see the ramifications of this conservatism in all sorts of ways. Look at the history of professional sports here. Every major black star that played in this city ended up getting traded. Frank Robinson is the first and best example.

  One of the best-hitting outfielders who ever lived, Frank played in Cincinnati in the late 1950s and early 1960s and won the National League most valuable player award in 1961. Frank was an outspoken guy, a civil rights advocate who had many threats made on his life. In 1965, Reds general manager Bill DeWitt traded Robinson to the Orioles with outfield prospect Dick Simpson in exchange for pitchers Milt Pappas and Jack Baldschun. DeWitt defended the deal by calling Robinson “an old thirty.” Well, the next season, Frank was the first Triple Crown winner since Mickey Mantle—leading the American League with 49 HR, 122 RBI, a .316 batting average, a .637 slugging percentage, and 122 runs. Frank was named the American League’s most valuable player that season, which made him the first man in baseball history to win the award in both the National and American Leagues. How’s that for an “old thirty”? It was the worst trade in Reds history.

  But that was just the beginning with the Reds. Look at every talented black player the Reds have ever had, like Vada Pinson and Bobby Tolan. Something’s always wrong with them. Take a look at the great Big Red Machine that won two World Series and dominated the mid-1970s. Tony Perez at first base, Joe Morgan at second, Dave Concepcion at short, George Foster in left field, Cesar Geronimo in center, and Ken Griffey in right. The only players who were written or talked about were Pete Rose and Johnny Bench. The papers hardly ever mentioned the rest of the team. Understand, I know Johnny Bench. I like Johnny Bench; he is a great player. And I know Pete Rose. A great player. I am not criticizing them. I am using this as an example to explain the mindset of this city, this area.

  When Johnny Bench was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, the city had a rally. I think Johnny was voted in unanimously—as he should have been—and the city rallied behind him, which they should have. A street was named for Pete Rose. When Frank Robinson went in, I don’t think the city even sent a representative. Finally, Frank came back to Cincinnati for a small ceremony. But the man played most of his career here.

  The Royals always had a hard time in Cincinnati. One thing people always said was that our fan base was as much from downstate Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia, as from the city. They argued that in the dead of winter, people didn’t want to deal with the ice and fog and sleet to see the Royals play. They noted that for all the Ohio players (short list: me, Twyman, Embry, Adrian Smith, Jerry Lucas, George Wilson, Arlen Bockhorn, Tom Thacker), the Royals simply never caught on here, and there was no way of changing this.

  They also said that Cincinnati fans were unbelievably stingy—the joke was that vendors at Crosley Field had to pry the money for peanuts and popcorn out of the hands of each Reds fan. People pointed to the Bengals, saying that when the team first started playing here, even though interest was off the charts, the team could not sell out a 28,000-seat stadium.

  These excuses are ridiculous. When the Royals were a title contender, we drew. If our front office had put a first-rate team out there and promoted us the right way, people would have come. Instead—and you have this in a lot of Midwestern cities—you have front offices that want to get in the big game but don’t want to pay the cost. We didn’t get the right players and did not pay them enough, and our teams weren’t successful, and that’s why fans did not come. When it comes time to pay a player, management justifies lower salaries by saying, “Well, this is Cincinnati. It costs less to live here and is a good place to live.” Well, Boston is a good place to live too. So is Los Angeles. So is Houston. And New York. And New Orleans.

  When I played for the Royals, there were some 162,000 blacks in the metropolitan Cincinnati area. I doubt if more than ten or twenty ever held Royal season tickets. Austin Tillotson once went to a bunch of games and counted the crowd. Over the course of weeks’ worth of home games, he counted the number of black fans on two hands. That’s inexcusable. But it’s also typical. If management had cared about getting black fans interested in the team, the fact is, they would have done it.

  However, if the economics of the city are so out of whack that black men can’t get jobs and feed their families, then surely these men don’t have the money to take their kids to see a professional basketball game. It doesn’t matter if the tickets are the cheapest in the league; if you don’t have money, you still can’t pay for a cheap seat.

  That’s a much larger issue.

  What I am talking about here is racism on an institutional level, and that poisons us all. It comes from the people who own banks, which refuse to give black small-businessmen loans. It comes from the country clubs that won’t let blacks be members unless they are famous, and even then uses them as tokens. It comes from corporations that refuse to hire minority executives for their highest positions, yet rely on minorities for their revenue and rank and file. And, of course, it comes from the newspapers and media outlets that are selective in who they hire and how they gather information. It comes from the agendas of the news editors, journalists, and broadcasters. These things could change if the organizations and the people who ran them wanted change. The question is, do they?

  In 1967, Jack McMahon was fired as coach. His replacement, Ed Jucker, had coached the University of Cincinnati to NCAA titles in 1961 and 1962. Ed Jucker was a college coach at heart, but that rah-rah stuff doesn’t work in the pros. He used to tell us to “go out and make things hurt a little bit.” He regularly forgot our names in the huddle. He once forgot Wilt Chamberlain’s name, instead telling us to “stop the big kid.” He announced that John and Tresvant would be our starting forwards, which would have been fine if they weren’t the same guy. In college, if you make a mistake, the coach gets all over you, and Ed tried that with us. You can do that when you are a fifty-year-old man talking to an eighteen-year-old college kid. Not in the pro game. A good NBA coach says, “Okay, you made a mistake. Let’s not do it again.” Then they move on.

  Before the season started, I had another fight with management about my contract and missed training camp in a protracted holdout. During the first week of the regular season, I pulled my hamstring. The injury flared and receded throughout the year, along with back and groin problems, and for the first time in my professional career, I was in and out of the lineup.

  Wayne Embry and Jack Twyman had moved on, but we still had a decent club. Jerry Lucas and I remained the team’s core. We played a third of our home games in Cleveland that season, others in Omaha, and there were rumors that Jacobs wanted to move the franchise. The team had no local television contract, and if your radio antenna was pointed in the wrong direction, you weren’t going to hear our broadcasts. Midway through the season, Ed Jucker decided that I was taking too much abuse bringing the ball up court after baskets made by the other team, so he had other players handle that duty. But in the process it took the ball out of my hands, hurt our ability to get into our half-court offense with as little wasted motion as possible, and ignored one of the cardinal rules of basketball—playmakers want the ball. If I’m a coach in trouble and I have Michael Jordan, I tell the team I want Michael Jordan to have the basketball. Or Wilt. Or Oscar Robertson. I don’t think Ed understood this. I never got the sense he really understood pro basketball, per se, because during his two-year reign as head coach, he also played our starting five almost exclusively, forgoing our bench entirely, running us into the ground by the middle of January.

  Attendance for our home games fell to an average of 4,100, the worst in the league, and we finished four games below .500—missing the playoffs for the first time since my rookie season. I finished seventh in the league in scor
ing and third in assists. I was on my way toward thirty years old and playing for a team that seemed to be getting further and further from title contention. I was considered the greatest all-around player in history by my peers, but at the same time I was becoming the symbol of everything that had gone wrong with the Royals franchise. Local fans had grown accustomed to my solid style, and I believe they started to take my talent for granted. If I scored thirty points, had ten assists, and eight or nine rebounds, they said, “Ah, well, just another game for him.” If somebody else scored fifteen or twenty points, the headlines would scream how sensational he was. I understood that I was being held to a different standard.

  But now the newspapermen who had never liked me much anyway had their chance. Inaccurate and misleading stories began to appear. Where once I had been praised for my ability to control a ball game and make the right decisions with the ball, now a column was printed claiming that Norm Van Lier said I held the ball too much. Newspapermen circulated stories that Jerry Lucas felt he should have gotten the ball more. John Tresvant and Fred Hetzel believed that they were traded because I controlled the ball too much, though neither was ever quoted directly on the matter.

  A New York writer named Phil Berger was covering the New York Knicks as a beat reporter in 1969 to 1970. In his book, Miracle on 33rd Street: The New York Knickerbockers’ Championship Season, Berger, in a minor passage, wrote, “A writer traveling with Oscar said: ‘Like every time you see a team in the locker there’s always some noise between the guys on the team, “Let’s go out there and give them a game,” and this and that, just something that shows the guys know each other but between Lucas and Oscar there was none.’”

  Of course, the claim that was reprinted the most, and came to be accepted as fact, was that Jerry Lucas and I did not like each other.

  Let’s set the record straight.

  As far as hoarding the ball, my response would be a question for anyone who knows the slightest bit about basketball: Who would you rather have the ball, Oscar Robertson or Norm Van Lier?

  As far as John Tresvant and Fred Hetzel’s alleged complaints: The Royals had traded Bob Boozer, one of my best friends on the team. They’d helped Wayne Embry into retirement. Every time my contract came due, I fought with them tooth and nail for every dime. I was the last person they were going to listen to on player matters.

  As for the book, the only paper that traveled with us was The Cincinnati Enquirer, and even that was sporadic. In 1968, the Enquirer’s sports editor had been promoted from his position as a beat writer. He had covered the Bearcats and Royals for the last ten years. I don’t know if he had been one of the local guys who had fumed because I talked to New York reporters. I don’t know if his problems with me were racial or based on something else, because he also wrote that the black players on our team hung out in our own clique, separately from the white players. (This was when we had three black guys on the team. Two of us roomed together—that’s the clique. If Bob Boozer stopped by the room, I guess we became a gang.) I can definitely say that he was the first person to play up problems between Jerry Lucas and me.

  But the Enquirer’s coverage of me soured well before my last season in Cincinnati. For example, in 1968, the Organization of African States circulated a petition asking people to condemn the Olympics for holding their Summer Games in South Africa, which at the time had a governmental policy of racism and apartheid. Along with senators, statesmen, people of business and culture, I signed the petition. There were hundreds of notable people on this list. Thousands of people altogether. But the story came out like this: “O Voices for Boycott.” Now, I know that for a Cincinnati paper, I stood out as the most prominent local celebrity on the boycott list, but there was no mention in the headline or the story of any of the other people involved in the boycott. There was no mention of what I felt about this boycott. What came across was that I wanted to boycott the Olympics. Period. I’m an Olympic gold medal winner; I don’t come to decisions like this lightly. The day the article came out, I called him and we had words. I told him if he did not print a retraction, I would sue him. From that point on, I never spoke to anyone from the Enquirer.

  And there was no problem between Jerry Lucas and me. Newspapers created this rumor. Sometime around 1966 or 1967, a writer from the Enquirer printed rumors and unattributed, anonymous quotes about a problem. These got picked up and put on the circuit, and became fact of law. The truth is, Jerry was a great player, but he wasn’t a great one-on-one player. He’s said as much: “I’ve never been good with the ball, so there’s never been any sense clearing out a side for me.” And we played together for six seasons and ended up developing a rapport, especially on pick and rolls. During our final season together, 1968–1969, the two of us were healthy for a stretch and had the Royals playing well enough that Frank Deford and Sports Illustrated were speculating about our postseason chances.

  Jerry and I were inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame the same year, and to this very day he remains a good friend. Having said this, the whole time Jerry was with the Royals it was written that I didn’t like him. I remain convinced that the papers did this because I was black and he was white.

  After the 1967 season, for the third time in four years, I found myself at war with the Cincinnati front office. This time the dispute was over the meaning of a clause in my contract. The clause was supposed to pay me a percentage of the gate receipts in addition to my salary. The Royals brass did not feel that way. We could not settle the matter, so once again I did not report to training camp. At this point in my career, I was making around one hundred thousand dollars a season. Considering the team’s weak attendance figures, the issue wasn’t a matter of money, because even if I won, I wasn’t going to be getting a fortune. Rather, I felt the wording dispute was a matter of principle. In the NBA, respect is measured by the figures on a player’s contract, plain and simple. If I broke my leg or fell on my head in the middle of the game, would the league be taking care of me?

  A few days before the 1968 season, I did not think I’d be playing in the league. The Royals, meanwhile, were making calls trying to find an available guard, and Ed Jucker had resigned himself to the idea that the season would start without me.

  Finally, the deadlock broke; the Royals gave me a new three-year contract, which included an incentive clause that rewarded me with higher bonuses based on how far the Royals went in the playoffs. If the Royals did not finish higher than fourth during the regular seasons of any of these three years, I would make a total of just less than four hundred thousand dollars. If they made it to the finals for all three seasons, my salary bumped another fifty grand per year.

  It would be my last contract with the Cincinnati Royals.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Moving On

  1969–1970

  “I’M WILLING TO MAKE a few mistakes—but not too many.” And so Bob Cousy kicked off his first press conference in Cincinnati. Though there were flecks of gray in his trademark crew cut, the new coach of the Cincinnati Royals showed all the optimism and confidence he’d been known for as a ten-time first-team all-star and a five-time NBA champion. Once the highest-paid player in the league, Bob had retired from basketball in 1963, after which he’d grown a bit antsy for the game and had coached Boston College’s basketball program into the NCAA tournament. Always a proud man, Bob had stayed in shape with a regimen of tennis and golf. During summers he ran a basketball camp, and he was more than happy to take to the court and hold his own against any college kids who might challenge him. So when Louis Jacobs’s son Max approached him about coming on as a coach and player, Bob jumped at the six-figure offer.

  A new regime was officially underway in Cincinnati. Max Jacobs was running the team for his dad. Ed Jucker was out. Pepper Wilson got his marching orders and was replaced by Joe Axelson, a guy nobody had ever heard of. Even the radio announcer was replaced. The new management team spared no expense in announcing itself. During the summer, billboards started a
ppearing around town: COUSY IS COMING. The first practices of the season were like photo shoots, with newspapers and magazines running posed pictures of Bob standing, back to the camera, under the basket in his coaching sweater, a big “Cousy” on the back.

  One day while all this hoopla was taking place, I was at my house with a friend, Jimmy Thompson. He’d taught me to do woodwork and was helping me with some remodeling. One of the team’s commercials came on.

  “Hey, Oscar,” Jimmy’s tone was joking, but he didn’t look like he was amused. “You better watch out for Bob Cousy.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Remember that article he wrote that you would be a Royal letdown? Cousy, he don’t care for you.”

  I laughed Jimmy off. I did not know Bob except as a basketball competitor, but we’d always had a wary respect for each other. If there was any rivalry, it was a professional one, and I couldn’t imagine that anything from those days would carry over. Cousy had proved himself as a player, and he’d had some success as a college coach. And we were never going to win under Ed Jucker. I figured it had to be a step forward. Because there was some overlap between our careers, and we were both floor generals, I thought we’d see eye to eye on a lot and would be able to talk basketball and strategy.

  I never imagined that the worst year of my professional life was about to begin.

  Although he was unfailingly polite with the press, Bob’s competitive nature and self-assurance hadn’t been softened by time. Calling everyone “Babe,” Bob announced that he would remake the Royals into a fast, tough, running team, just like the Celtics had been in his heyday. In practice he told returning players we lacked discipline. He threatened guys he thought weren’t working hard: Toe the line or else. Bob decided that Jerry Lucas was slow and out of shape. Four games into the regular season, Jerry was traded to San Francisco. Bob saw something in Adrian Smith he didn’t like; Adrian went packing with Jerry. In exchange for one Hall of Famer and another ten-year veteran, we got Bill Turner and Jim King, two guys who couldn’t crack our starting lineup. I didn’t understand it, but didn’t say anything. Our new starting line featured thirty-six-year-old Johnny Green at forward, thirty-three-year-old Connie Dierking, me and Norman Van Lier at guard, and Tom Van Arsdale at forward. It wasn’t exactly in line with the stated commitment to rebuilding and youth, but I guessed they were going to rebuild in stages. Fine. Then Bob changed things further. Bob wanted Van Lier to handle the ball. Meanwhile, I’d be moving off screens and finishing plays.