The Big O

by Oscar P Robertson

  The problem was that our new playmaker, Norm Van Lier, wasn’t tall enough to see over the guy who guarded him. This not only delayed his passes but also made him susceptible to the pressure of double-teaming. Now, instead of having an all-pro guard for ten straight years running the show, we had problems getting into our offense. Still, we beat the Celtics twice in the first weeks of the season, and our record was 8–6. So I just went out on the court and did my job.

  While all this was happening, a minor drama started to unfold between Bob and his former team. Red Auerbach may have retired as the coach of the Celtics, but now as their general manager, he was just as shrewd. During the preseason, when he’d read that Bob intended to coach and play, Red decided not to release Bob’s name from the retired list. The local papers mentioned this delay as the supposed impetus for our two early wins over the Celtics, but Joe Axelson was the only one angry about the stall. Eventually, the two sides reached an agreement in the form of cash and Bill Dinwiddie. One month into the season, Bob Cousy, age forty-one, completed our youth movement.

  We were in Cleveland playing the Knicks. The Knicks were going for their record-setting eighteenth straight win. With sixteen seconds left, they trailed by five. I fouled out. Bob rose from the bench, put himself in to replace me, and immediately threw the ball away. New York scored, drew a foul, and converted the free throws. Cousy turned it over again. New York ended up winning in overtime. The next time he wanted to play, he brought the wrong uniform. “It took me about eleven minutes of actual playing time to realize it wasn’t going to work,” he later told an interviewer. “I feared I was going to tarnish something that I had accomplished over thirteen years and that I was very proud of.” After thirty-four minutes, spread over seven games, Bob Cousy re-retired as a player.

  For all the hype about the team’s commitment to youth and rebuilding, our veterans were getting the job done. Connie Dierking was our only other dependable scorer. But soon he broke his hand. Johnny Green may have been thirty-six years old, but he was the only guy down low getting any rebounds for us. He was out there so much that his ankle started giving him problems. Not long after that, Herm Gilliam was called to fulfill his reserve commitment with the armed forces. If all three had been available, we still weren’t anything more than an average team. Without them, things started to fall apart. We were a team in flux, a mishmash of veterans and young guys without any cohesion or identity. If I had been handling the ball more, I could have settled things down, found open men, and made sure to feed players when they made it to their sweet spots. As it was, our guys were lost out there. I’d run off a pick and get open and expect to get the ball, and it just wouldn’t happen. Maybe guys couldn’t see me. Maybe they couldn’t get the pass off. I’d been the all-star MVP for the third time the previous season, was putting in twenty-five a night, and could still score almost at will, but as things progressed and we began to slump, I became concerned.

  Whatever my prowess as a scorer might have been, first and foremost I’d always been a playmaker. And we were a team that needed direction. Bob may have been intent on having a team play “his” style of ball, or the Celtics’ style of basketball, or whatever it was, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to use what you’ve got. Concepts and styles are fine, but basketball is basketball. So long as there’s a twenty-four-second clock, there are only so many things you can do on a court. We weren’t getting anything out of our offense. I’d averaged ten assists a game through my career. It seems to me that if your goal as a coach is to have your team play unselfishly, and you’ve got a bunch of green players out there along with a guy who led the league in assists every year—a guy who holds the all-time record for assists—it might help the team to have that guy distribute the ball.

  Something had to be going on.

  Soon I heard a rumor. Every night after the game, Max Jacobs would call from headquarters in Buffalo. Before asking Joe Axelson whether we’d won or lost, he’d want to know the attendance count. Another rumor: the gate receipts were picked up every night, sent to Buffalo, and then money would be sent back to run the team and pay expenses.

  We kept losing. It was hard to stay as focused. Soon a story in The Cincinnati Enquirer intimated that Bob wanted to install a running game that I didn’t fit. We traveled to cities, and various guys told me they’d heard I was on the trading block. One night, we were getting blown out in Philadelphia. With nine and a half minutes left, Wally Anderzunas tapped my shoulder and said he was coming in for me. As I left the floor, the voice over the P.A. said he was coming in for Tom Van Arsdale. When I got home from the road trip, my wife and friends wanted to know what happened in Philadelphia. I had no idea what they were talking about. Turns out, the next day’s Enquirer surmised that I had taken myself out of the game, and the beat reporter had written a story about it without talking to me. Stories soon followed about the bad feelings between the coach and me.

  One day after practice, Connie Dierking came up to me. “Why don’t you just go to Cousy and talk to him?”

  Over the years a lot of people have asked me the same thing.

  In life, sometimes you get into a situation where you let fate decide your course of action. I hadn’t done anything to create this situation. So I figured why should I try to solve something I had no control over?

  Kissing someone’s ass in a situation like that isn’t going to solve anything. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I did that.

  I knew that I didn’t have any role in the team Cousy wanted. I could see that he had his own plans in mind, and nothing I could say or do was going to change that.

  “Let me tell you something, Connie,” I answered. “I have done nothing to Bob Cousy. I hardly know Bob Cousy. But you know what? He is going to get rid of you too.”

  And he did. A few weeks later, Connie was shipped out to the 76ers. When the all-star break came, I was the only starter left from last year’s team. The newest incarnation of the Cincinnati Royals had dropped its sixth straight game and fallen to last place. I visited New York. Milt Gross called. He asked about friction and the team and the state of things. I chose my words carefully and said nothing more damning than, “It’s an impossible situation.” Milt brought up the Philadelphia game. “How can I take myself out of the game?” I replied. “The kid told me he was coming in for me, but maybe it would have been better if I had taken myself out.” Milt asked if I thought I’d be traded. “I’d be foolish to think the possibility of being traded wouldn’t come up,” I answered. “I know the management’s talked about it. I don’t necessarily want to be traded, but if it happens, it is something I would have to live with.”

  I told Milt, “The way I see it is Cousy is trying to build for the future. He wants young players. I suppose at thirty-one he doesn’t consider me a young player. I don’t like it.”

  “There are two mammoth egos involved,” wrote Milt in the next day’s New York Post. “Oscar was a spectacular player but never played on a winner. Cousy was a spectacular player and played on so many winners with the Celtics that what is happening with the Royals must be galling to him.” The column concluded:

  The theory consequently is being batted back and forth like rebounds under the board on which nobody can get a firm grasp. Is Cousy trying to mold his personnel to his Celtic concept or mold himself to his players?

  “We don’t have a guy in the middle,” says Oz.

  Sometimes it seems they don’t even have Robertson.

  In a town like Cincinnati, only a few games were broadcast on television, radio reception depended on anything from the formation of the clouds to the position of your antenna, and the local evening news might show two baskets in a fifteen-second report. If you wanted information about the Cincinnati Royals, you read the newspapers. The Cincinnati Post was a small-circulation paper that relied on wire services for the bulk of its national and feature coverage. While it sent reporters to all home games and practices, the Post did not have the budget to send a report
er traveling with the team. As a result, The Cincinnati Enquirer was the sole source of consistent information and the paper of record—the main resource for fans who couldn’t see or hear games for themselves, as well as for papers outside Cincinnati who picked up the Enquirer’s stories whenever the Royals made larger news.

  Whenever I’ve talked to sportswriters or any other reporters or journalists, all I’ve asked is that they be fair in how they cover me. If you see something, write what happened. I may not like what you write, but if that’s what happened, I won’t complain. Along these lines, I’ve always felt that if a reporter wants to know about something, he should come to me and ask. I’ll answer any question. Again, it may not be the answer the reporter wants. But as long as he prints what happened and asks me about it, things will be fine. But the following piece of biased journalism from the January 26, 1970, issue of The Cincinnati Enquirer shows why racial problems and hatred have long dogged Cincinnati.

  Robertson, Green Just Too Tough for Bullets, 129–122

  With all the sanitation workers out on strike in Cincinnati, ageless Johnny Green looks like the best garbage man in town. And if Johnny is cleaning up in the back of the truck, Oscar Robertson has to be up front at the wheel.

  Green and Robertson, the slightly elderly Frick and Frack of the Cincinnati Royals, brought a touch of vaudeville to the Cincinnati Gardens Sunday. And when it was over, the Baltimore Bullets walked off stage looking like rotten tomatoes.

  Robertson scored 41 points and passed off for 15 assists, and Green came up with 19 points underneath the basket and grabbed 12 rebounds. Not bad for a 36-year-old playing only 32 minutes with his fifth club in the last five years.

  I understand that beat reporters have their deadlines to meet. I appreciate that you might get tired of covering a team night after night after night and look for ways to be creative, and work current events like a union strike into your stories and metaphors. Having acknowledged this, I ask the following:

  If Johnny Green and I had been white, would we have been compared to Frick and Frack—would that have been used to describe us? Sure, it might be a fairly common way of referring to two people who are closely connected in some way, friends or whatnot. But the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang cites the phrase as coming from Black English, and advises any user that, “Some care may be needed in using the phrase, as it is said also to be a Black American English slang term for the testicles.” Whether the paper was consciously aware of the uses and roots of a term like Frick and Frack is something of a moot point. It is a term with racist overtones, as is the rest of the story. Moreover, these biases, whether intentional or not, are so deeply ingrained into the structures of power that to this day, I think, society is still trying to deal with them.

  On January 28, 1970, I arrived at the gate of the Cincinnati Gardens on my way to play the Bucks. The parking attendant showed me an ad for a grocery store that was in the paper that day. The ad showed the entire Cincinnati Royals lined up in the store. Except for me. “What’s the matter, Oscar, aren’t you on the Royals?”

  Two days later, we were in Boston and lost to the Celtics. I pulled a muscle in my groin and couldn’t run and had to sit out the last six minutes of the game. On my way to the locker room afterwards, I had to crouch just to walk without wincing. It took me a while to shower and get dressed, and I was finishing up when a reporter approached. How did I feel about the trade, he wanted to know.

  He was told to leave. Even back then it was strange to hear you were traded from a reporter instead of your front office. I needed to make a call. Jake Brown said that, yes, it was true. The Royals had made a deal with Baltimore, bringing in Gus Johnson—a powerful forward with tremendous leaping ability, who once shattered a backboard during a game. Gus was my age, and he made about fifty thousand dollars less than I did. But there was a reason for that. His knees were all messed up, and his body wasn’t going to last much longer. I knew they didn’t care about Gus. He was toward the end of his usefulness, and eventually they would unload him. They just wanted me out of Cincinnati.

  I figured if that’s what they wanted, then it was time for me to leave. But I was going to go on my terms. J. W. and I talked for a while. The next morning, Bob called me at home.

  “Babe, I know you’ve been unhappy with the team, so we’ve traded you for Gus Johnson.” Isn’t this a bitch. From all that has been written and said about me, he knows that I am not happy with the Royals.

  “Yeah. I heard. You better come meet me at J. W.’s office.”

  “What? Why?”

  “It’s not so cut and dried.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’ll discuss it with Jake.”

  A few hours later, Bob Cousy, Bro Lindhorst, and Joe Axelson were scattered on the couches and chairs of J. W.’s office. J. W. asked them the terms of the trade. Joe answered: “Straight out for Gus Johnson, no other consideration.”

  “Well,” J. W. smiled. “Unfortunately, Oscar doesn’t want to go to Baltimore. And I guess you haven’t read his contract lately. Oscar has the right of veto over any trade.”

  It was like a bomb exploded in there. Cousy, Axelson, and Lindhorst stared at each other. Then Bob met my eyes, squinting, a question in his eyes, as if he couldn’t quite comprehend what he just heard.

  They all began sputtering. “Oh, but he’ll like it in Baltimore—and they’ll pay a lot more money.” “I thought you’d jump at the opportunity.” “We’re doing you a favor, sending you to a contender.”

  J. W. cut them off, addressing Lindhorst. “Would you go to Baltimore for fifty thousand dollars, Bro?”

  That quieted them down. J. W. took control of the room, first telling the Royals front office that we didn’t want to leave any avenue unexplored. Then he called Baltimore and laid out our terms, pulling a figure out of the air—three years for seven hundred thousand dollars, more than twice my salary with the Royals.

  There was a pause on the other end of the line, and then Baltimore’s front office said they would get back to us.

  Cousy, Axelson, and Lindhorst looked like they were in shock. Axelson asked J. W. what they should do next.

  “Well, you’ve already leaked that you’ve traded him,” J. W. said. “So you better trade him. We’ll get in touch with a few clubs and tell you where Oscar wants to go.”

  Axelson threw up his hands. “If he has a veto,” he bellowed, “we can make a trade and still have to come back to you for approval.”

  My lawyer smiled again. “That’s right. But we’ll cooperate. We’ll tell you the places he’s willing to go, and you can go from there.”

  It really was an unbelievable scene. The three of them slinked out of there, shoulders low, heads down at their shoes. Once they were gone and everything had died down, J. W. asked me what my criteria were and where my first choice would be.

  I thought about it before answering. “I need to think it over and talk to my wife.”

  What followed was a spectacle that was half circus, half media war. For the next two weeks, the Enquirer ran daily stories about my trade, or lack thereof, about my ingratitude, my selfishness, my fake injury.

  In my opinion, the Enquirer writers were the mouthpiece for the Royals management’s propaganda. Players from other teams were asked loaded questions like, “Don’t you think the Royals play better without Oscar?” Once, when a reporter intimated that I was faking an injury, Wilt responded, “Could you ask an intellectually honest question, please?” Finally, the newspaper completely abandoned commenting on my game and started attacking me as a person: “Bob Cousy had done everything possible to placate the Big O, whose mood is always the same, bitter. For years, Oscar privately has scorned the Royals management; he has ridiculed Cincinnati and its fans, he has knocked other players, both on his team and on others; he has never been willing to pay a compliment. He is, has been, and probably will grow old a bitter man, convinced that it all is a plot.” Thanks largely to the newspaper
and Bob Cousy, I would never play for the Royals again.

  Meanwhile, the team went from a steady state of decline into a dull plummet. The Royals switchboard was flooded with calls, and a few old friends defended me in print, asking, “Why do they knock Oscar?” Jerry West, in his own low-key way, seconded the motion. Following the Lakers easy win over us he said, “I would say they might have missed Oscar just a tiny bit, just a tiny bit.” Then he turned serious. “He’s the guy who gives them direction. With a player like him, you just can’t afford to take him out of there. Honestly, it’s hard for me to imagine them trading a player of his caliber, because they don’t come along every day. Personally, he is the best basketball player I have ever seen. I’m sure there are other reasons behind it.”

  On February 4, 1970, The Cincinnati Enquirer ran this story: