The Big O

by Oscar P Robertson

  From the first day of practice, the Bucks were seen as the new Celtic dynasty in the making, with a repeat championship in the future. But there were some minor changes to our team, and none were particularly positive. For one thing, our owner, Wesley Pavalon, was up to his neck in the red ink of a crumbling empire. He became neurotic, jittery, and this has an effect on the franchise, trickling down through management and the coaching staff. On the court, Bob Boozer had retired, and we’d gotten rid of Greg Smith and Dick Cunningham in a trade that hamstrung our ability to defend on the perimeter. And while newcomer Curtis Perry was an athletic power forward, he was a limited offensive player, and he had problems adjusting to Coach Costello’s histrionics. The pressure to repeat, along with the ownership problems, affected Coach Costello, I think, because he started applying the whip more and more in practice, treating thirty-year-old men like they were college freshmen. The team was bitching about it.

  Racial overtones bubbled beneath the city’s breweries and bratwurst halls, and this affected things as well. While Milwaukee may have been a bigger city than Cincinnati, it wasn’t particularly more progressive on the racial front. (In 1977, after he’d left the Bucks for Washington, Bob Dandridge told an interviewer, “Coming to Wisconsin was one of the biggest adjustments of my life. I had never experienced true racism until I came to Wisconsin.”) The tensions came to the forefront with the news that Lew Alcindor had gone to court and changed his name.

  Before his senior season at UCLA, Lew had converted to the Islamic faith. At the time of his conversion, he had been given the new name of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (he’ll be referred to as Kareem from this point on). Though the court filing did nothing more than legally change his name, there was a significant public backlash, just as there had been years earlier, when Cassius Clay had become Muhammad Ali. I think it affected Kareem. He’d never been too keen on the city, and the backlash only furthered his sensitivity. And while it did not matter too much on the court—Kareem would lead the league with 34.8 points a game, as well as 16.6 rebounds, good enough to earn him MVP honors for the second consecutive year—the chill was noticeable in the locker room.

  I was thirty-three years old during the 1972 season, and the Bucks were on their way to a 63–19 record and a second consecutive conference title. But the season was marred by a major injury. In early February, I suffered sciatica. I could not feel my feet, and I missed eighteen games. By the time we met the Warriors in the opening round of the playoffs, I still couldn’t run at full speed. Somehow, I managed to average twenty points, ten rebounds, and eight assists in the first three games of the series.

  We advanced into the conference finals for a highly anticipated rematch against the Los Angeles Lakers. Where last season we had been the record-setting juggernaut and the Los Angeles Lakers had been the walking wounded, now the Lakers were the team at full strength. They had had a record-setting winning streak (thirty-three games—starting with a win over us on November 5, 1971; ending forty-three days later, on January 7, 1972, with a loss to us, on national television). They had the record for most wins in a regular season (sixty-nine, breaking our mark by three games). Hobbled by my injury, I played just seven minutes in game six. Going into that must-win game, we got in foul trouble early, and Coach Costello gambled, keeping both Curtis Perry and Bobby Dandridge in the game early in the second half. Both eventually fouled out. The Lakers beat us 104–100, to take the series four games to two, and Jerry West went on to win his first title.

  The next season was just as frustrating. On October 6, Kareem and Lucius Allen were arrested for suspicion of marijuana possession in Denver. Although they were released on bond and never charged due to lack of evidence, the event was a horrible overture for the regular season. I was playing about forty minutes a night. At least until January 7, I was. I injured my right hamstring at practice and sat out the next four games. We went on the road, and I stayed with the team and kept traveling. During games, I did rehab by jogging underneath the stands. Well, we were in Phoenix and the game got underway, and, lo and behold, they went up fifteen in the first quarter. Soon the trainer was chasing me. “Oscar, you have to go into the game.”

  “What?”

  “Larry wants it.”

  “Man, there’s a reason I’m not playing. I’m hurt.”

  “What can I tell you?”

  So I went out there, aching like a bitch, and dragged myself up and down the floor, and wouldn’t you know it, I ended up breaking a finger in that game. For the next two months I played like that, limping, my thigh wrapped up like a mummy, unable to extend my leg to a certain angle or get it into certain positions.

  With about two months left in the season, the situation went from irritating to downright scary and surreal. Gunmen involved with the Black Muslims movement murdered seven people at a mosque in Washington, D.C. Kareem knew all seven victims and had helped finance the mosque in which they were killed. Speculation was, there was a contract on Kareem’s life as well, and he played the remainder of the regular season and playoffs with armed bodyguards around him. Somehow though, with the constant tension dogging us and the media asking questions, with me hobbled and Kareem distracted and looking over his shoulder, we still were able win sixty games for the third consecutive regular season—becoming the first team in NBA history to do so.

  We met the Golden State Warriors in the opening round of the Western finals again. (The San Francisco team had moved to Oakland the previous season.) But this time Nate Thurmond and the Warrior defense played aggressively, seriously outrebounding us and overplaying all the passing lanes. We blew the Warriors out twice, winning in twenty-point runaways, but lost three games playing catch-up. I was playing well and scoring at will, and if we could start rebounding, I was sure we had a chance to pull out the series. We fell behind early in game five, but had pulled within striking distance with eight minutes left when, all of a sudden, an enormous pain shot into my leg. I was carried to the sideline and was diagnosed with a ruptured Achilles tendon. We lost game five and were soundly trounced in the sixth and deciding game. Once again, our season was over.

  We had been the city’s darlings during our championship season, but sports is a fickle game—yesterday’s headlines carpet today’s birdcages. So it didn’t matter that the best teams of that era—the Bucks, Lakers, Knicks, and Celtics—were among the elite of all time. It didn’t matter that the championship teams from 1970 to 1973 still hold an almost mythic place in the record books and NBA lore. Our successes during the regular season also didn’t matter. The bottom line in professional sports is the championship. And for the second straight season, we hadn’t gotten the job done. And for the second straight season, I’d frequently been on the sidelines, watching.

  On September 8, 1972, the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly officially approved the merger of the American and National Basketball Associations. On the surface, the ruling looked to be a defeat for our union. But even a cursory reading of the opinion found otherwise. For while the committee declared that a merger of the two leagues would not violate antitrust laws, they also decided that the reserve clause was illegal and could not be part of the merger agreement. Along these lines, the Senate subcommittee also announced the preparation of a bill that would strike down the reserve clause and replace it with an option clause, allowing a player to switch to another team a year after the end of his contract without the original team retaining his rights. In addition, the subcommittee ruled that the ABA teams did not have to pay $1.25 million to get into the NBA and that players should all be signed to one-year contracts with an option for a second season. Following that, they’d become free agents.

  Just as importantly, the subcommittee declared that without any verdict or settlement in the Players Association’s lawsuit against the NBA, the injunction preventing the two leagues from merging would stay in place.

  It was a landmark victory. We’d gotten rid of that reserve clause and successfully suspended the merger. Not ev
eryone in the union was pleased with the results of the option clause, but we’d definitely won, giving even more momentum to our lawsuit against the league. After years of being mistreated and taken for granted, our struggle had been validated.

  Almost immediately, club owners returned to the negotiating table. After meeting with Larry, the league signed a bargaining agreement with the union, the first in NBA history. It was a three-year deal, and under its terms, players received a minimum set salary of $20,000. Moreover, beginning at age fifty, former players were to receive an annual pension for each year of service.

  Eight years and eight months after players voted to boycott the all-star game over the pension issue, we got what we wanted.

  Change may have been slow, but it wasn’t impossible. The same month as the labor settlement, my old roomie, Wayne Embry, was promoted to become the general manager of the Milwaukee Bucks. Wayne became first African-American in professional sports to hold such a title. It was another unbelievable step, a sign of how far things had come—one that even now is too rarely taken. But it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy.

  Still, history would show that professional basketball was entering a difficult period. Wilt retired at the end of the 1973 season, signaling the end of an era. And while the American Basketball Association had some of the most exciting players in the game in Julius Erving, David Thompson, Artis Gilmore, George McGinnis, and George Gervin, the ownership did not have the financial strength to sustain their league as a viable rival league to the NBA. Except for a few solid franchises like the Indiana Pacers and Denver Nuggets, the great majority of their clubs was relying on the hope of a merger in lieu of self-sufficiency.

  In order to generate interest in a merger, interleague exhibition games started. While the NBA dominated the early meetings, by the mid-1970s, the wins had evened out. The general public remained unmoved. Television ratings for basketball had been slumping for some time. ABC’s executives were unhappy with all sorts of things—the NBA’s recent expansions, the glut of basketball, and the changing face of the game. Memos circulated that the game was becoming “too black.” When the NBA’s contract came up in 1973, ABC refused to meet its terms, and the league switched networks, joining CBS. Executives at ABC countered with a slap in the face, a low-budget show called “The Superstars,” where athletes and stars competed against each other in outdoor events, such as swimming and the obstacle course. The slap became a sting over the course of the next few years. The NBA Game of the Week routinely got clobbered in the ratings by infamous spectacles, not the least of which was the sight of Joe Frazier needing help to reach shore while competing in a swim contest.

  As far as my own career was concerned, there was, at first, a similar floundering.

  My three-year contract with Milwaukee had ended with the loss to Golden State, and when I told a newspaper reporter that I had to assess things before making any decisions about my future, speculation began that I might retire. The reality was that I just wanted to think about what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to play another season, and Wayne Embry had already indicated that he wanted me to come back.

  If I was going to have one final run, I wanted to go out at my best, and I spent that off-season rehabilitating my body, watching my diet, and working out. By the time training camp came around, I weighed a trim 217 pounds. But even as we started negotiating the terms of a new contract, I told Embry that pretty soon he was going to have to start looking for another guard.

  “Don’t say that now,” he told me.

  “Wayne, I am serious.” I said.

  We’d known each other for a long time. This wasn’t management and player giving each other smooth talk. “Between you and me,” I said, “I’m hanging it up.”

  Soon we’d reached an agreement on a one-year contract for $250,000; when we announced the deal to the press, I made sure to say I didn’t have the patience to coach, never wanted to coach, and anything else that I thought might bury the worries in Larry Costello’s head. (Larry needn’t have worried, black athletes weren’t getting too many opportunities to coach back then.) I also said that this would definitively be my final season in the National Basketball Association. For his part, Larry told reporters that if I did not play more than thirty minutes a game, my body wouldn’t run down. “Thirty minutes a game is all we need from Oscar. We want to run all the time, and with four experienced guards, we should be able to do it.”

  With Kareem, Bob Dandridge, and myself, we had a solid core. Lucius Allen had come into his own as a starter. He became athletic enough to run the wing and score on the fast break, solid enough a ball-handler to take pressure off me in the backcourt, and good enough as an outside shooter to make you pay for ignoring him. Jon McGlocklin could nail a jumper at any opportunity, and Cornell Warner and Curtis Perry contributed ruggedness and athleticism, respectively, in the frontcourt. We also picked up Ron “Fritz” Williams, the prototypical hustler who could not shoot at all, and a twenty-three-year-old, six-foot-seven forward from the ABA named Mickey Davis. While I was concerned about our ability to rebound, as long as the core took care of business, I thought we had a chance to compete for another title.

  We came out blazing in the regular season, winning fourteen of our first fifteen games, including a run of thirteen straight. After I scored thirty-four in an early-season showdown against the Bullets, my old nemesis K. C. Jones, who had taken over as Baltimore’s coach, marveled. “He still does it all. Nobody in the world can stop him when he’s ready to put the ball up. He pulled the whole game out of his bag tonight.” Phil Chenier, who’d scored a season low of eight points, agreed. “He’s like Super Quarterback. He knows where everybody is going, and he scans the play and makes a decision before making a move. He’s too much.” Kareem was also back to his usual dominant self, scoring thirty a night, even if he had shaved his beard and muttonchops (“Nothing happened, I just felt like shaving”). By all accounts, we were the team to beat.

  Our only early slip came in a 105–90 loss in Boston. After winning sixty-eight games during the 1973 regular season, the Celtics had reached the conference final, only to lose to the Knicks in game seven—in Boston Garden, of all places. Then they’d had to watch Willis Reed pull his infamous game-seven heroics, as he led New York over the Lakers for the championship. That Celtics squad obviously was one of basketball’s elite teams. With Jo Jo White racing around at point guard, Don Chaney hounding you to death on defense, and John Havlicek still running through screens, shooting the hell out of the ball, and hustling all over the place—Boston was loaded in the backcourt. Their frontcourt was just as good: Don Nelson had an ugly but almost automatic jumper and was sly as hell on the boards. At center, Dave Cowens, who may have been only six nine but had long arms, was a great post defender. He caused all kinds of matchup problems on offense because he could run, handle the ball, was relentless on drives and running hooks, and also loved to drift outside and light up your post guy from out there. Tom Heinsohn topped the roster off by bringing in Paul Silas, an off-season acquisition from Phoenix who grabbed every rebound in sight, and Paul Westphal from the bench, providing the Celtics with rebounding options as well as the depth to press and trap and fast break. It was almost as if Bob Cousy and Bill Russell were still out there, wearing the green and white.

  Jo Jo White had scored twenty in Boston’s early victory over us. On December 1, we played them again, and we shut him down. Jo Jo scored two early baskets, but accomplished little else in the first half. If you took away their fast break, Boston was a fairly average team. We jammed their outlet passes in the frontcourt, made sure to have men back to defend against their running game, and also took care of the ball, denying them the advantage of any turnovers. Boston sagged in on Kareem, and in the second half we capitalized by swinging the ball across the court, where Hondo Havlicek was left alone to deal with Bobby Dandridge. Bob scored fifteen in the fourth quarter to blow the game open, and we won going away.

  My durabi
lity was great, according to the Milwaukee Journal. “His remarkable forty-five-minute performance was probably the biggest single factor in the 117–93 rout that ended the Celtics’ twelve-game winning streak. The thirty-four-year-old campaigner did it all. He collected twenty points, ten assists and six rebounds; sank nine of fifteen shots; ran the offense with his usual aplomb; and perhaps most important of all, made a nonfactor of Jo Jo White by holding the fleet Boston guard to eight points.”

  Bobby led us in scoring that night, with twenty-seven points, and also held Havlicek to 6–20 shooting. We improved to 21–4, while the Celtics fell to 16–9. I remember thinking that it was a good win for us, because it showed that we could, man for man, shut down Boston. This boded well for the future.

  At a practice, however, pain shot through my lower extremities. I was taken to Milwaukee Lutheran Hospital and diagnosed with a flaring sciatic nerve. I stayed overnight, underwent diathermy, and was literally stretched.

  Milwaukee’s team doctor, Thomas Flatley, expected me to be out of action for about ten days. I ended up missing eleven games.

  I remember that the Lakers came to town, and Jerry West was on the sidelines too, out with the same abdominal injury that had crippled me the previous season. Sitting there, watching the action, I recognized how strange it was: these teams playing, with Wilt retired, and neither Jerry nor I on the court. Some things you can’t ignore, you know? Soon I told Larry Fleisher that next season he was going to have to find someone else to run the association. For at least the second time, I told Wayne Embry that the team should really start to look for another guard. He told me Lucius could handle the responsibilities.