Collision Course

by William Cook

  When Gene Shue learned what the Royals got in return for Lucas from San Francisco, he said, “What kind of a deal is that? I was on top of this all the way. I can’t tell you what we were offering, but it was a lot more than you got.”14

  When Bob Cousy was informed of Gene Shue’s comments, he remarked, “He offered us John Barnhill and Barry Orms earlier this year. It’s none of his business. Whatever he has to say, he has an ulterior motive. It’s nice to be an expert. Someday I may be as smart as him.”15

  The Lucas trade was further complicated by the fact that during the past summer, Jerry Lucas had indicated that he was considering retirement. In a concession to Lucas, Bob Cousy and Joe Axelson signed an addendum to his contract stating that the Royals would not trade him unless he agreed to it. So it begged the question of whether or not Jerry Lucas would have reported to Baltimore.

  Jerry Lucas and his wife, Treva, had come to enjoy living in Cincinnati immensely. They owned a home in the upper-middle-class suburb of Indian Hill and were close to family still living in Middletown, Ohio. Furthermore, while playing for the Royals, Jerry was close to the restaurant chain that bore his name that he operated which had bothered Bob Cousy so intensely.

  But all of this domestic bliss surrounding Lucas was a little too distracting for Bob Cousy and Joe Axelson, and it’s clear that neither wanted him on the Royals.

  Apparently, Lucas had been expecting a trade for some time. Treva Lucas told the press that they had enjoyed living in Cincinnati the past six years and made many friends in the community. Treva wouldn’t scold Bob Cousy for trading her husband. “It could prove to be very beneficial for the Royals and us, too,” she said. “I’m sure he’s doing the right thing. I have confidence in him. I think he’s a fine coach.”16

  So, Jerry Lucas resolved that his future was in the words of the old song, “California, Here I Come,” and headed west.

  Back east, the future of the Cincinnati Royals remained to be seen.

  Oscar Robertson became concerned when Cousy announced that he wanted Norm Van Lier to handle the ball more—thereby moving him off screens and finishing plays. During his entire ten years with the Royals, Oscar Robertson had been running the offense.

  Oscar stated in his biography, The Big O—My Life, My Times, My Game, the problem with making Van Lier the playmaker was that he wasn’t tall enough to see over the player who guarded him. It not only delayed Van Leer’s passes but also made him susceptible to the presence of double-teaming. The result was that the Royals had trouble getting into their offense.

  When he arrived in Cincinnati, Bob Cousy had announced that he was going to implement a youth movement on the Royals. That certainly seemed like a good idea. A few of the Royals starters were over 30 years old: Adrian Smith was 33; Johnny Green, 36; Connie Dierking, 33; and Oscar Robertson, 31. But then, Cousy contradicted his plans when he decided to insert himself on the active roster—he was 41!

  On November 18, after a couple of months of haggling, the Royals and Celtics reached an agreement on removing Cousy from the Boston inactive list. Cooz was free to suit up, but he suddenly came up injured with a pulled muscle in the groin during a practice session.

  A few nights later, on November 21, at Cincinnati Gardens, the “Wizard of the Hardwood” made his return on the court, and his performance left a lot to be questioned. The Royals won the game defeating the Chicago Bulls 133–119 with The Big O scoring 41 points and Tom Van Arsdale, 19.

  The game was hardly the grand promotion that Cousy had promised with him playing—only 3,450 fans showed up. It was reported later that one fan out driving his car and listening to the game on radio rushed to the Gardens to buy a ticket when he heard that Cousy was going to play.

  In the third period, when Cooz stood up and took off his warm-up jacket, the small crowd rose to their feet with a standing ovation for him. Cousy entered the game and helped Oscar Robertson and Norm Van Lier break the Bulls’ zone press.

  At the beginning of the 4th period, Cousy remained on the bench, but with the Royals leading by 20 points, he replaced The Big O for the final 5 minutes and 28 seconds of the game and fans began to see just how rusty his skills had become while not playing in the NBA for the past 6½ years. His passes bounded off other player’s hands or went awry. On six or seven occasions, Cousy threw the ball away.

  However, Cousy’s wife Missy, who was on hand, quickly came to the defense of her husband. “It would seem to me,” said Missy, “that when they’re open in the corner, that they would know that they’re going to get the ball.”17

  Cousy finished with 3 points and 2 rebounds. His self-assessment of his return as a player was critical but not convincing. “I thought I was terrible really. I’m going to have to get myself back in shape. I felt confident and the legs didn’t feel too bad. I think I’m capable of playing a little better than that.”18

  On November 28, Bob Cousy made another appearance on the court in Cleveland where the Royals were playing the high-flying New York Knicks. With about one minute and thirty seconds left in the game, Oscar Robertson fouled out after scoring 33 points with the Royals leading 101–98. Then, Cousy put himself in and promptly threw the ball away. That was followed by a foul, the Knicks sank two free throws, and then Cousy turned the ball over again.

  With 16 seconds remaining and the Royals leading 105–102, Cousy called a timeout so the Royals could bring the ball in near midcourt. He passed the ball to Tom Van Arsdale, but Dave Debusschere stepped in front of him, stole the ball, then scored to cut the Royals’ lead to 105–104. Then, as Van Arsdale started to bring the ball up court, Willis Reed tapped it away in the direction of Walt Frazier. So, Van Arsdale fouled Frazier who then made both free throws to give the Knicks a 106–105 victory. It was New York’s eighteenth straight win. Later, Cousy was to say that he felt sad that he had put himself in the game, but as he looked down the bench, he didn’t see anyone he felt could keep their cool in that situation.

  What Oscar Robertson didn’t know at the time, was that Bob Cousy and Joe Axelson had already started shopping him around to other NBA teams. They had offered Robertson to the New York Knicks in exchange for Cazzie Russell and Dave Stallworth. But when the Knicks, coached by Red Holzman, suddenly went on an 18-game winning streak between October 24 and November 28, they cut off the trade talks with the Royals.

  While going forward in the season Cousy would play less, he suddenly came under fire from some members of the press and other players for using his reactivation as a player as subterfuge to make himself eligible for the player’s pension fund.

  According to Cousy, Max Jacobs had informed him that, as he had returned as a player, if he would contribute about $20,000 for the years he had been out of the NBA, he would be eligible to collect about $10,000 a year when he reached the age of 65.

  Regardless of the criticism, Cousy felt that he had been the first president of the NBA players’ association, worked hard for the establishment of the pension fund, and deserved to be included. But in the end, he quit without qualifying.

  Towards the end of December, Bob Cousy came to the conclusion that 33-year-old, nine-year NBA veteran guard Adrian Smith, like Jerry Lucas, didn’t fit into his plans for the running Royals either. On Christmas Day 1969, Smith was traded to the San Francisco Warriors for a future second-round draft choice.

  Cousy decided to trade Smith because he was satisfied with the way Norm Van Lier was playing in the backcourt with Oscar Robertson. Once again, Cousy stated that the only team interested in Smith, who was making $35,000 a year, was the San Francisco Warriors—they wanted him to take the pressure off of Jeff Mullins.

  The Warriors were coming to Cincinnati to play the Royals on Christmas Day. As Bob Cousy didn’t want to be the “Grinch that Stole Christmas,” he told San Francisco general manager Bob Feerick that he wanted to wait until after the game to tell Smith that he had just been traded. To that end, he promised to keep him out of the game. But the game went into overtime and Cousy h
ad to use Smith. The Warriors won 124–120. Adrian “Odie” Smith took the trade hard, broke down, and cried. However, Smith’s wife was furious with Cousy and never spoke to him again.

  Royals fans were absolutely dumbfounded; Bob Cousy had traded two All-Stars in Lucas and Smith and gotten little in return for either. In fact, the Royals got players for both who were incapable of making the Royals’ starting lineup.

  As the Royals struggled to play .500 ball, two days after Christmas, on Saturday, December 27, 1969, a huge holiday crowd of 11,665 fans packed Cincinnati Gardens. It was the largest crowd to ever see a Royals game in the Queen City. But those fans were not there to see Bob Cousy or The Big O. The Milwaukee Bucks were in town with the NBA’s prized rookie center Lew Alcindor.

  In late November, the Royals had defeated the Bucks 129–104 in Milwaukee. At the time, Lew Alcindor was apparently still adjusting to the NBA game. Connie Dierking had dominated Alcindor underneath the basket and, at one point, was scoring a basket a minute while out-positioning him for rebounds.

  Surprisingly, the Royals defeated the Bucks again 112 to 110 in overtime giving them a season record of 17–21. It was Milwaukee’s only loss in an eleven-game stretch.

  Oscar Robertson led the Royals with 31 points supported by Connie Dierking and John Green who both who scored 14 points.

  For the Bucks, Flynn Robinson, soon to be a member of the Cincinnati Royals, was the leading scorer with 41 points followed by Lew Alcindor with 29.*

  At the All-Star Game break on January 7, 1970, the Royals had a record of 22–23.

  As the second half of the 1969–70 season began, the Royals kept losing, and fans kept hearing rumors, often fueled by the media, that Oscar Robertson was not fitting into Bob Cousy’s running game. Oscar was hearing the rumors, too, and when the Royals were on the road, opposing players would ask him what he knew about the possibility of being traded. All the rumors appeared to have an isolating effect on Robertson.

  Oscar considered Cincinnati home and really didn’t want to be traded. But he knew his departure was inevitable, and so in order to ease the emotional pain, he reverted into his customary defense mechanism that Cincinnati was a racist city and the local media was biased against him, therefore he didn’t care where he went.

  Robertson wasn’t alone in his feelings about Cincinnati not being a bastion of racial tolerance. Bob Cousy had expressed serious doubts, too, and it made him wonder if Cincinnati had a future in the NBA. Shortly after it was announced that Cousy would be the new coach for the Royals he started receiving unsigned hate mail letters. Cousy cites one example of such a letter that read, “Who the hell wants to go to your games and watch those niggers run up and down the court?”19

  Considering Robertson’s feelings and Cousy opinions in regard to the spirit of racial tolerance in Cincinnati, it was just a bit surprising that almost 12,000 of those alleged “Queen City bigots” came out to Cincinnati Gardens during the Christmas-New Year’s holiday week to see Lew Alcindor play. From a historical perspective, one can only say “go figure!”

  Still, at times, one has to admit that there was some credibility to Oscar Robertson’s racial sensitivity toward Cincinnati, but you would hardly think that it would be a member of the press that would take the lead in reinforcing his negative feelings. But that is exactly what happened following a Royals 129–122 victory over the Baltimore Bullets in late January 1970.

  Barry McDermott, a sports reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, wrote a column that appeared in the paper the following morning that included an asinine analogy, comparing the play of Oscar Robertson, who scored 41 points and had 15 assists, and Johnny Green, who scored 19 points with 12 rebounds in 32 minutes, to sanitation workers. At the same time, McDermott stated that they were the “Frick and Frack” of the Cincinnati Royals.**

  It is a fact that in most American municipalities for over a hundred years the overwhelming number of employees holding the position of sanitation worker, AKA garbage man, have been black. In fact, Oscar Robertson’s father for a time had made a living as a sanitation worker in Indianapolis. But for a reason only known to him, Barry McDermott wrote in his column, “With all the sanitation workers out on strike in Cincinnati, ageless Johnny Green looks like the best garbageman in town. And if Johnny is cleaning up in the back of the truck, Oscar Robertson has to be up front at the wheel.”20

  In defense of Barry McDermott, one could make the inference that he was only writing the lead-in for his column based on post-game comments made by the Bullets’ Kevin Loughery, who said, in regard to the brilliant play of Johnny Green in favor of his lay-ups, throw-ups, and fancy play around the basket, “It’s not garbage what he’s doing. Everybody else in the league would do it but it takes talent. Everybody would like to get two footers all night.”21

  Nonetheless, the column bothered an already supersensitive Oscar Robertson, and it should have. The Big O was playing his heart out with trade rumors swirling around him, and out of the blue, a sportswriter unwittingly insults both him and his father.

  In an attempt to bring clarity to the social consciousness of Oscar Robertson, Bill Furlong of Sport magazine wrote in early 1970 that he saw race from the inside where no white man could venture. “[Robertson] knows that there are times when the worst thing that can happen to a black in America is fame. It gives him a sense of claustrophobia—he doesn’t know he’s been confined to a ghetto until he gets a chance to leave it.”22

  As Bob Cousy continued to remake the running Royals, by February, only seven of the fourteen players that had been at training camp were still on the roster, and soon the biggest name on the team would be packing his bags, too.

  Cousy was less than candid with his critique of how The Big O fit into his plans for the Royals. “Oscar can go out there and score 40 points every night—he’s that kind of player,” said Cousy. “And we might win a few more games if he did. But if we want to be the kind of team we can be, we’ve got to establish the habits that will give us continuity in our offense and our defense. And to do that, Oscar has to keep the ball moving when somebody else can do the scoring.”23

  The rumors of an Oscar Robertson trade really heated up in late January 1970, and then the rumors became a reality. On January 28, a sports reporter intercepted Oscar on his way to the locker room at Cincinnati Gardens and asked him how he felt about the trade. Shocked, Robertson called his attorney, Jake Brown, who confirmed that he had been traded to Baltimore for Gus Johnson.

  That night, the Royals, playing the Milwaukee Bucks, entered the fourth quarter only 2 points down, but Oscar Robertson sat out the first five minutes of the period and they lost the game by 12 points, 114–126. Robertson finished with 23 points while Jim McGlocklin and Lew Alcindor both scored 33 points, and Flynn Robinson added 23 for Milwaukee.

  Two days later, general manager Joe Axelson confirmed the trade stating that he and Cousy felt that they could better themselves. That meant that while they were rebuilding the Royals, they came to the conclusion that Oscar Robertson was more useful as barter than a building block.

  While Baltimore was willing to increase Robertson’s $125,000-a-year salary by $30,000 to $50,000 and give him a two-year contract extension, Cousy and Axelson had failed to read the fine print in Robertson’s contract that stated he had a no-trade clause. So Robertson nixed the deal. He was willing to consider going to Baltimore for a $700,000-a-year, no-cut contract, but that was unlikely to happen.

  When informed of the clause in Robertson’s contract by Jake Brown, Bob Cousy, Joe Axelson, and Ambrose Lindhorst, the Royals attorney, were smitten; The Big O had them all by their—whatever. The Royals could trade Robertson, but he would have to approve the deal. Nonetheless, Jake Brown assured the three that he and Oscar would cooperate with them. Brown even offered to let them know what teams Oscar would be willing to be traded to.

  Oscar Robertson had come to Cincinnati 14 years ago, and over that span of time, the community had become home to him. He had a wife
and three children, owned property, and had business interests in the city. But Robertson quickly came to the conclusion that if Bob Cousy wanted him gone, then it was time to go, but he would be the one to decide where he was going to.

  The Cincinnati print media, led mainly by the Cincinnati Enquirer, driven mostly by the fact that Oscar Robertson had never been friendly with them, began to take the side of Bob Cousy and the Royals management in the trade dilemma. Instead of criticizing Robertson’s game, they began to launch personal attacks on him, suggesting, for instance, that despite Bob Cousy doing everything in his power to appease The Big O, he was never anything but bitter. The newspaper went on to state that for years Robertson had scorned the Royals management and ridiculed Cincinnati and its fans and would grow old a bitter man convinced that it was all a plot.

  As the switchboard in the Royals front office began to light up with protest calls, Bob Cousy started to put an economic spin on the reason he wanted to trade Robertson, stating that the Royals were going to show a considerable loss for the season and that they could not continue to pay out a Wilt Chamberlain size contract when they were only drawing 3,500 fans a game and losing $300,000 a year.

  “I feel that $125,000 is good compensation,” said Cousy. “He’s been an All-Star and he’s done a job as a player. He’s contributed something to Cincinnati and Cincinnati has compensated him. The fact is that a superstar in this price range has to draw people. Oscar draws people. Unfortunately, he draws people for everyone else during the year. He draws people on the road.”24

  With the trade rumors out in the open and Robertson’s veto of the deal with Baltimore, skeptics were now wondering if The Big O would begin to “dog it” on the court—just going through the motions. Bob Cousy was not concerned about that possibility as he felt that Robertson’s stature as a player would not allow him to do that.