The Big O

by Oscar P Robertson

  I was a sophomore in college during the Royals’ first season in Cincinnati. And it was toward the end of their opening campaign that an accident took place that, I believe, hung over the franchise, perhaps ultimately influencing its fate.

  Maurice Stokes was a moose of a man, the first star that the franchise had. At six feet seven and 250 pounds, he was stronger and a better shooter than Elgin Baylor, who led Seattle to the 1958 NCAA championship game and had joined the NBA following his junior season. Along with Jack Twyman, Stokes was the heart of the Royals during the late 1950s. He was a physical player, but also a smart, gentle man of humble beginnings—his father had worked for thirty years in Pittsburgh steel mills, and his mother was a domestic. The Royals, led by Stokes and Twyman, along with Georgie King and a decent supporting cast, came to Cincinnati touted as the team to beat in the Western Division.

  In the final game of the regular season, while jumping for a rebound, Maurice’s legs were unintentionally cut out from under him. He crashed to the floor and landed on his head. After receiving some medical attention, Maurice left the court under his own power. Five minutes later he went back in and finished the game. The team then showered, went straight from the arena to the train station, and traveled all night to Detroit (the former Fort Wayne franchise had recently relocated to the Motor City). They were preparing to begin a best-of-three playoff series against the Pistons the next afternoon.

  A half-hour before tip-off, Maurice and teammate Jim Paxson became nauseated and vomited. Everyone figured it was a virus, perhaps food poisoning. Maurice was lethargic in warmups, but he played the game, and the team took a bus to the airport at Ypsilanti, Michigan, to catch a flight back to Cincinnati. Mo had a sandwich and a beer and bowl of soup. Ten minutes into the flight, he became violently ill and lost consciousness in a cold sweat.

  By this time the plane was forty-five minutes from Detroit, and an hour and a half from Cincinnati. Pilots and team personnel convened and decided to proceed to Cincinnati. The plane eventually landed, and Maurice was rushed to a Covington hospital. Doctors would later say that only the efforts of the stewardess had kept Maurice alive.

  Meanwhile the Royals played game two without him and lost, ending their season. The team then scattered back to their hometowns: everyone except Jack Twyman, who lived in Cincinnati, and Maurice Stokes, who was in the hospital, paralyzed.

  When Maurice regained consciousness, his body no longer worked. As doctors were taking tests, one of the technicians made a joke. Maurice laughed, and the technicians realized that laughter was a reflexive action, like breathing. Except for reflex actions such as this—the flutter of his eyelids, or spontaneous laughter—it was impossible for him to do anything. At the same time, his mind was clear as a bell. Maurice understood everything that people said, but his injury affected the part of the brain that controls the voluntary action of the rest of the muscles in his body, so he had no muscle control whatsoever.

  Maurice was diagnosed with post-traumatic encephalopathy, meaning a blow to the head was the cause of his paralysis, as opposed to a virus or encephalitis. Some of the players believed that the decision to fly ahead to Cincinnati and the resulting additional forty-five minutes of the flight contributed to the severity of Maurice’s illness, but who can say for sure? He had about fifteen thousand dollars in the bank and could not relocate if he wanted access to workmen’s compensation as a means of paying for part of his medical bills. Rehab would cost about a hundred thousand dollars a year, and there was no real chance at recovery. In those days, there was no medical insurance and no pension. Maurice had no way to pay his medical bills and no prospect of ever walking again, much less playing. He was twenty-four years old.

  Attendance that first year in Cincinnati marked a noticeable improvement from the largely absent crowds in Rochester. But it wasn’t enough, and Maurice’s accident seemed to spread a cloud over the franchise’s immediate future. Tom Wood ran the Cincinnati Gardens that first season; he later became executive vice president and ran the entire team. According to him, the Royals took in $96,000 at the gate that first season. Player and front-office salaries alone were $110,000—miniscule in comparison to the rest of the league, but still enough to put the Royals in the red for the season. The team also had to pay expenses for travel, equipment, rent on the arena, and so on. There were no television rights, no money for playing away from home, no other income whatsoever. The Harrison brothers threw in the towel and sold the team to a group of local investors headed by Tom Wood and a Cincinnati attorney. A rider in the contract stipulated that the price, $200,000, would rise to $225,000 if Maurice Stokes ever played again.

  After Maurice’s accident, Clyde Lovellette, a highly priced addition the Harrison brothers had made before selling the team, didn’t want to play on Cincinnati and forced a trade to St. Louis, where he’d go on to become an all-star. Another starter gave up basketball to play baseball in the St. Louis Cardinals minor league system. Indeed, only the generosity of Ben Kerner of the St. Louis Hawks kept the Royals franchise from folding. The Hawks had just won the Western Division; Kerner believed Cincinnati would eventually make a great natural rival for his team. Kerner literally gave Cincinnati five players, no charge. In addition, he traded Wayne Embry to the Royals, giving Cincinnati a barrel-chested, dependable center for Twyman to team with.

  Despite operating on a shoestring budget, the Royals were still hemorrhaging money, saddled with bad luck and failures. While the University of Cincinnati went to two consecutive final fours and consistently sold out the Armory Fieldhouse, the Royals continued to struggle at the box office, averaging around fifteen hundred fans a game. The same Jack Twyman who’d worked out with me when I was being recruited by the Bearcats was the team’s highest paid player. An excellent standstill shooter from the outside and a prodigious post scorer, Jack was paid the unspectacular annual sum of twenty thousand dollars.

  At that time the league had two kinds of drafts. Since there was no free agency then, these drafts were the only ways for teams to add players. The main draft was for players whose collegiate eligibility had expired, but there was also a supplemental draft known as the territorial draft. In this draft, a team could claim the rights to any underclassman playing within that region. It had been designed to keep players geographically close to whatever fan base may have followed them in college. The Royals had selected me in a territorial draft at the end of my sophomore year, which meant they controlled league rights to me. While this allowed the Royals to claim me, there was a tactical downside—if each team kept the best players from its region, no other team had a chance for choice national talent.

  If you were at the top of the league, the mechanisms were set up so you tended to add more ammunition to your talented squad and remain at the top. If you were in the middle of the pack, you also tended to stay there. In 1958, relying on Jack Twyman’s jump shot and little else, the Cincinnati Royals won a league-low nineteen games and finished in last place in their division. In 1959, they again finished last, more than seventy-five thousand dollars in the red. When Cincinnati used the first pick of the 1959 draft lottery to select my old rival, Bob Boozer, he turned around and signed a contract with the Peoria Caterpillars, a basketball team that was part of the rival AAU league. The only reason the Royals did not fold or relocate was because they owned my rights and were relying on my arrival to reverse their bad luck, mismanagement, and errors. But until I graduated, the team was on its own.

  Hank Aaron has talked about getting terrible service in empty restaurants in Cincinnati, purely because of the color of his skin. And if you mention the city’s name to other black major leaguers of the time, you’re more than likely to hear story after story about the vulgarities that rained down from the white stands in Crosley Field. By now I wasn’t an awestruck kid, happy to see black faces at a baseball game. I understood the city’s racial biases well. But the Royals held my rights. I was their savior. No way they would trade me.

  Professio
nal sports at this time had a monopoly on player rights. If a team drafted you, they held your rights for good. When your contract ran out, you weren’t free to sign with another team, but could only sign with the team you played for. Being traded or cut from the team was the only way your rights changed. If you didn’t like a team’s offer, too bad. Your only choices were to jump to another league or hold out. Basically, you were putting your professional life on the line, and owners did not hesitate to use this, and other scare and muscle tactics, in their negotiations.

  When I was eighteen years old, one of the things that Jake Brown had promised me was that he would see me into my pro career, help handle my finances, and be a friend to me even after I left the University of Cincinnati. Now he made good on his promise and entered into negotiations with the Royals front office. J. W. knew that we had leverage—for the first time all the rumors about the Globetrotters actually worked in our favor. After having lost Boozer, the Royals could not afford to let me jump ship as well. If I signed with the Globetrotters, their franchise was finished. If I had to play in Cincinnati, at least it would be on my own terms. After I returned from the Olympics, J. W. sat down with the Royals management and outlined exactly what those terms were.

  In those days, such a meeting was unusual. Players didn’t have agents or anyone else negotiating their contracts. J. W. was never my agent, mind you; he was my attorney and my friend. He didn’t negotiate my salary—partly because there wasn’t any serious money to begin with, and partly because management did not want to deal with a lawyer. They preferred to intimidate players.

  Not this time. J. W. negotiated for me, and we all knew I had leverage. Soon the Royals and I agreed on a contract: three years, with a base pay of about thirty-three thousand dollars a year. J. W. also negotiated a pair of clauses into the deal, each of which was then unique to the NBA: the first provided me with a percentage of the team’s gate receipts—this boosted my annual take to around fifty thousand dollars. The second, a multipart clause, was even more impressive. I could not be cut from the team. My money was guaranteed and had to be paid for the full three years, regardless of whatever injuries I might suffer. Moreover, I could not be traded without my consent—a fact that would become important years later.

  The average working salary in the United States at the time was just over five thousand dollars a year. Stamps were four cents, bread just twenty, and a brand-new turbine-drive Buick convertible, complete with tail fins, went for just less than two thousand dollars. The day I signed my contract, I became one of the highest paid players in the league, and also the most protected. The Royals advanced me about fifteen thousand dollars on my salary.

  I took care of my mother’s debts and gave her the security that allowed her to spend more time with her gospel choir. Yvonne and I also put a down payment on a Tudor-style home in the neighborhood of Avondale at 3604 Eaton Lane. It was an integrated, upscale area, secluded and relatively wooded. Our home had three bedrooms upstairs, as well as a basement, which I fixed up with a friend of mine, Jimmy Thompson, to use as an entertainment room. There was a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, and a little sitting room off the dining room. I have fond memories of Yvonne and I spinning records in that place, in the basement, dancing together.

  Armed with her master’s degree, Yvonne returned to teaching. Sometimes I’d sit at the kitchen table, helping her keep class records. She told me that the children in her class used to use her full name at every opportunity: “Mrs. Oscar Robertson, may I sharpen my pencil?” “Mrs. Oscar Robertson, may I go to the rest room?”

  I was only two hours away from the shotgun shack on Colton Street in Indianapolis where I’d grown up, but I had entered an entirely different world.

  Before the season started, a national sports magazine asked Celtics playmaker Bob Cousy about my chances. Cousy answered, “West could be the best. And Oscar could be a Royal letdown.” Jimmy Thompson told me about the line, but I didn’t think anything of it. If the franchise had been one of the league’s bottom-feeders up to now, there were also indications of change. The draft that season had been surprisingly bountiful—including one of my Olympic teammates, Bob Boozer, who had finished his contract in the rival league. The two of us, along with returners Twyman and Wayne Embry, infused the Royals with a solid talent base.

  Before we started our preseason workouts, head coach Charley Wolf called a special team meeting. Unlike the one George Smith had called when I started at Cincinnati, I attended this one. My arrival brought a lot of publicity with it, and the Royals were concerned that veterans might have had problems with this. I didn’t say anything. After a few practices, the guys understood I was there to do my job. Besides, there wasn’t time to worry about jealousy. Wasn’t time for anything besides basketball, really. The exhibition season was upon us. Fifteen games in sixteen days, none of which players were paid for, although I seem to remember that tickets were sold.

  On October 20, 1960, more than eight thousand people—the largest crowd in Royals’ history—came to the Cincinnati Gardens to watch my regular-season debut. Our game against the Lakers was also notable for the introduction of my Olympic co-captain and supposed rival, rookie Jerry West. The large photo on the front of The Cincinnati Enquirer’s sports page the next day featured me, driving for a layup, and scoring with my right hand.

  I had a triple-double that night, scoring twenty-one points to lead the team and amassing twelve rebounds and ten assists. The Enquirer called it “perhaps the finest performance in four seasons, as (the Royals) rang up more points than any one Cincinnati team in history.” Of me, a columnist said: “His superb faking and generalship thrilled the fans, and there is no doubt he will be one of the greatest.”

  So I began my initiation. There were eight league teams back then, and we played seven games in as many cities in ten days. We’d get up early in the morning, get onto a bus or go to the airport, and hit a city. At the arena, we had to tape our own ankles before games, because there weren’t trainers for anything other than serious injuries. Dolph Schayes and Bob Pettit were among the guys I know who broke their wrists and still kept playing. I’d estimate that eighty percent of the league played with charley horses, jammed thumbs, and pulled muscles back then, and the only thing the trainers offered for relief were freezing sprays of ethyl chloride.

  After games, you went back to your hotel for a good night’s rest. The next day at the airport, you waited for your flight, then fell asleep on the plane, cramped in those little airplane seats. We flew on rickety little DC-3s; any gust of wind shook them back and forth, and if we were playing in California, we’d have to stop six or seven times along the way. Guys received eight dollars a day in meal money, and the Royals always booked us into cheap, fleabag hotels. We’d arrive in the dead of night, get to our rooms, and discover the beds were too short. I used to have to put a suitcase rack at the end of the bed for my feet.

  Back then, most teams did not have more than two black players, in part because of road travel. Three black players were too many to deal with. Teams avoided rooming a black guy and a white guy together. When Bob Boozer and I joined the Royals after the Olympics, this could have caused problems, as the team already had Wayne Embry. But Wayne was such a congenial man that management could room him with white players without anybody getting upset. So that freed things for Bob Boozer and me to room on the road, although every once in a while Wayne and I bunked together.

  Over the course of the season, you played each team about twelve times, so you got to know everyone else’s plays and they knew your own. We could have switched jerseys and run one another’s sets to perfection.

  When I think back on it all, I have to say that it was a good life. You really got to know everyone—your teammates, your coaches, other players, everyone. And you got to do it while playing basketball, the game you loved, against the best players in the world.

  My on-court adjustment process went fairly easily, I think. The game was faster, the player
s stronger, but nothing overwhelmed me. The pro game involved thinking a lot, processing the different things you had to do, while at the same time being able to make decisions and react. Charley Wolf moved me to guard, my natural position, giving me the ball and control of the team. I responded in kind. I was a rookie, but in my mind I wasn’t a young basketball player anymore. I had confidence in my knowledge of the game, and if a teammate ran a play wrong, I was going to let him know about it. If a ref blew a call, I was going to say something. Every city and game presented both new obstacles and excitement, and I wanted to take on all challenges, wanted to topple them all.

  Jerry West liked to tell reporters that I never was a rookie. Jerry always felt that he had had difficulties adjusting to the professional game, but that I handled the ball with the confidence of a proven pro from the very beginning. Ed Jucker, my coach on the University of Cincinnati’s freshman team, used to remark on the difference between the boy he had coached and the man I became. “He was like a stagestruck kid in college. Overwhelmed by it all. His wife deserves a lot of credit. She’s really loosened him up.”

  During my first trip to Philadelphia, Tom Gola, a top defensive player, held me to fourteen points. Afterwards, he told reporters, “O’s a pretty good player, but he’s certainly no all-pro, and he has a long way to go.” The remark was picked up by the wire services and spread coast to coast. A week later, Philly came to the Gardens. I scored forty-four.

  When we visited St. Louis, the Hawks sent a defender into the backcourt to hound me. “We haven’t picked up a man back there in years,” Hawks guard Paul Seymour said. Other teams tried different things, sagging in their defense, hoping to keep me from driving and rebounding. One game I astounded my teammates by challenging Wilt Chamberlain, driving at him, attacking the basket, and scoring right over him. “If you’re not confident,” I told reporters, “you’ve got no business playing the game. That shot just won’t go in.”