This was all happening while we were in the playoffs. And wouldn’t you know it, we upset the Syracuse Nationals in the first round, and flew straight from Syracuse to Boston.
Two nights later, we played the Celtics in game one of the series for the Eastern Division title.
During the series, the ownership of the Royals would change twice. Pepper Wilson, our general manager, would make half a dozen phone calls at one point just to figure out who his boss was.
The back and forth and confusion lasted until training camp of the 1963–64 season, when Lou Jacobs finally ended up the owner of the Royals, and for all intents and purposes, the franchise lost its last chance at having ownership that actually cared about winning and losing.
Our team couldn’t be worried about that. We had the four-time defending world champions to deal with.
During the regular season, whenever the Celtics came to Cincinnati, Bill Russell and other players used to come to my house. Yvonne would cook a big dinner for them. Then both of our teams would go and try to beat the hell out of each other. Out on the court against the best players, it doesn’t matter if they are friends or not. If you don’t play hard against Bill Russell, he will embarrass you. Same thing with Wilt. And with me. Our friendships always took a backseat to our game.
That year the Celtics were all balance and experience. They had won fifty-eight games with no player averaging more than twenty points. Thirty-four-year-old Bob Cousy had announced that this was his last season. They had all the talent and motivation in the world, and all oddsmakers figured they’d beat the hell out of us.
That first game in Boston, it looked like the oddsmakers were right. At the low point, we were down twenty-two. But we came back to a 135–132 win that shocked the Celtics. Boston coach Red Auerbach complained constantly about the officiating. All the papers said that I was carrying Cincy on my back. Twenty-four hours later, we ran onto the court for game two in Cincinnati. We were down nine in the first half, made a run, faded in the end, and got blown out, 125–102. Two nights later in the Boston Garden, beneath the majesty of their championship banners and on the fabled parquet playing floor, we beat them by five, 121–116. The Royals, the undisputed underdogs of the series, had a two-to-one lead. And two of the next three games were on our home court.
We had a four-day break to rest and practice and work on our plays. We wasted no time. The day after we got home, our team walked onto the floor of the Cincinnati Gardens for practice. The floor was covered with sawdust and hay, and we had to step over giant piles of elephant shit.
While we’d been taking down the Celtics on their home court, the circus had come to Cincinnati. Lou Jacobs had neglected to inform the team’s management—even during all of their negotiations—that he had booked the Gardens for the circus. For the duration of the playoffs. With no chance for rescheduling.
Our practice—and the series—moved to tiny Schmidt Fieldhouse at Xavier University, a venue with about one-third the capacity of the Gardens.
To say that we felt unsupported by the front office would be very kind. The whole team was furious. We’d worked all season to be in the playoffs, to get to the point where we had a chance to beat our biggest rival and make it to the championship. We had a chance for a huge home-court advantage, twelve to fourteen thousand fans screaming obscenities at the Celtics and pressuring the refs into calling things our way. Instead, the Cincinnati Gardens would be alive with trapeze artists and tightrope walkers. We’d be in some little fieldhouse that I didn’t even know how to get to.
I played as hard as I could, but Boston took the game easily, 128–110. Days later they finally won at home, 125–120, and moved up to a 3–2 lead in the series.
Two nights after their home victory, I would not let us lose. In the friendly confines of Schmidt Fieldhouse, the Royals scored a 109–99 victory, forcing a seventh game in Boston.
On April 10, 1963, the day of the game, the case of Mississippi Governor Ross R. Barnett was passed onto the United States Supreme Court. The highest court in the land would hear about Barnett’s efforts to block the admission of James H. Meredith, a black man, to the University of Mississippi.
Sam Jones arrived hours early at the Boston Gardens and spent time in the darkened, empty arena, practicing and shooting. Bob Cousy arrived through his usual secret entranceway, not knowing if this would be the final game of his professional career. The game had been sold out for several days, and it was as crazed an environment as you could expect. At the half, Boston led 68–64, but we were in striking distance and felt good. Cousy started the second half by nailing a set shot. In less than five minutes, Boston flew to an 86–72 lead, then extended it to 98–82 with a lot of help from six-foot-four Celtics guard Sam Jones, whose early practice paid off—he hit jump shots, off-balance drives, one-handed layups.
Sam Jones, K. C., Bill Russell, Cousy. If a player had on a white-and-green uniform and was anywhere near me, the guy was pushing, shoving, holding, or just pounding on me. I think it was Auerbach’s gentle way of trying to wear me down or make me lose my cool.
In any case, I started leading us back. One possession after another. One trip to the foul line after another.
With a few minutes left in the third quarter and Cousy resting on the bench, we’d whittled a twenty-five-point lead down to nine, 98–89.
But when Cousy got back onto the court, he had a second wind and took control. It seemed like he hit every shot he took and dished out key assists, each one more spectacular than the other—a length-of-the-court bounce pass to Sam, a behind-the-back flip through the lane on the full run to Russell.
Boston outscored us 27–9 and took a commanding 123–98 lead.
We fought back with a 17–2 run, but it was too little, too late.
Final score: 142–131. The Celtics were on their way to yet another NBA championship.
Cousy finished the game with twenty-one points and sixteen assists. Russell had twenty points and twenty-four rebounds. Sam Jones was their real star, though; he ended up with a career-high forty-seven.
I ended the night with forty-three points, including twenty-one out of twenty-two free throws. No other Royal had twenty.
“Let me tell you,” Bill Russell said, “They shocked the stuffing out of us in that first game. We had a twenty-two-point lead. Imagine. And they beat us. And they kept fighting us all the way. That Oscar—I’ve just seen too much of him, that’s all.”
“Poor Sam was so happy to be out of that series,” Bob Cousy told reporters, “he almost cried.”
Afterwards, reporters, fans, and players alike blamed our loss on the circus debacle and the ownership chaos. The truth is, we had the opportunity to beat Boston. We couldn’t do it. We simply didn’t have the right players on the court to beat the Celtics. A lot of the Royals were gun-shy about playing them; it was almost as if they couldn’t go forward and play aggressively against the green-and-white Celtics uniforms. Moreover, we didn’t have the bench necessary to beat them; we needed an infusion of a couple of players and a couple of stouter hearts. Sure, the confusion in ownership and the mismanagement of the Gardens might have thrown us off. But at the end of seven games, the Celtics were the better team. They went on to beat the Lakers in the finals, winning their fifth straight title, and sending Bob into retirement with a final victory parade.
I was dejected after we lost the series. Coming close and then ending up short can sting a lot more than never having a chance.
On April 12, 1963, two days after our loss, Martin Luther King was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, for defying a court injunction and leading a march of African-Americans toward downtown Birmingham. The marchers were halted after four and a half blocks, but not before more than a thousand shouting, singing black men and women had joined the demonstration.
The same day, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, firebombs were thrown at a Negro leader’s home where representative Charles C. Diggs Jr. of Michigan was staying. Two young men were arrested. They admi
tted to throwing the bombs and said they were “just having fun.”
That summer I joined a group of basketball players and coaches on a kind of goodwill ambassador trip behind the Iron Curtain. We played exhibition games in Yugoslavia, Poland, and Romania. Even a game or two in Egypt, if I remember correctly. One night there were seven of us out to dinner. I was sitting there with Red Auerbach, Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, and a couple of other players. Red used to tease me all the time, and I really liked him, so I’d send barbs right back. All of us were at a table, sitting there, and Red’s smoking one of his damn cigars, baiting me, and he asked if I would like to play for the Celtics.
“Hell, no! What the hell for?”
“You young punk, you!” He had a big grin on his face.
“If it weren’t for Russell,” I said, “you guys wouldn’t be crap.”
Bill was laughing at me, and Red was egging me on, and we were all having a good time. I didn’t think anything of it at the time.
It wasn’t until much later that I remembered Bob Cousy at the table that night. He was sitting there listening. I don’t remember if he was laughing or not.
CHAPTER TEN
Union President, NBA Royalty
1963–1968 (Part One)
WHEN THE 1963 SEASON ENDED, Maurice Podoloff, the only commissioner the National Basketball Association had had so far, stepped down, replaced by the league’s publicity director, J. Walter Kennedy. The Chicago Zephyrs relocated to Maryland and became known as the Baltimore Bullets. The Syracuse Nationals, meanwhile, moved to Philadelphia, filling the gap that had been left when the Warriors had left for San Francisco the previous year. These shifts were indicative of a definitive change in the league. No longer were franchises located in towns like Fort Wayne, Moline, Oshkosh, Waterloo, Rochester, and Syracuse. Now every team was located in a major metropolitan area, with the two smallest franchises in St. Louis and—you guessed it—Cincinnati. The smallest arena in the league now seated ten thousand. During the upcoming season, for the first time in league history, the total attendance would exceed three million fans. A contract was signed to televise the all-star game in prime time.
In Cincinnati, we had our own reasons for enthusiasm: a welcome infusion of frontcourt talent, in the form of one Jerry Lucas. The great forward from Ohio State, and my teammate on the 1960 Olympic team, had spent two years in the American Basketball League as the property of the Cleveland Pipers. But like so many teams and leagues that started up with grand hopes, the Pipers ran out of cash—in their case they went belly-up before playing so much as a single game—and Saperstein’s fledgling ABL folded in 1962. Lucas ended up sitting out for a season before getting his shot in the NBA.
At six feet eight, 220 pounds, Jerry was a great athlete. Now he had to make the transition from pivot to forward, which required speed and leaping. But when he was a boy, he used to invent memory games, and he’d developed a photographic memory. Jerry was a Phi Beta Kappa student in college, and he understood how to apply his smarts to the game: how to lurk on the opposite side of the court and wait until a shot went up, at which point he could judge its trajectory and arc and immediately position himself for a rebound. He was tricky, physical, and bull-tough, a consummate team player. A three-time college All-American and two-time player of the year, Jerry had played center in college. He may have shot the ball in a peculiar, over-the-shoulder fashion, but he also set college records for shooting accuracy and understood the pick and roll as well as anyone I played with. With his back to the basket, he’d led an Ohio State squad featuring John Havlicek (a young guy named Bobby Knight was a reserve) to the 1960 title. A fan favorite throughout the state of Ohio, he was regarded by many as the best rebounding forward the game had ever seen.
Of course, if Jerry wanted to play in the NBA, he didn’t have much choice either—Cincinnati held his rights. I know that guys in Cincinnati’s front office still remembered some of the nasty things Jerry had supposedly said to Sports Illustrated. General manager Tom Grace certainly felt he’d been burned when Lucas went to the Pipers. But grudges didn’t matter. Our franchise simply couldn’t afford not to have this guy.
The day Tom Grace and Pepper Wilson finally swallowed their pride and signed Jerry, our team became dangerous. Wayne Embry wasn’t a traditional center, but he provided us bulk up front. Jack Twyman may not have held the scoring role he once did—something he wasn’t happy about—but as a team player in the best sense, he refocused his efforts on the defensive end. Adrian “Odie” Smith and defensive hawk Arlen Bockhorn rotated in the starting lineup opposite me at off-guard. Tom Hawkins started as our small forward. And with Bob Boozer, Jay Arnette (an underrated, leaping six-foot-two speed merchant), and Harold “Happy” Hairston, we had unprecedented depth coming off the bench. For the first time since the franchise was in Rochester, the Royals front office had filled the roster with talent. We were a legitimately balanced squad, with each player capable of handling his responsibilities. Without Lucas, we’d taken Boston to a deciding seventh game. With this lineup and depth, according to various preseason magazines, we were favorites to dethrone Boston.
Jack McMahon was like a lot of coaches of that era; he was fiery. On the sidelines, he would yell and moan until he was red in the face. He also came in and, like many coaches, immediately decided we needed to play better defense and try to run more. He was a former player himself; he knew not to beat guys over the head for their mistakes and wasn’t above going out to a bar with some of the players after a game, so he kept things on an even keel. Our training camp was on some army base, and Wayne Embry was named team captain. It was a good thing. Wayne was the type of guy who would tell you exactly what you needed to hear and do so in a way that avoided upsetting anybody.
On September 27, the day of our first exhibition game, the Jacobs family and their Emprise Corporation put an end to all ownership questions with the announcement that Jacobs had paid four hundred thousand dollars for forty percent of the Cincinnati Gardens and had also retained fifty-six percent ownership in the Royals. Warren Hensel—who never had owned much of the team, despite his involvement—was out. Bro Lindhorst, the Jacobs’s lawyer, would take over as executive vice president, despite Hensel’s many protestations that he had a written contract and was legally entitled to run the team. None of us could worry about it—as players we knew the front-office situation was bizarre, but we had a season to prepare for. We hit the road for an exhibition schedule-slash-barnstorming tour, playing night after night in dank high school gyms in small towns like Huntingburg, Indiana; Fort Dodge, Iowa; Chillicothe, Ohio; and Quincy, Illinois.
Things did not start off well. Jerry Lucas was accustomed to being a star and having the ball, and he had problems adjusting to an offense that did not revolve around him. It takes any player a while to adjust to a new offense and system, but because there was so much excitement and hype surrounding Jerry, I think the transition affected him even more. Where he’d set college records for shooting accuracy, now he was being asked to play for long stretches without the ball and to rely on someone else to set him up. Because Jerry took pride in his shooting percentage, I think he became self-conscious at times. Throughout the exhibition season and into the preseason, the chronic knee condition that would bother him throughout his career began to show itself. Never the most mobile player to begin with, Jerry was reluctant to shoot open fifteen-footers and instead drove to the basket and picked up cheap offensive fouls. He and I had problems finding offensive rhythm together and establishing any kind of chemistry.
And since we played a good number of preseason games against St. Louis, Jerry’s problems were further magnified. Night after night he was matched up against Bob Pettit, a Hall of Fame player who gave everybody fits.
The one place where Jerry’s game was unaffected was on the boards, and I think this is the source of what became a long-standing misperception. Even if Jerry was tentative in our offense and unsure of where to move, once a shot went up, he was relentles
s, a rebounding demon.
Back when Syracuse had a franchise and Dick Barnett was their star, there was a story that players complained about not getting any passes from Dick. Supposedly, Dick answered, “If you don’t like it, get the ball off the backboard.” Somehow this story got applied to Jerry Lucas and me. Only now reporters claimed that Jerry had complained about not getting any passes. Now, the story went that I told him, “Then go get it off the backboard.” Soon the word was out: Oscar and Lucas don’t get along. The truth was, we’d played together and been friendly on the Olympic team but didn’t know each other all that well—not yet. I passed the ball to everyone in our basketball scheme.
In any case, what at that time was the largest opening-night crowd in Boston Garden history showed up for Jerry’s professional debut. At power forward, Jerry was more than ready for them and totaled twenty-three points and seventeen rebounds. Though I hit a crazy fifty-foot hook shot toward the end of the first half and managed to throw a bounce pass through Bill Russell’s legs at one point, we were down fourteen with a little more than six minutes left to play. A run of nine straight free throws, one of my trademark baseline jumpers, and a Wayne Embry layup that I set up closed the gap. With twenty seconds left, we were down a point when Bob Boozer hit a long shot from the baseline. Sam Jones countered with a long jumper.
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