The Big O

by Oscar P Robertson

  The difference, to me, is the quality of basketball skills and the level of basketball knowledge that we had back then. Plain and simple, ours were better.

  It’s something of a cliché to say that modern television and broadcasters are in love with the dunk. Commentators think that because a guy can dunk a ball, he’s the greatest thing ever. Producers like to show the same dunk on highlight clips and video packages, edited quickly so the move is repeated four and five times.

  I don’t want to sound like some dinosaur: “In my day, we knew how to play, to dunk; we had to walk uphill both ways to get to the basketball court, and then when we dribbled, the ball rolled down the hill.” Dunking’s been part of the game for a long time. Many players I knew when I used to play at the Dust Bowl could dunk a ball. Gus Johnson tore down rims more than thirty years ago. I could list guy after guy who was a great dunker. It never meant anything to me but two points. A lot of them never dunked because it embarrassed a defender, and he’d take it out on them the next play. I rarely dunked, but I did do it once in a while in practice, just to show people I could.

  But if you can dunk a ball, you are now the greatest player in the world. Gone by the wayside is ability to make a play or think about the game of basketball. Street lingo today translates “skills” as the ability to dribble the ball behind your back or off your knee. But knowing how to run a good fast break is a skill. So is busting your hump and getting out on the wing and filling the lane at the proper angle. Teams don’t run the way we did anymore.

  Knowing how to rub off a defender when you use a pick is a skill. Knowing how to feel a defender with your body and read the court to see where help is coming from is a skill. Knowing how to stay in control, pace yourself, and not use all your energy too early or give away all your tricks, that’s a skill. Setting solid picks and knowing how to get yourself open from them; knowing how to hit a guy with a pass the exact moment he frees himself and how to get him the ball in a place and at a time that allows him to shoot in rhythm; getting position low on the post; boxing out; playing solid man-to-man defense while also knowing where the ball is—those are skills. Certain players in the game today have them—Jason Kidd and Tim Duncan are two, off the top of my head. But most younger players don’t, not by a long shot.

  Shaquille O’Neal is one of the greatest players of all time. He’s big, strong, and fast. Shaq’s go-to shot is a dunk. There’s no doubt he would have gotten his share of dunks on Bill Russell. There were times he’d get position close to the basket, and there’s nothing anyone could do about that. Bill was six nine, and he had long enough arms where he might have been able to front Shaq. He might have been able to deny him the ball from the side. He was smart enough and competitive enough that he could have played against him. Bill could exploit anything, make you rely on the weakest parts of your game. Shaq doesn’t have much of a jumper. He has a jump hook but doesn’t have the kind of full hook that would be unstoppable. (Hell, his jump hook might be unstoppable if he shot it more.)

  And on the other end of the court, I doubt that Shaq could have defended Wilt Chamberlain.

  Long after Maurice Stokes’s bank account had been drained and his workmen’s comp had dried up, he remained paralyzed in a Covington hospital bed, his therapy and treatment running thousands and thousands of dollars a year. Jack Twyman had declared himself Maurice’s legal guardian and took on all of the responsibilities. One thing he did was contact sports writers from across the nation, most of whom joined in the cause. Pat Harmon of the Cincinnati Post wrote a column that brought in donations. My friend Milt Gross wrote a column about Maurice in the New York Post that brought in more than three thousand dollars. Cliff Keene of The Boston Globe knocked out a story, and a family sent a check for five hundred, which, their letter said, usually went for Christmas. Jerry Tachs—the same Sports Illustrated reporter who had caused me so much grief with his story when I was at Cincinnati—wrote a feature that brought in more than twenty-five thousand. Jim Murray at the Los Angeles Times and Bob Broeg of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote pieces, both of which brought in thousands of dollars.

  During the off-season, Jack also endured years of fund-raising lunches. Once he received a donation of two thousand cases of tomato sauce, delivered to a Cincinnati warehouse. The next week of Jack’s life was spent as a new entrant in the wholesale food business, with the proceeds going to Stokes. Howard Cosell even brought Jack onto his ABC Christmas special in New York, which helped a lot. The big financial breakthrough, however, came via a soft-spoken man named Milton Kutsher. A huge basketball fan, Kutsher ran the Monticello Hotel in the Catskills in upstate New York—the same hotel that an NBA scout had wanted me to work at when I’d been recruited for college. Every year starting in 1959, Kutsher brought together thirty-five NBA all-stars, at their own expense, and held a giant fund-raiser basketball game. During the first ten years, the game at Kutsher’s along with the columns and programs by the nation’s sports media raised more than one million dollars, all of which went toward paying Maurice Stokes’s medical bills.

  I’d first met Maurice at a dance at a place called Castle Farms here in Cincinnati, back when I was in college. I’d seen him play a few times. I did not know the man very well, but after his accident, I used to visit him and cheer him up whenever I could. It wasn’t the easiest thing, to see an athlete of his ability in that situation. But like everyone else, I kept hoping for the best. Soon enough I became involved with Kutsher’s games, taking on the responsibility of getting players to commit to playing, helping to arrange their trips to and from the game, and maintaining the event’s annual momentum. When Jack Twyman fell out of favor with Cincinnati management and coach Jack McMahon, he retired from basketball in 1966. I saw Maurice more and went out of my way to see that visiting players in Cincinnati would take time and drop in on Maurice, making him feel welcome and cared for in the players’ fraternity.

  While Maurice was in the hospital, he regained some movement in his upper body and began a series of arm and chest exercises to develop his upper-body strength. With the help of a speech therapist, he also did a lot of reading. History and poetry were his favorites. After Martin Luther King died, Stokes had this put into writing:

  There are a great deal of people who get upset about the death of a great man. I have to admit that I used to be one of those people, but no more. He has left so many great memories that it makes one feel rather good whenever his name is mentioned. You don’t have time to remember any of the bad things that happened, if you remember the good things he left.

  During the summer of 1965, everyone was up at Kutsher’s for the Stokes game. Tom Heinsohn met with Larry Fleisher and said he was going to retire from basketball, which meant the Players Association would need a new president. The two of them talked with Jack Twyman. At the time, despite Walter Kennedy’s locker-room promises at the all-star game, there still wasn’t any pension plan (the Kutsher’s game was Maurice’s pension). Playing conditions were still dismal. It was obvious that there was a long and fierce fight on the horizon. Whoever was going to take over the union would have to be intelligent, dedicated to the players’ interest, and willing to spend an enormous amount of time for the cause. It needed to be a star, the men agreed, a premier player, someone who played so well that the league couldn’t punish him. Someone who would also impart courage to other players who were somewhat timid and insecure about their futures. Since there were more and more black players coming into the NBA, it also followed that the new head of the union should be black.

  The three of them took me aside. I told them I was honored and flattered they’d asked.

  For the next eleven years, whenever Larry called me and said, “O, hey, we need a meeting,” I was there. Negotiations with the league were annual or semiannual; sometimes they were hectic and sometimes they were icy. Few and far between, sometimes they were protracted, drawn-out affairs, held through countless meetings over a stretch of seven or eight months. Between 1965 and 197
6, I attended every one I could, though my term as president ended in 1974. If our union needed a meeting, I was there as well. It did not matter how much time it took, or whether I had to pay for the ticket out of my pocket. (“He was the worst guy in the world for billing the association for travel, telephone, or anything else,” Larry once told an interviewer. “He spent big money of his own and spent free time on off days during the season.”) The way I saw things, it was part of the job. If I wasn’t willing to do this stuff, why should anybody else?

  Larry used to say that I had the one great talent necessary for an effective labor negotiator: always distrust the other side. On one occasion, the league made an announcement of major consequence. Larry was four thousand miles overseas and could not be reached for comment. Knowing the first person the papers would contact would be me, he waited until he could get a paper, skipped to the sports page, and read a story that interviewed me for my reaction. “Oscar said word for word what I would have said.” Larry and I shared one basic core understanding: When owners dealt with players, whatever they attempted was against our interests. That was our starting point. The league could prove that this was not the case, but we proceeded from that basic distrust.

  By 1967, I understood the role of the media, as well as the necessity of using the press to get my message out to people. I realized that if we were going to get our side of the story out to people, I had to do it. This became essential when we got sick of waiting for the league to make good on their promises and went head-to-head with ownership again. Looking back, the issues seem obvious. We wanted a hospitalization and medical plan. We wanted an exhibition schedule that lasted ten games instead of fifteen. We wanted to be paid for these games. We wanted an end to regular-season Saturday night and Sunday afternoon back-to-back games. We wanted to establish a set schedule, limiting the number of regular-season games to eighty-one. We wanted the creation of an actual all-star break, as opposed to a schedule that had the regular-season games resuming on the day after the all-star game.

  Most importantly, we wanted to end the reserve clause, which any rational person could see was patently illegal.

  In truth, I believe the league with the red, white, and blue basketball, the ABA, presented a sufficient threat to ownership to compel them to change their thinking on most of the player-treatment issues. The changes may have been made grudgingly, but we did obtain a shorter schedule; we did get paid for exhibition games; we did get trainers on the road and an end to some of the excessive scheduling practices. Not because these things were wrong, but I believe because there were owners who were worried that key players would jump leagues if they felt they weren’t being treated humanely. They were probably right about that.

  As for the reserve clause, that war would rage for years.

  At the time, there was a tremendous gap between the contributions of black players to the game and the public’s acceptance of us outside the game. Matters such as our insurance and pension plans never registered as something the average fan cared about, let alone the idea that the black man scoring all those points and doing all those spectacular things deserved them. In this sense we were very much akin to the jazz performers in Las Vegas during the 1950s, who were allowed to play on the stages but could not stay in the hotels.

  I have mixed feelings now when I watch a basketball game and see all the shoe commercials. On the one hand, a sneaker doesn’t make you jump any higher or play any better. So it’s more than a little disturbing to see black players peddling these $100 and $150 sneakers and promoting crass materialism. Perhaps more than anyone, inner-city kids thrive on basketball, and I think there’s something vicious about equating basketball talent with expensive shoes.

  Having said this, those commercials also can be seen as an indication of how far things have come. When I was playing, black athletes were never hired to do commercials or endorse products.

  If the idea of an endorsement is to sign up the best players or the guys who were popular or charismatic, it naturally follows black players should have had offers. But about the only offer I had was a how-to book on basketball fundamentals that came out in 1964 (Play Better Basketball, it was called). Besides the book, I can remember only one other: Late in my career, I lent my name to an insurance company that recreated my childhood love of the game for a commercial. As for TV appearances, I did Curt Gowdy’s American Sportsman show, going fishing with marine biologist Jack Casey and ABC. I also filmed an episode during the first season of Greatest Sports Legends. That’s about it. Wilt showed up on Johnny Carson sometimes. Maybe Bill Russell every now and then. That was it for national appearances by black basketball players.

  Converse sneakers were big back then. But they never used a black player to endorse their shoes. Same thing with Adidas. They would give you the shoe to wear for free, but that was all. I think Rick Barry was the first player Adidas paid for an endorsement. He didn’t get much money, but there were posters of him in every sneaker and department store. Recently, Converse wanted to re-release their All-Star sneakers, with a retro campaign that used the legends of the game. When they contacted me, I said I did not want to be involved. When I was a star, they never came to me or asked another black person for an endorsement.

  Some friends have told me that it’s time to let bygones be bygones, that Converse has been through untold bankruptcies and ownership changes and is trying to right its corporate ship. Surely, my friends say, the people who run the company now have nothing to do with Converse’s policies in the 1960s. If I were to associate myself with them, couldn’t it be seen as an example of how far things have come? Couldn’t it be an opportunity for me to have a measure of closure on an issue that’s bothered me for so long?

  I don’t think so. For one thing, they didn’t want me when I was in my prime, so why should I do it now? For another, I have serious reservations about the way shoe companies target children to sell wildly expensive sneakers that don’t help anyone jump better. On top of that, a part of me thinks that until black men own the companies selling the sneakers and clothes, the guys in the commercials are still playing the role of those jazz musicians in Las Vegas, back in the 1950s.

  And there’s also a final, more prosaic reason: I never liked playing in new sneakers. I kept all my sneakers for a long time and wore their soles to the nub. The fact is, the Converse shoe couldn’t take all the turning, twisting, and stopping in my game. Adidas either, although I wore those for the majority of my career with the Bucks. Spalding was the best sneaker I ever wore, and I don’t know if they make sneakers anymore.

  When you grew up in an all-black neighborhood in Indianapolis as I did, you had to prove you weren’t a criminal. When you came to college the way I did, you had to prove that you were actually there to go to class and weren’t some slacker on the take. And because I was successful, because I was quiet and reserved, people accepted me. They did it grudgingly, and still whispered to themselves when I wasn’t in the room, but they accepted me. I married an African-American woman, but her skin color was very light and, sad to say, that helped the way people looked at us. In every endeavor, I had to prove myself. Through sports, I gained entry to different venues, met various types of people.

  My wife once said that a person of color may not be an activist, or walk in marches, but he or she simply cannot sit on the sidelines. You can never be passive because these misconceptions affect you all the time. They affect you no matter how high up as a black person you go, no matter how educated you are or how much you acquire, or how much freedom you feel you have. When you feel that perhaps you have attained a level where it doesn’t affect you so much, there’s always some little thing that knocks you off your feet, reminding you all over again.

  When Yvonne took our child to a camp, she’d be the only black child there. We enrolled her in Cincinnati Country Day School. She was one of the only black children there. She’d be in a vacuum, the same way that Yvonne and I were in a vacuum. If we walked into a good restaurant in C
incinnati, people would initially look at us with that faint expression of distaste. Then it would dawn on them, they’d say among themselves, “Oh, that’s Oscar Robertson.” And the expression changed. After you’ve seen that a dozen times, it’s worse than being refused admission to the restaurant in the first place.

  When Yvonne and I first moved to Avondale and onto Eaton Lane, the area had been integrated. Over time the demographics shifted; more black families moved in, and soon the whole neighborhood was black. Every once in a while a story circulated that my family was about to move into a white neighborhood. I believe “exclusive” was the word the papers used. The stories were false, and there was no need for anyone to panic. The fact is, Yvonne and I first moved into an integrated neighborhood precisely because I didn’t want to live where I wasn’t wanted. No way were we going to create extra problems for our kids.

  My wife is a cultured and educated woman. She is an avid reader, collects fine art, is active in any number of cultural organizations, and also draws and paints (though she never sketched me—says I can’t sit still long enough for a rendering). My mother wrote spiritual music and is a renowned singer. She’s recorded and toured with the Beck Jubilee Singers—a group that in some circles is held in the same stature as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Mom’s sung on national television and to a sold-out Madison Square Garden. My brothers were all strong family men. As for me, I used to come home after practice and shoot hoops on a basket and backboard that I’d nailed above my garage. Sometimes I would shoot by myself, just to work on my stroke, but lots of times neighborhood kids would come around, and I’d play with them, especially my friend Odell Owens.

  One of my oldest and closest friends was Adrian Smith from Kentucky, who came straight out of Adolph Rupp’s all-white basketball factory. I’d known him since 1959. We used to relax at one another’s homes all the time, and our wives used to trade recipes. All of which is to say, mine is a family of decent people. We had—and to this day have—no problem with anyone who has no problem with us. My attitude was, Don’t worry. If you don’t want me living next to you, don’t worry, because I won’t. If you don’t want me to socialize with you, don’t worry.