The Big O

by Oscar P Robertson

  Wes Unseld was on his way to a triple-double that night, and Baltimore managed to close the gap to 64–53, with ten minutes remaining in the third quarter. And that’s when the Big O made another appearance.

  Lew forced a Baltimore player to miss a wild reverse layup, got the rebound, and fired me an outlet pass. I caught the ball at around half-court and centered the ball, basically bringing the ball to the middle of the court. On videotape it looks like I am moving at less than full speed. Players seem to be whizzing past me to the left and the right. Two defenders are back for Baltimore, defending the basket. As I approached the top of the key, I suddenly changed pace, speeding up a bit, veering off at a sharp right angle. The two defenders reacted, coming toward me. Immediately, I threw a blind bullet of a pass to Greg Smith, who was cutting down the left side of the court, and hit him at full gallop for the uncontested layup.

  From there I hit Jon McGlocklin for an open jumper. McGlocklin knocked down another on his own. Our lead mushroomed to 82–64, with 89–77 going into the final period.

  That last quarter of basketball I remember as being as close to perfect as the game of basketball can be. I remember Lew getting a defensive rebound under the basket, and that I ran up to him and got the ball and told him to post up. He jogged ahead, and we went into a spread offense. I took my time bringing the ball up, waiting for everyone to get good and wide. From nearly half-court, I threw a hard pass into the middle of the lane, where Lew had gotten position on Wes Unseld. Lew caught the ball and in one motion leaped and turned and dunked right over a stationary Unseld.

  Lew hit another majestic, one-handed, over-the-shoulder dunk, his body extended entirely, his arm bent and head inches from the rim.

  Another fast break; this time I hit a streaking Bobby Dandridge for the assist.

  I cut past Lew now, getting the pass on the perfect give-and-go, which I finish with a double-pumping layup.

  I am alone against Kevin Loughery on the right side of the court, posting him up from about fifteen feet, with my back to the basket. I square up, take one hard dribble left, and drain the jumper.

  Fred Carter is guarding me on the right side of the court. I have him isolated, without any help. Using my height and strength, I dribble toward the baseline. Fred is hand-checking me, pushing at me, and I am using my hip to ward him off. I half-turn and give him a little bump and half-spin off him toward the baseline. While he shouts to the referee, I take a fifteen-foot fadeaway that hits nothing but the bottom of the net.

  “I played over four years with him at Cincy and Milwaukee, and the four-straight championship sweep with Baltimore was the most perfectly orchestrated performance I ever saw,” Bob Boozer told reporters. “Oscar was so great that once in a while, when I was in the ball game, I’d have to shake myself into the realization that I was out there too. I’d get entranced watching him.”

  With two minutes and fifty-four seconds left to play, we were ahead by seventeen, and Coach Costello was still diagramming new plays on his yellow pad. He started substituting, a starter at a time. It was my 886th game in the National Basketball Association, and finally I was going to be a champion. I remember the seconds counting down. Hugging guys on the sideline and our celebration spilling over onto the court, the Baltimore fans collectively standing and cheering out of respect.

  When I got into the locker room, the first person I saw was Jack Twyman, waiting to interview me. I hugged him. “Finally,” I said.

  Champagne popped all over the place. People were screaming. “Finally,” I repeated. “It’s been a long time, Jack. A long time coming.”

  I was exhausted, elated. I raised a number one finger to the camera. Lew came into the locker room, and I hugged him. “Big fella!”

  It had been sixteen years since I had won the Indiana state high school championship with Crispus Attucks. After that game, they’d given us soda pops.

  It had been eleven years since I’d won a gold medal at the Olympics. I don’t remember what I’d had after that win.

  Finally, I was an NBA champion. I grabbed a bottle of champagne and a paper cup. Of all the champagne I’d drunk in my life, this was the sweetest. Amid the insanity, I congratulated each team member. I’m supposed to be stone-faced, but I was jubilant and kept repeating, “Finally. We finally did it.”

  The celebration continued, and so did the hugs. Waves of relief and emotion crested and ebbed, crashing over one another and intermingling. I wished I could have hugged Ray Crowe. Tom Sleet, Al Spurlock, George Smith, J. W., Austin, and every teammate and anyone who had ever helped me on and off the court were there. Most important, I wished my family would have been there. I slipped away from the ruckus. Lew was sitting quietly in a corner, drinking a Coke and chewing gum. He’d now won national titles at high school, college, and the professional level. After a few moments to himself, he admitted to a reporter that he was glad the ordeal was over and said he wanted to get some rest. He got up, took a paper cup, and drank some victory champagne. I passed by him and found a phone.

  Yvonne picked up on the first ring. I could sense her tears and happiness through the phone static.

  “Hi Yvonne,” I said. “We finally did it.”

  In the press conference afterwards, someone asked Bullets coach Gene Shue who he thought should have won the most valuable player award. “Oscar,” he answered. “Oscar was their leader, he controlled their offense, he hit the open man, and he played tremendous defense. I said when they got him they would be the best team in basketball.” The majority of voters felt otherwise. Averaging twenty-seven points a game, Lew was named the series MVP, and for his efforts received a new car. I was happy for Lew.

  Now I had a championship. It was a heavy load off my shoulders.

  In the deciding game of the series, I’d played some of my finest basketball, scoring a team-high thirty points (on eleven of fifteen shooting), while amassing nine assists and three rebounds. There couldn’t be any greater vindication for all the hell I went through in Cincinnati. When a reporter mentioned how easily I could have ended up being in the other locker room right now, I answered, “Yes. I know how close it was. And I’m glad I wound up in Milwaukee.” I didn’t say I was glad I didn’t go to Baltimore. I just said I was glad I came to Milwaukee.

  I’ve always felt that the 1970–71 Milwaukee Bucks were one of the great teams in basketball history. Including the ten preseason and fourteen playoff games, our overall record was 88–18. We were the second team in league history to sweep the championship series (the 1959 Celtics had been the other). Moreover, we lost fewer playoff games (two) and won by a higher average margin of victory (14.5) than any previous champion—to this day only Moses Malone’s 1982–83 Philadelphia 76ers have ever beaten our playoff record (12–2). Sure, some people said that competition was diluted by the ABA and league expansion. But I disagree. For one thing, the reserve clause, along with the lack of any salary cap, ensured that teams had a depth that is unimaginable in today’s game. As for the expansion issue, Michael Jordan’s 1995–96 Bulls won their seventy-two games right after the league expanded. There’s no question that competition that season was watered down, and expansion allowed the better teams to pad their win total (Seattle also won sixty-five games that season, for one of the ten best regular-season records of all time). Yet nobody questions the Bulls’ status as an all-time team.

  Teams around the league regarded 1970 as the year to beat us. Lew and Bobby Dandridge and Lucius Allen were all coming into their own. By all rights, we had the makings of a dynasty.

  The next afternoon we flew back to Milwaukee. A cheering crowd was waiting for us at Mitchell Field. I drove back into Kenboern. Turning into the cul-de-sac, I saw out in front of my house that a sign had been tacked up. It was maybe thirty feet long and three feet wide, with huge, spray-painted letters:

  CONGRATULATIONS O.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Do Not Go Gently

  1971–1974

  GREAT PLAYERS WIN CHAMPIONS
HIPS. It’s a common remark among sports experts and talk-show people. The idea is that unless a player carries a team to a title, individual achievements don’t quite measure up. As if one guy, playing a team sport, can make up for his team’s front-office mistakes, coaching blunders, and small-market payrolls. As if all by himself he can overwhelm other teams that not only have talented players but also might be run by smart coaches, with a front office that just maybe scouts and picks well at the draft, negotiates good trades, or has the payroll and kind of market that allows them to attract the best players.

  Michael Jordan happened to be an unbelievable individual player. He also was fortunate enough to play on a team that recognized major talent, especially Scottie Pippen’s potential, drafting him out of Central Arkansas. The duo was fortunate enough to play together for many years and grow as players and teammates. They may not have been happy with all of the decisions that their general manager, Jerry Krause, made, but few would disagree that the man successfully constructed teams around the pair that were geared toward and complimented their individual abilities. Add to that Michael’s indomitable will, and you get a stunning total of six titles. A testament to Michael’s desire and talent, yes. Still, I can’t imagine anybody claiming that Michael’s will alone won those titles.

  Ted Williams never won a World Series. Neither did Ernie Banks. Gale Sayers never won an NFL championship, and Dan Marino never won a Super Bowl. Charles Barkley never won an NBA title. Connie Hawkins, Karl Malone, Sidney Moncrief, Darrell Griffith—none of them won championships. The list goes on and on. Does it mean any of them weren’t great players? Don’t they deserve consideration when people talk about all-time greats?

  Having said this, man, was I glad to win that title.

  Losing weighs on you, no doubt about it. A title was a validation.

  Our team split $212,000 in playoff money. For some reason I never understood, Milwaukee’s front office let the play-by-play announcer pick the ring design instead of giving the players a say. Everybody got rings. The players, all the minority owners and investors, every secretary in the office. Everybody except one guy, the equipment manager. We used to call him Goody, and he’d taken care of the equipment for the team since their inception and, man, he wanted one of those rings. I never understood why he didn’t get one.

  Soon my attention turned back to union responsibilities and our lawsuit. Robertson v. NBA had resulted in a preliminary injunction against any merger between the National and American Basketball Leagues. However, the court left a window of opportunity to NBA and ABA representatives to file for a Sherman waiver—a move that would have allowed for an exemption from antitrust status. (Baseball and football had received similar waivers; in the case of the NFL, this had cleared the way for a merger with the AFL.)

  The ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee was a Republican law-and-order senator from Nebraska, Roman L. Hruska. In September 1971, he introduced a bill (S237) to the Senate that would grant the NBA a Sherman waiver. A subsection of the Committee on the Judiciary, the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, considered whether to grant the waiver and clear the way for a merger.

  The stakes could not get any higher than this.

  Hearings were held. Hruska was a principal advocate of the merger. Former California state senator Thomas Kuchel spoke on behalf of the NBA, saying that the salary wars for untested college stars “will inexorably end in ruin.”

  There was but one senator who spoke out against S237. He was the longtime Republican senator from North Carolina, Sam Ervin. Ervin was a strict constructionist, interpreting the Constitution literally. During the 1960s, Ervin had been known as something of an independent. To the delight of liberals, he supported civil liberties, opposed “no knock” search laws, data banks, and lie-detector tests as invasions of privacy. In 1966, he helped defeat a constitutional amendment that would have allowed prayer in school. At the same time, Ervin also opposed almost all civil rights legislation, in part on the grounds that a civil rights law took rights away from others (whites, for example: the right to hire whom they wanted, to sell their homes to whom they wanted, to go to school where they wanted).

  Sam Ervin would go on to become the chairman of the Senate Select Committee to Investigate Campaign Practices—popularly referred to as the “Ervin Committee” or the “Watergate Committee.” With eyebrows arching and references to Shakespeare and Bible-themed speeches of moral indignation, Ervin was a major figure in the Watergate investigation and Richard Nixon’s eventual presidential downfall. (One choice line: “The President seems to extend executive privilege way out past the atmosphere. What he says is executive privilege is nothing but executive poppycock.”)

  However, before his Watergate heroics landed his face on counter-cultural tee shirts, the strict constructionist helped determine the fate of professional basketball.

  Witnesses from each side of the argument came, testified, and answered questions in front of the imposing half-circle of committee members. As with all political issues, certain senators already had made up their minds to advocate one side or another, and the slant of their questions betrayed this advocacy. Often, Ervin ended up squaring off with Senator Hruska and others.

  John Havlicek and I were the only two players to testify. During the weeks when I should have been getting ready for training camp, a great deal of my time was spent in offices working with Larry Fleisher in preparation for my appearance. We didn’t go over testimony, per se, because we didn’t know what questions were going to be asked. We reviewed various scenarios; we wanted to make sure that I let the senators know exactly what the Players Association was trying to do as an organization.

  On September 22, 1971, accompanied by Larry, I testified:

  I speak here today on behalf of the players in the National Basketball Association. Our opposition to the proposed merger (of the two leagues) is total. Every player supports our stand and the positions as indicated by our counsel in prior testimony. The players recognize the unfairness of a system of professional basketball which allows them to negotiate with only one team. They have gone through the experience of no competition prior to the ABA’s existence and of great competition since 1967. They understand that every player has been dramatically helped by the competitive aspects of a second league. All of their salaries have increased, from the last man of the team to the superstars.

  I have personally seen the hardships that were wrought upon many players in the NBA during the early 1960s—the men who played for five thousand or six thousand dollars a year, the men who were not able to bargain effectively for increases, the men who retired and were finished with their careers at age thirty without any benefits. We, the so-called superstars, really do not need to fight the merger. I have a long-term contract. I will probably retire at the end of my contract. I do not stand to benefit financially by having the leagues continue to compete for my services, but I do stand to benefit by seeing that the four-hundred-some-odd ballplayers in professional basketball have an opportunity to be treated as other people in American life; that they can truly negotiate for their services; that they can escape from the ghettos or leave the suburbs, knowing full well that they have a right to earn an income commensurate with their skills and commensurate with the risks involved in the shortness of their careers.

  All of our players stand behind me in this position.

  The questions proceeded. Senator Ervin began by asking about a player’s brief career window and the idea of players receiving the same chance to work in a free market as everyone else. Other senators asked about how I felt about being traded and the right to choose my workplace. Soon Senator Hruska became involved.

  SENATOR HRUSKA: Mr. Robertson, there are some people who believe that a draft of some kind is necessary for organized league sports, that without some discipline of that kind, it would not be possible over the long run for league sports in this type of team sports to do their most effective work or perhaps over the long run to per
form in the fashion and the way that the American public is willing to support. Have you given that proposition any thought on your own?

  OR: Yes, I have. Quite a bit.

  SENATOR HRUSKA: Would you mind sharing with us some of the conclusions you have reached in that regard?

  OR: Well, this will be my twelfth year in professional basketball, and I have seen some of the ills brought on the ballplayers when I first started playing basketball, and I think it is terribly wrong for anyone to limit anyone’s ability to earn money no matter where it may be, whether it is in business or in sports. I think any time you limit a person as to where he can go, such as the case was prior to the two leagues, I think it is terribly wrong.

  SENATOR HRUSKA: It is wrong to limit the amount of money a man can earn?

  OR: I think in America it is.

  SENATOR HRUSKA: Does the draft system do that?

  OR: I think if you only had one league, that is true. As long as you have two leagues, there is no telling what a person can earn.

  SENATOR HRUSKA: You seem to have done pretty well. Do you think you are worth more than the one hundred thousand dollars you are getting?

  Immediately, Larry Fleisher leaned over toward me. We’d known each other for years now, and he knew what my immediate reaction might be: “There may be those who wonder if you are worth the money you are getting from the taxpayers.” Larry whispered in my ear. I thought about his advice, paused, took a drink of water.

  OR: To be honest and frank, I think so.

  There was some laughter from the committee and the gallery. I waited for it to end.

  As the hearings proceeded, an independent report by the Brookings Institute found that clubs in both basketball leagues suffered not from salary inflation, but from insufficient revenues due to playing in arenas too small to support them. According to the report, only the sharing of home-game receipts with visiting clubs, plus the end of compulsory option clauses, could save the leagues. When the findings were brought in front of the committee, NBA commissioner responded with the opinion that these provisions “wrecked the chance of merger.” Witnesses continued to be heard. The committee went into deliberations. By this time, training camp was about to start.