The Big O

by Oscar P Robertson

  Epilogue

  YOU CAN STILL VISIT BELLSBURG, Tennessee, and walk the farmlands where my great-grandfather Marshall Collier and my maternal grandfather Papa Bell worked and toiled. On his deathbed, Papa Bell told my mother to keep his land and never sell it.

  In most cases, though, change is constant. While the run-down area of Indianapolis where I grew up is still called Lockefield Gardens, that’s where the resemblance ends. Half of Lockefield’s original twenty-four buildings were demolished during the early 1980s. The blacks were put out. Most of the remaining buildings were converted to upscale apartment complexes, replete with manicured lawns, fountains at the entranceways, and swimming pools where yuppies lounge and college kids flirt. Need I say it is predominantly white now? There’s a waiting list for apartments. As for the Dust Bowl, it was dismantled during the renovations. I don’t think that should have happened. Indiana is supposed to be a state that cares about basketball. But if urban basketball had mattered at all to the city planners, if the politicians cared one bit about what the community thought or considered the significance of those courts to the history of the game and the city, the Dust Bowl would have been landmarked. Now it’s too late.

  Crispus Attucks High School also was a casualty of progress. Once Attucks won its second state basketball title, white high schools started admitting and attracting black athletes. When the athletes diffused into other schools, more and more of the Attucks student body followed. By the mid-1960s, Crispus Attucks no longer served as the educational, social, and cultural backbone of black Indianapolis. Some of the more radical activists in Indianapolis wanted to tear down the school because of the supposed memories of prejudice it evoked. Those activists were on the wrong track. When they looked at the school, they saw a symbol of the white man’s prejudice. But if you attended Attucks, you didn’t experience prejudice within its walls. I remember Crispus Attucks as a haven where I learned much of what helped me become a success. I was truly happy at Crispus Attucks. The prejudice I encountered was in the white sections of town.

  In the 1970s and 1980s Crispus Attucks was integrated. Enrollment kept shrinking. In 1986, the school was converted to a junior high.

  Yvonne and I had moved back to Cincinnati in 1975. Including the years I spent here during college and the pros, I’ve called the city home for well over forty years. My Ohio license plate reads, simply, ‘OR4’, and it is not unusual, even now, for cabbies or pedestrians to crane their necks as they greet me. Restaurant maître d’s are happy to rush me to a good table, and every once in a while a teenager or child recognizes me from television. My wife takes me to cultural events and has helped me to enjoy social occasions. I like to smoke an occasional cigar and drink a beer. I own businesses here. I raised my children in Cincinnati, and I’m comfortable here.

  I am a part of Cincinnati life.

  And yet . . .

  Though the racial divisions that were so prevalent when I first moved here have been closed in many ways, in too many other ways things are worse than ever. There were acts of vandalism through the streets last year. The political leadership needs improvement. The city’s school and library systems are having financial trouble. Banks should certainly lend more to minority-owned businesses for them to be successful. A local talk-radio station broadcasts such racially charged invectives that it’s hard for me, in good conscience, to go onto my friend Andy Fuhrman’s radio show, because it’s on the same station. The city’s still not the best sports town for blacks. Coming off a 2002 season as the NFL’s laughingstock, the Bengals responded by hiring Marvin Lewis as their head coach. Lewis has been one of the best defensive coordinators in the league for years. I hope he starts winning fast. The window of opportunity does not stay open long.

  For decades I’ve done whatever I could to help the University of Cincinnati’s basketball program. Whenever I could help in recruiting, I would. At the same time, I also let the school know it would be wrong for me to tell some young man to come to the university if I didn’t think he could do the academics or wasn’t a good enough ballplayer. I support the school, but without sacrificing my own personal integrity. This never went so far as to create a rift between the University of Cincinnati and me. But I have to admit, for a time relations between us were a bit chilled. We’re on better terms now, the university and I. In 1989, Bob Huggins was hired to try and rejuvenate the men’s basketball program. While I wasn’t going to impose myself or go anywhere I wasn’t wanted, I wanted to welcome him to town. Soon he, George Smith, and I went out to lunch and talked about the program, where it had been, where it was going. At my daughter’s urging, I have six season tickets. I stop by practices once a week or so, talk to the players about basketball.

  In 1993, before J. W. Brown passed away, he did one final wonderful thing for me.

  I remember when Rod Noll first mentioned to the idea of having a statue of me constructed. It was a nice gesture, but I thought it was kind of crazy. I actually told him no, that I appreciated the thought but didn’t want any statues put up for me. But J. W.’s son, Robert, said that J. W. wanted it.

  Then he told me he was dying.

  The Myrl Shoemaker Center is the hub of the University of Cincinnati’s athletic facilities, a 13,176-seat, ultramodern basketball and volleyball arena, with private executive suites, a restaurant and lounge, and an expansive video scoreboard. Among his final activities, J. W. arranged to have a statue of me put out in front of the center’s main entranceway. Not only that, but he found the artist—Blair Buswell of Highland, Utah. As if this was not enough, he also financed the statue’s construction and installation.

  I remember the press conference when the university announced the statue’s placement. I couldn’t help but think back to when I was seventeen years old and J. W. took me under his wing, invited me to his home for the first time. I couldn’t help but remember how tough things were for me at school and on the road.

  So much time had passed, so much had happened.

  The sculpture is larger than life. It shines, impervious to time and the elements.

  I look at it and see a bronze version of myself—young and lithe, in motion, racing up court, looking up, my body ready to spring, the basketball connected firmly to my hand.

  I told everyone that I was going to drive downtown and come around at 5:30 in the morning when nobody was here, just to look at it sometimes.

  Finally, when it was time to unveil the statue, I took to the podium, first making a joke about college students, then about how the statue takes twenty pounds and twenty years away from me. When it was time to get serious, I once again was flooded with memories—of black cats in locker rooms and the Klan and also all the friends who’d stood by me.

  “Time is slipping by,” I said.

  “This statue is for Oscar Robertson,” I said. “But it’s also for you. And you. And you.”

  As I pointed into the crowd and as my voice rose, it also tremored and cracked, and I started crying. I couldn’t help it. This was the catharsis, the happy ending, the hero riding off into the sunset. It was wonderful.

  And yet . . .

  It was rumored that either my wife or me would be asked to be on the University of Cincinnati board of trustees. When my name came up, I’ve been told, the idea was dismissed, with the excuse, “Oh, he’ll want to hire black professors.” Never mind that it’s a public university now, so by law it should be diverse. Never mind that the issue has nothing to do with me; if there aren’t enough black professors, then some should be hired. It’s just a matter of right and wrong. Never mind that seeing how many Jewish people have helped me in my life, I might want to hire Jewish professors, I might want to hire Martians, but neither Yvonne nor I are going to be given the chance to so much as express our respective views in preliminary interviews. Never mind that if I hadn’t integrated the basketball team, it might be getting around to admitting its first black student right about now.

  So long as I am a statue or a symbol, everything i
s fine. It’s when I express views and ideas that doors close. Is this what it means to be an immortal?

  My old uniform from Crispus Attucks sits safely on display in a glass case in the Basketball Hall of Fame, in Springfield, Massachusetts. My Cincinnati Bearcats jersey hangs from the rafters of Shoemaker Center, and my bronzed likeness stands in front of their arena. The Milwaukee Bucks have retired my number. I’ve received every honor that a basketball player can get, ranging from being named player of the century to gracing the NBA’s roster of the fifty greatest players of all time. The United States Basketball Writers of America even renamed their college player of the year award in my honor. I’m honored and more than happy they named such a prestigious award after me.

  Doing things the right way always has been important to me. It remains so. For example, on February 16, 2003, a week or so after the 2003 all-star break and some thirty-three years after my career with the Cincinnati Royals ended, the Sacramento Kings retired my jersey during halftime of a nationally televised game against the San Antonio Spurs. During the game, the Kings wore retro jerseys. Some of this was done in conjunction with an NBA program called Hardwood Classic Nights.

  Since 1999, when Joe and Gavin Maloof became the majority owners of the Sacramento Kings, they’ve turned that moribund franchise around, transforming it from one of the NBA’s graveyards into a crown jewel. The Kings are a title contender for the first time, really, since Jerry Lucas and I had our chances ruined by that stupid trade that got rid of Bob Boozer.

  The Maloofs invited me and some others from the franchise’s history out for the weekend. They didn’t have to have a ceremony, didn’t have to acknowledge the Kings’ roots in Cincinnati, didn’t have to do any of this, NBA program or not. But they not only hosted the weekend, they treated everyone very well. It was one of the most professional situations I’ve been involved in, in my life.

  That was a wonderful gesture, let me tell you. While in Sacramento, my wife and I had some talks with their superstar forward, Chris Webber. My wife spoke to him about African art.

  So other than my Olympic and all-star jerseys, every number I’ve ever worn has been retired. I guess I am a regular living legend.

  Until Michael Jordan came onto the scene, most basketball experts considered me the greatest all-around player who ever lived. Even now the question rages. Phil Jackson played against me as a member of the New York Knicks and also coached Michael to all of his championships. He’s always answered the “Who’s better?” questions diplomatically, talking about the impossibility and unfairness of comparing players from different eras, especially considering how different Michael and I were on the court. (Michael was a scoring machine; I was a player who could assume that role, but I was first and foremost a floor general.) Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played with Magic and against Michael, and he’s always been generous, saying that he played with me first and that made his time with me special.

  I think Hubie Brown has a unique perspective on matters. Hubie was an assistant on our championship Milwaukee team. After a stint as head coach of the Knicks in the early 1980s, Hubie retired to the announcing booth until just this past year, when Jerry West asked him to take over as coach and teacher of the Memphis Grizzlies.

  “When they pick the top ten players of all time, they are always going to pick the same four guards,” Hubie says. “Oscar Robertson, Michael Jordan, Jerry West, and Magic Johnson. Oscar will always be one of the top ten players to ever play. And then when people say Michael Jordan was the greatest player in the history of the game, well, the guy he had to top was Oscar Robertson.”

  Again, a generous answer. The truth is, I get the question a lot: How would I stack up against Michael Jordan? I’ll tell you the question that really should be asked: How would players like Michael Jordan or any of the players playing today stack up against Oscar Robertson? How would they do against Jerry West or Wilt Chamberlain?

  Michael is truly a once-in-a-lifetime player. He always seemed to understand what his team needed from him. But in the context of playing the game, no, I don’t think anyone was any better than I was. As I said before, people don’t realize what’s asked of you when you play with a team that’s not very good. You have to get other players in control; you can’t freelance. If I would have—if I could have—shot the ball thirty times a game (18.9 field-goal attempts per game was my career average), I would have scored a lot more, I guarantee that.

  Does it bother me that people today tend to think everyone who plays now is better? No. Because I know no one in basketball could achieve what I could achieve if I were in my prime and playing now. No one could do now what Bill Russell could do. No one could do what Wilt could do. And that’s the end of it.

  Of course, speculation is beside the point. You can’t alter history or change time. We live in the here and now; a new generation of players is maturing and becoming the game’s leaders, Iverson and Webber, McGrady, Kevin Garnett, and Vince Carter among them. They’re all very good, even great, players, but if there’s anything missing from their games, it’s this: Some of these great basketball players do hardly anything to help the team or the other players on the team. I always thought that my role was to get the team going, get other players involved. You don’t see that a lot anymore.

  Of today’s generation of players, I think Kobe Bryant is the best. Kobe has a tremendous game. Everyone wants to compare him to Michael Jordan. Kobe is so far ahead of Michael Jordan at this point in his career, it’s unbelievable. Kobe Bryant is the heart and soul of the Lakers. Lots of people say it’s Shaq. Shaq is great, no doubt about that. If you look at the games that have been won by Los Angeles, and you look at the most important parts of the game, yes, Shaq is very important. He is an outstanding big man inside, especially if he stays close to the basket, but Kobe Bryant makes the plays. He makes the pass, the block, gets the rebound, gets out and gets the tempo up. He has the size and speed to go to I don’t know what heights.

  The business of basketball has changed a lot in the past twenty years. At the beginning of the 1980s, the NBA finals were being televised late at night, on a tape-delay basis, because ratings were so awful. Magic and Bird changed that and began a cult of personality that Michael Jordan then took to previously uncharted dimensions. At the same time, the free-agency clause that I went to court to obtain ushered in a new level of salaries, with players signing contracts for unheard-of amounts of money and agents exerting as much control on a team’s roster as general managers. In 1998, it reached a boiling point: A labor stoppage seriously hurt the game, damaging owners as well as the image of players and the union (especially when player meetings were held in Atlantic City, and one guard joked, to The New York Times, “If this strike goes another week, I may have to sell one of my cars”).

  Thankfully, the game has emerged from the wreckage. Revenue sharing allows all teams, be they small- or large-market, to pay top salaries. There’s free agency and player movement and salary caps, not only for rookies, but for all levels of veterans, dependent on how long each player has been in the league. During the 1980s, Michael Jordan opened the gates to endorsement millions for Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, and untold others, but there are not that many great endorsement deals off the court anymore. Those days are gone. They had their run, and the players enjoyed it.

  I am not privy to what’s going on between the union and the owners today, negotiation-wise. I watch the game as a fan. And I know that right now the game is not as competitive as it could be. Maybe four or five teams could win a championship—that’s the extent of it. Other than that, the league has become a marketing tool that is used by the NBA and its licensees to sell products. Caps. Socks. Jackets. Headbands. Everything that kids want. Even the history of the game is being marketed as fashion. The league is more than willing to license three-hundred-dollar “retro” jerseys styled after the uniforms of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. But does this do anything besides sell the image? What about the actual history of the game? NBA 2Nigh
t is a nightly show on ESPN. There’s a weekly show, Inside Stuff, which the NBA produces, that runs on ABC, and an ESPN2 program that follows teams around. There are those pre- and post-game shows on all these networks: ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Classic, TNT, TNN. They’re affiliated with the NBA, they cover the NBA, and none of them capitalizes, utilizes, or even pays attention to the history of the league. Nothing matters to the press beside tonight’s highlights, this week’s wackiest plays, and dunks, dunks, dunks.

  Meanwhile, the fans are saying something else. Retro jerseys featuring the names and numbers of the all-time greats are selling out. I’m pleased to report that some things have changed: The retired wing of the Players Association is totally involved with this.

  Once I retired and came home to Cincinnati, I felt I would be able to capitalize on my career and popularity here. J. W. Brown and his son Robert helped me make the transition to the private sector. I still took time out to conduct youth basketball clinics—both throughout the nation and internationally. I was hired as a consultant for Specs International, a sportswear business, and even spent a few years working part-time as a television analyst for the Metro-7 league, a forerunner of what has become the Great American Conference. But my primary professional focus was the business world.

  If my years of union struggles taught me one thing, it was that when you want to get something done in this country, you’ve got to have an economic and political power base to work from. Without that, you have no leverage. Without financing, even the greatest idea and project comes out to nothing.

  Too many people are content to live in their little shells, their suburbs, their homes, to plan vacations and pull down the shades on what’s happening around them in business, their communities, and governments. Not me. I learned that all this world owes you is the opportunity to do something for yourself.