by William Cook
Following Attucks’ first championship in 1955 the victory parade for Oscar Robertson’s team was rerouted in Indianapolis toward the predominately black residential area (or ghetto) because the city fathers didn’t trust the blacks to behave themselves along the traditional route. This event left an indelible mark on Robertson’s psyche.
In winning back-to-back state championships in 1954–55 and 1955–56 the Crispus Attucks teams had a record of 60–1. While Oscar Robertson was the most famous player on those teams, the squad also included Hallie Bryant and Willie Gardner, both of whom would go on to play for the Harlem Globetrotters.
Besides his basketball prowess, Oscar Robertson was a better than average high school student and heavily recruited. More than seventy-five schools expressed an interest in him and forty schools contacted him directly, including UCLA, Duquesne, Kansas, NYU, Duke, Marquette, Nebraska, Illinois, Purdue, Notre Dame, Arizona State, Cincinnati, and Indiana.
Oscar was no different than most kids in Indiana, black or white—most kids who played basketball in the state had a dream of playing for Indiana University. However, during a recruiting visit to Bloomington, Oscar was disappointed and promptly left the Indiana campus after being confronted by coach Branch McCracken who stated, “I hope you’re not the kind of kid who wants money to go school.”3
The insinuation that he was out for money deeply insulted Robertson. He was to say later that if McCracken had just said something as mundane as “Oscar, we really want you to come to Indiana and play basketball for us,” he would have grabbed a pen and signed on the dotted line to become a Hoosier.
Oscar Robertson wasn’t the only talented black basketball player to have misgivings about Branch McCracken. Wilt Chamberlain had been offered a scholarship by Indiana and made a campus visit but left convinced that McCracken had racist tendencies, so he signed with Kansas.
Robertson ultimately decided to enroll at the University of Cincinnati for several reasons: it was close to home, only a hundred miles from Indianapolis; he intended to study business, and liked the fact that UC had a business administration program that included a co-op program; the Bearcats played a lot of eastern teams and he always wanted to play in such venues as Madison Square Garden; and the clincher was that his parents, Bailey and Mazell Robertson, liked Bearcats head coach George Smith.
After enrolling in the University of Cincinnati and entering the business administration program, Oscar began his co-op job in the accounting department at the Cincinnati Gas & Electric Company. But he quickly felt that the racism of Indianapolis had followed him to Cincinnati. The racial environment of the UC campus and community at large didn’t improve much and considerably reinforced his negative feelings about America’s racial conscious.
Most writers chronicling Robertson’s early days at UC state that his professors harassed him. The fact is that most college freshman, regardless of their race, are routinely, although mildly, harassed by their professors and instructors to socialize them into an environment of higher learning. But Oscar maintained in his own biography, The Big O—My Life, My Times, My Game, that he was ridiculed by his professors who attempted to make him feel stupid. One could make a case that it was Oscar once again conceptualizing himself as a victim.
Oscar arrived in Cincinnati to play basketball amidst considerable ballyhoo in the press and tickets for Bearcats home games quickly became scarce. Robertson’s freshman team, that included Ron Dykes, Ralph Davis, Spud Hornsby, and Larry Willey, averaged 99.6 points per game and finished with 13–12 record.
Following Robertson’s freshman year, all the Bearcats home games were sold out for the next three years. Beginning in his sophomore year and through his senior year, Oscar filled the 8,000-seat Armory Fieldhouse to capacity. Unprecedented large crowds also showed up for his freshman squad games that preceded the varsity contests. Every Bearcat fan, whether young or old, was filled with optimism and the mantra became wait till next year.
Haldane Dosher Higgins was a Bear Kitten with the University of Cincinnati Band when Oscar Robertson arrived on the campus in the fall of 1956. Over the next few years, Ms. Dosher Higgins would have the opportunity to see Oscar mature. Recently, she stated, in regard to Oscar, “from a shy freshman in 1956 to a national hero in 2014. I knew in those days I was watching history in the making.”4
Dick Baker, who was the director of community relations at UC when Oscar Robertson arrived on the campus, took responsibility for giving him the nickname “The Big O.” According to Baker, it was early in the ’57–58 season when Lee Allen (late historian for the National Baseball Hall of Fame), who, writing for the Cincinnati Enquirer at the time, told him that he ought to get a nickname for Oscar. “How’s “The Big O” strike you?” asked Baker. “That’s a helluva good name,” Allen replied.5
Despite all the ballyhoo over Robertson’s arrival in Cincinnati, just a couple of blocks away from the Armory Fieldhouse in the neighborhoods of Corryville, Clifton, and Clifton Heights that bordered and surrounded the big campus, Oscar was persona non-grata and regarded by most neighborhood merchants as just another black man that posed a threat to their livelihood, especially in the places where white people socialized: the theatres, restaurants, and taverns. The feeling among the tavern owners and restaurateurs in the area at that time was that, although they loved the way Robertson played basketball and were big fans of his, they feared that if he came into their place of business, then perhaps he would return the following evening with a whole lot of black friends and drive away their white clientele.
So about all that was available to Robertson in the area was a take-out pizza and hamburgers—about the same fare that would have been available to him in the deep south.
In some areas, in close proximity to the campus, blatant rather than subtle segregation existed. In Corryville, on the east side of the UC campus, there was a weekly bingo game held in an old gymnasium run by a veteran’s group that enforced a policy of seating bingo players in various halls in the facility according to race. Hence there were black halls and white halls for bingo players.
The feeling by black Bearcats players that they weren’t welcome off the UC campus in the surrounding neighborhoods persisted for more than a decade after Oscar Robertson had graduated. Rick Roberson, a native of Memphis, Tennessee, who bypassed the opportunity to become the first black player to play at Memphis State by choosing Cincinnati instead, was one who openly expressed the feeling that he wasn’t welcome in areas off-campus. Roberson, who played for the Bearcats from 1966 to 1969 and would become the school’s fourth all-time best rebounder behind Oscar Robertson, Jack Twyman, and Connie Dierking, always felt uncomfortable only a few blocks away from the UC campus.
During Oscar Robertson’s sophomore year, in one of the first road games of his collegiate career on December 21, 1957, he was confronted with a sickening episode of racism when the Cincinnati Bearcats went down to Texas to play the University of Houston Cougars.
In the years following World War Two into the early 1960s, the city of Houston, Texas went through a period of enormous economic, social, and cultural change. It was one of the largest municipal metamorphoses in American history. By 1958, Houston had become a modern boomtown. Between 1950 and 1960, the population of the city rose by 36%, from 596,163 to 938,219. By 1970, the city’s population would exceed one million inhabitants and continues to grow today.
Entering the 1960s, with the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union in full throttle, Houston would become the headquarters of NASA, and with the expansion of the ship channel, the city was now coming under the spotlight of international attention and potential investors. The voters in the county of Morris had even approved a $20 million bond issue to build an air-conditioned, domed stadium, to be used by professional baseball, football, and basketball, to possibly be ready for use by 1962. In order to expedite the needed cultural change necessary to transform Houston from a sleepy southern town into a huge international city, quietly
civic leaders, civil rights advocates, and influential business leaders in the community got together for a meeting of the minds at the “whites only” Rice Hotel and in just one day they would agree to end racial segregation in public accommodations in the city of Houston.
Houston, Texas had, for generations, been culturally on the cusp of the deep-south and its backward racial atmosphere had stunted the growth of the city. But, with forward-thinking leadership, by 1968, Houston would become a booming metropolis with gleaming skyscrapers and bustling suburbs.
The city’s growth was a factor in prompting Eddie Einhorn, the future owner of the Chicago White Sox and ever the entrepreneur, to coordinate what is considered the first nationally televised college basketball game in 1968. Billed as the “Game of the Century,” Einhorn put together a spectacular college basketball showdown featuring two of the most talented black athletes of the twentieth century: UCLA’s Lew Alcindor and The University of Houston’s Elvin Hayes playing in the Astrodome. The game was watched by millions of fans across the country.
But in late 1957, when the University of Cincinnati Bearcats were about to come to town, Houston was a cow town with skyscrapers just beginning to dot its landscape and its inhabitants’ still clinging to its racially intolerant past. Oscar Robertson would become one of the many talented black people that Houston was not yet ready to embrace and seemed to take pride in insulting.
The Cincinnati Bearcats were staying at the Shamrock Hilton Hotel in Houston for their game with the University of Houston Cougars. Around 12 midnight, UC coach George Smith went to Robertson’s room and informed him that the management of the hotel wanted him out. Robertson was taken across town to Texas Southern University where he was given a dorm room to spend the night, while his white teammates remained downtown at the Hilton.
In retrospect, looking at the insensitivity of George Smith’s inaction when confronted with racial discrimination toward one of his players, reasonable minds would question why the coach didn’t remove his entire squad from the hotel. The ignominious action of the hotel management just wasn’t an insult to Oscar, it was a huge insult to the entire Bearcat team and to the University of Cincinnati.
But looking back at the incident through the prism of time, one needs to be reminded that in the 1950s and early 1960s, inequalities in accommodations for athletes of color, regardless of if they were amateur or professional, was a dirty little organizational sanctioned norm.
Nearly all the Major League Baseball teams of the era had segregated accommodations for white and black players in Florida during spring training. The policy advanced by the front offices was that their clubs were part-time residents in the state and they didn’t really have the standing to question the local laws or social norms of the communities they trained in. It was, in fact, an endorsement by the teams’ management of discrimination against their employees. It made hypocrites out of supposedly fair-minded baseball men such as August Bush, Branch Rickey, Bill Veeck, Jr., Gabe Paul, and others. George Smith was just as hypocritical when being faced with the discrimination aimed at Oscar Robertson in Houston by taking no action on his or the university’s behalf.
The game was played and only about 2,000 fans saw it in Houston’s small and narrow gym. The Bearcats defeated Houston 70–53 as The Big O scored 25 points.
Later, Oscar Robertson was to state in his biography that as much as it bothered him that he had been forced to leave the hotel, it bothered him a lot more that he had been the only person that was forced to leave. “All this talk about being a team and winning and losing together, staying together and doing things together—as a team. What just happened? I asked myself. I had forgotten momentarily that this was America.”6
The racial insults experienced by Robertson in Houston had been proceeded by insults at Denton, Texas. In the game against North Texas State in Denton, when Robertson first entered the locker room, he found that a black cat had been let loose. Then, when the game began, the fans got on him pretty hard, but they didn’t rattle Oscar as he scored 37 points.
It appeared that the whole affair, all of the indignities that confronted Oscar Robertson in Texas, were swept under the rug by George Smith, the University of Cincinnati, and the Cincinnati press.
The Cincinnati press acted as if they were oblivious to the racial insults that Robertson had suffered in Texas, and there was not even a hint of any of the episodes printed in the city’s three major daily newspapers: Cincinnati Enquirer, Cincinnati Post, or Cincinnati Times-Star. In the Enquirer, on the page carrying the Houston game summary, there appeared a companion article highlighting the average day for Oscar Robertson on the UC campus. Basketball and school at Cincinnati were portrayed as a rather warm and fuzzy experience for The Big O.
Such overt episodes of racial discrimination overwhelmed Oscar Robertson emotionally and led him on a perpetual thought process that life was unfair and that if you were black you were always going to be victimized. But this defense mechanism also protected Oscar and drove his fierce sense of competitiveness on the basketball court where he demonstrated with ease that he was superior to everyone, not just white players, but other black players, too. Going forward in the pros, Oscar’s Cincinnati Royals teammates would be constantly held on the short lease of his intense scrutiny.
If Oscar Robertson as a sophomore had done nothing more than what he did on the night of January 9, 1958, at Madison Square Garden in New York, his legacy in college basketball and as a Cincinnati Bearcat would still have been assured for all time. At the time Robertson was averaging 30 points and 16 rebounds per game. Then, in the most fabled game of Robertson’s college career, he scored 56 points (22 field goals on 32 shots and 12 straight foul shots) vs. Seton Hall at the Garden as the Bearcats defeated the Pirates 118–54. Oscar’s 22 field goals had topped the previous record of 21 by George Mikan of DePaul in the 1945 NIT.
Robertson’s epic 56-point performance at Madison Square Garden broke the arena’s all-time scoring record of 54 points held jointly by Tony Jackson of Brooklyn’s Thomas Jefferson High School in 1957 and St. John’s University’s Harry Boykoff in 1947.
The professional record for the Garden at that time was 49 points held by Neil Johnston of the Philadelphia Warriors. That total would eventually be surpassed by Wilt Chamberlain of the San Francisco Warriors who had 73 in 1962. The scoring record for the current Madison Square Garden that opened in 1968 is 62 points set by Carmelo Antony of the New York Knicks in 2014.
There were plenty of pro scouts watching the Holiday Tournament games at the Garden, and they were interested in one soon-to-be-available player in particular—the Bearcats senior 6′9″ center Connie Dierking who had 19 points in the Seton Hall game.
The local Cincinnati Royals, who had territorial draft rights, were interested in Dierking. One of Les Harrison’s scouts notified him that Dierking was a keeper due to his work under the glass and his ability to shoot from the corner. However, Connie Dierking would be drafted by the Syracuse Nationals in the 1958 NBA draft.
The Bearcats were now 8–2. The two losses to Bradley, 73–79, and Oklahoma State, 57–61, had occurred on the road and without an injured Connie Dierking on the floor.
Cincinnati’s 118 points vs. Seton Hall broke the Madison Square Garden college scoring mark by two points that had been set the year before when Bradley beat Xavier 116–81 in the second round of the NIT.
January 9 had been quite a night for Queen City round ball in New York. Overshadowed by the performance of Oscar Robertson and the UC Bearcats in their victory over Seton Hall was the fact that in the opening game at the Garden that evening, Xavier, also from Cincinnati, had defeated a scrappy Iona squad 71–61. The Musketeers were now 5–1 on the season—their only loss was to Cincinnati, 68–79, a month ago.
At the time Robertson set the new Madison Garden scoring record, college basketball was still struggling in New York as a result of the point-shaving scandals of the early 1950s. Robertson’s performance against Seton Hall
in the Holiday Festival had resurrected Madison Square Garden as the basketball epicenter of the world.
Carried off the floor by his Bearcat teammates and then surrounded by the press, Robertson was asked by Cincinnati Post sportswriter Wally Forste if this was his biggest basketball thrill. Robertson replied, “No. My biggest thrill was helping win two state high school championships at Crispus Attucks in Indianapolis.”7
Oscar Robertson’s performance vs. Seton Hall was acknowledged as the greatest one-man show in Madison Square Garden basketball history. Joe Lapchick, the St. John’s coach, witnessed the game and described Robertson as “merely wonderful.” Fuzzy Levane, the New York Knicks scout, called Robertson, “the best sophomore player since Wilt Chamberlain.”8
The New York Times, in its report on the game, stated, “The 56 points tallied by the 6-foot, 5-inch star from Indianapolis set an individual scoring mark for the Eighth Avenue arena, where basketball has been played since 1934. Robertson left the game with 2 minutes 46 seconds remaining. He left with the cheers of 4,615 spectators ringing in his ears and with the knowledge that he had scored more points than the entire Seton Hall squad.”9
Although there had actually been less than five thousand people in Madison Square Garden that January night, for decades going forward it seemed that nearly everyone in New York had witnessed Robertson score 56 points. If you were in New York in the 1960s through the 1980s and mentioned to a waiter, cab driver, bartender, or just someone in a casual conversation that you were from Cincinnati, they would immediately tell you that they had witnessed the game in which Robertson broke the Garden scoring record. Historically, Robertson’s performance against Seton Hall had become one of the most enduring Big Apple sports legends of the 1950s, right up there alongside Bobby Thompson’s home run in the 1951 playoffs against the Brooklyn Dodgers and Don Larsen’s no-hitter in the 1956 World Series.
