King Without A Castle

The big O is known in basketball circles for being the Big Grind, a hoops curmudgeon who protests that in his day the players were better, the coaches smarter, the ball rounder. The reputation is not entirely undeserved. But today—40 years after a season in which he averaged a triple double in points, rebounds and assists—Oscar Robertson wants you to know that he does not spend his hours stewing in a kettle of his own bile. Well, wants you to know is a little strong because, frankly, he doesn't much care what you think. But to set the record straight:

At 63 Robertson has a life, and it's a damn good one. He's not rich by the standards of today's athletes (the most he made in a season was about $250,000 in 1973-74, his last in the NBA), but he's doing fine. He is the principal owner of three companies: ORCHEM, which sells chemicals used in industrial cleaning; ORPACK, which manufactures corrugated boxes; and ORDMS, which works with companies to streamline their paper flow. He spends most of his time at ORCHEM headquarters (he owns 100% of that company) in Fairfield, Ohio, a suburb north of Cincinnati. He serves on a couple of boards, attends charity and social functions, gets together with friends in Cincinnati, his adopted hometown, where he came to play college ball in 1957 and spent all but four years of a 14-year Hall of Fame NBA career. He and Yvonne, his wife of 32 years, have three daughters, one of whom received from him the greatest gift a father can give—life. In 1997 Oscar donated his left kidney to his middle daughter, Tia, then 33, whose kidneys were failing because of the effects of lupus. The transplant went well; Tia's disease is in remission, and neither father nor daughter likes to dwell on it. "It bothered me when the transplant got so much attention," says Oscar. "Of course I was going to do it. What father wouldn't?" He has an 18-inch scar and one less rib as a result of the surgery (as might be expected from a 6'5" athlete, Robertson's kidney was one of the largest that doctors at University Hospital in Cincinnati had ever seen), but he has no lasting effects, he says, other than that "my wife tells me to drink less beer."

Robertson even smiles once in a while. "Oscar is happier than he looks, honest he is," says Yvonne, who met her husband in 1958 when he was an All-America at Cincinnati. "It's just that he's lived so much of his life with people depending on him. He feels like so much is riding on everything. He's a serious person."

Serious is a good way to put it. Robertson is the kind of man who, when a subject is brought up that is likely to raise his ire, will first tell you that it doesn't bother him, then give you chapter and verse on why it does, then remind you—rightly so—that you, not he, brought it up. Banks in Cincinnati? Don't lend enough money to minority-owned businesses. Minority-owned businesses? Too often sell out and don't really help their own people. Converse? Says the shoe company offered him an endorsement deal in 1999, but he turned it down because "Converse was there for a lot of white athletes when I was playing, but they never came to Oscar Robertson." The Milwaukee Bucks, the franchise for which he played the last four years of his career? Enjoyed his time with the team, but the organization held Oscar Robertson Night to send a message that he should retire. Being named Indiana's alltime Mr. Basketball? Lost its meaning when he found out he narrowly beat out Damon Bailey, whom Robertson considers to be far less accomplished than any number of other Hoosiers schoolboy stars. The officiating in the NBA's recent postseason? Not up to the standards of championship basketball. White leadership in Cincinnati? Terrible. Black leadership in Cincinnati? Terrible.

The list goes on. But the point is, only a man deeply involved in life, a man who has seen much and been through much, could be bothered by so many things. And here's something that should bother us: The man whose name is synonymous with the triple double and eponymous with the lawsuit that gave free agency to NBA players isn't nearly as close to the game as he should be. ROBERTSON GREW UP hard, first on a farm in Charlotte, Tenn., then in a shotgun house (so called because all four rooms were in a line) on the gritty east side of Indianapolis. He was the last of three sons of Mazell and Henry Bailey Robertson, who left the family when Oscar was 12. Mazell worked as a domestic, a beautician and a short-order cook, often going from one eight-hour job to another. Oscar heard tales of slavery from his great-grandfather Marshall Collier, who died in 1954 at 116, reputed to be America's oldest citizen at the time. Oscar went to Indianapolis's Crispus Attucks High, named for the African-American who was the first person killed in the Boston Massacre in 1770. Robertson desperately wanted to go to Indiana, but in his only meeting with the Hoosiers' coach, Branch McCracken, he sensed that he wasn't much wanted because of his color.

So no one had to inform Oscar Robertson that there were differences between white America and black America in the 1940s and '50s. Still, racism never kicked him in the teeth until he went to Cincinnati as the school's second black athlete. During a road trip as a sophomore he was asked to check out of the Shamrock Hotel in Houston and stay in a dorm at all-black Texas Southern. The next night, as fans at North Texas State in Denton threw programs at him, Robertson stood at midcourt throughout pregame warmups, arms folded, seething, turning over in his mind whether he should play. He did and led the Bearcats to a 94-53 victory, scoring 37 points and grabbing 18 rebounds. The following season, when he got off a team flight in Raleigh-Durham, the first thing he saw were two drinking fountains, one marked COLORED, one marked WHITE. During the Dixie Classic that followed, he heard the n word dozens of times along with more insidious insults from fans, who called him "porter" and "redcap." He thought about quitting basketball but soldiered on, angry not only at the insults but also at the lack of support he got from teammates and coach George Smith.

What does a man do with his rage? Robertson channeled it into basketball, went at the game with a controlled but furious passion that helped him become college basketball's first three-time player of the year. After co-captaining (with West Virginia's Jerry West) the gold-medal-winning 1960 U.S. Olympic team in Rome, he was a territorial pick of the Cincinnati Royals and was named NBA Rookie of the Year after the 1960-61 season. The franchise had won 19 games in each of the two seasons before Robertson arrived; with him in the lineup, its win total went to 33, then 43 and finally to 55. "It took me five or six years to become an accomplished player," says West, now the Memphis Grizzlies' general manager and the player with whom Robertson is most closely linked. "But from the first game Oscar played, he looked as if he had been in the league for 10 years. There was nobody like him." Robertson redefined a point guard position that had been defined only a few years earlier by the Boston Celtics' Bob Cousy. Cousy's quarterbacking was flash and dash, behind-the-back deception, run, run, run; Robertson's was strength and control, economy of movement, a style that rarely made the highlight reel. The Big O was the first guard who took defenders where he wanted to go, using his well-muscled 220 pounds to back them down, his head always up, looking for cutters, wary of double teams, waving teammates to open spots or maybe carving out space to release his deadly jumper, held in one hand, far above his head, virtually unblockable. Cousy was a stone white guy who played black; Robertson, African-American to the core of his soul, played white.

The astonishing thing about Robertson's stats is not only that he averaged 30.5 points, 12.5 rebounds and 11.4 assists in 1961-62 but also that he came so close to that triple-double standard so many other times. In 1963-64 he missed a season triple double because he averaged "only" 9.9 rebounds. Consider: In his first eight seasons Robertson never averaged fewer than 29.2 points and 9.5 assists, and in his first five seasons he never averaged fewer than nine rebounds. Not that anyone paid special notice; triple doubles weren't part of the lexicon then, and Robertson was the only player routinely collecting them. (For comparison's sake, double-double players such as Wilt Chamberlain and Elgin Baylor didn't get many assists, and all-arounder West never averaged season doubles in either assists or rebounds.) "I never heard anything about the triple-double season until five or six years ago," Robertson says. "I don't remember ever looking down at a stat sheet and noticing that all the figures were doubles. Fact is, I never looked at a stat sheet." Robertson's Royals took his nightly brilliance for granted. "He was so smart on the court that whatever he told you to do, you just did it," says Adrian Smith, a former teammate and still a close friend. "It always seemed to be the right thing. I guess he made mistakes from time to time, but I don't remember any."

Robertson was tough on his teammates, his opponents, his coaches, the referees. His approach to the game and to life in general was, as his wife says, serious. He became president of the NBA players' association in 1965, less than a year after he and a number of other players threatened to stay in the locker room and boycott the All-Star Game at Boston Garden unless the league promised to allow union attorney Larry Fleischer to represent them at collective bargaining sessions. The league backed down. Robertson then went out and won the game's MVP award in the East's 111-107 victory. Robertson was still president of the union when in 1970 it filed suits against the NBA challenging the merger with the ABA, the player draft and the reserve clause, which effectively prevented free agency. When the suits were settled in '76, a guideline removing compensation for teams who lost free agents was called the Oscar Robertson Rule, a label it still carries. Robertson served as union president until his retirement, and then he was the first president of the Retired Players Association.

As good as Robertson was, his value as a player may not have been realized until Royals management broke up the team and traded him to Milwaukee before the 1970-71 season. With Robertson running the show in Suds Town, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's scoring average went from 28.8 points per game the previous season to 31.7, Bobby Dandridge's from 13.2 to 18.4, Greg Smith's from 9.8 to 11.7. As for Robertson, he sacrificed numbers for wins, averaging only 19.4 points per game, almost six points below his standard for the previous season in Cincinnati and a full 10 points below his career average to that point. Not coincidentally, the Bucks won the NBA championship, Robertson's only one. His last season was 1973-74, when the Bucks won 59 games and took the Celtics to seven games in the Finals. Robertson, 35, didn't think he was through, but the Bucks disagreed, so he retired with career averages of 25.7 points, 9.5 assists and 7.5 rebounds. With virtually the same roster except for Robertson the following season, Milwaukee won 38 games and finished last in the Midwest Division.