Oscar Robertson Returns Home With Memories, Message -- Book Teaches Game's Fine Points

Oscar Robertson remembers; but he doesn't romanticize. Driving along West Michigan Street in Indianapolis, he points out areas near the Lockefield Gardens housing development where he played basketball as a kid.

In his $8 Chuck Taylor All-Stars, he'd practice by the light of the moon, sometimes in the snow. That's what kids did in the 1940s and '50s when they had no money in their pockets and nothing else to do, he says.

If he wanted, Robertson, 59, could look back and conjure imagery out of a Frank Capra film. That might even be welcome in a world where a player chokes his coach, a high-school basketball team is taunted with racial epithets and kids pay $150 and up for sneakers.

Robertson remembers better than that. He remembers the Indianapolis schools that refused to play his all-black Crispus Attucks High School basketball team - for racial reasons as well as to protect their won-lost records. Sneaker companies who ignored him - perhaps the greatest basketball player ever - in favor of white players. Making a top salary of $300,000, a handsome sum then but near the National Basketball Association minimum today.

"I don't know if the world's out of control," he says. "I think a lot of people are."

Not Robertson, who sees discipline as the guiding force of life.

Robertson was back home in Indianapolis to talk about his new book, The Art of Basketball, a primer for young men and women hoping to learn the fine points of the game. The overriding message of his book: Whether you're practicing basketball or donating a kidney to your daughter, which Robertson did in 1997, do what you're supposed to. Not when it's expedient or politically correct, but at all times.

As Robertson says: "You can read the book all day long, but if you don't try to apply some of the things, it's not going to work for you."

A telling story: Not long ago, Robertson says, Converse asked him to endorse its sneakers. He declined, telling the company representative: "When I was a star, playing basketball, Converse was out there with a lot of the white athletes wanting them to wear their shoe. They never came to Oscar Robertson. There's no way I can do it."

These days, Robertson owns Orchem, a Cincinnati-area business that supplies chemicals to clean food-processing plants. He's doing well.

But what if he needed the money?

"This is America," he replies. "There's no such thing as `You don't need the money.' "

Fair enough.

"You ask Oscar a question," his friend Joe Wolfla says, "you get the answer. He's a legend, he's a hero of mine. But at the same time, he's as common as the old shoe. What you see is what you get."

And no mincing words. Over chili and cheeseburgers at The Workingman's Friend, Robertson dispenses no-nonsense views on everything from the NBA's 1996 selection of the 50 greatest players to whether sneakers can enhance an athlete's performance ("Oh, come on. How can a shoe make a difference?").

Of the NBA's top players of all time. Robertson was one, obviously, but said "after you get past the first 12, it's all P.R." Bob McAdoo and Dominique Wilkins should have been included, he says.

Robertson looks at the NBA game today and likes some teams, but doesn't necessarily like the game. The lack of fundamentals bothers him. Players don't box out to prevent offensive rebounds. Teams can't defend simple pick-and-roll plays. With 29 teams now, instead of 18 or fewer during his 14 years with the Cincinnati Royals and Milwaukee Bucks (1960-'74), "the product has been diluted."

And because the league tends to coddle its superstars, Robertson also thinks "referees have lost control of the game."

"If you go in for a basket and I grab you around the neck instead of going to block the shot, they should throw me out of the game for unsportsmanlike conduct," he says. Throw out a star player once and the entire league would get the message, he says.

As for the Golden State Warriors' Latrell Sprewell, who was suspended for attacking his coach, P.J. Carlesimo, Robertson sees two wrongs, no rights.

"Sprewell was totally wrong in that he attacked the coach," he says. "But the team knew this guy (Carlesimo) was yelling and cursing and screaming and harassing these players verbally. They did nothing about it."

In Robertson's day, if a player attacked a coach, "he would have been finished."

In Robertson's day, if a coach abused a player, "he would have been finished."

"I never had any coach curse me or berate me," Robertson says. "If he'd have done that, I would have said: `That's it for me. I don't want to play for you.' I would have gone to the owner and said, `I won't play here as long as this guy's here.' "

The obvious question, then, is: What about Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight's actions, especially when he drew three technical fouls in the Feb. 24 game against Illinois?

"I don't blame Bobby Knight for any of that," Robertson says. "You know who I blame? The college president. If he sees a student athlete do something like that, what would he do? So obviously, he's letting Bobby Knight get away with that.

"Now I'll tell you what's even a worse tragedy - they tell that referee (Ted Valentine) who gave him the technical fouls he can't ref in the Big 10 until after the first of the year. I'd sue them, if I were him."

Robertson is equally disgusted by what happened in January in Martinsville, Ind., where students and fans yelled obscenities and racial slurs at the Bloomington North basketball team.

Although he played in an era when racism was far more overt, Robertson says nothing like that ever happened to the Attucks Tigers in his playing days.

"I couldn't believe a high-school coach in this day and age would sit back and allow that to happen," he says. "I can't believe the school would allow that to happen. See, if black kids did that (to white kids), it'd be all over the state."

And if an Attucks team had done that? "They would have disbanded our school and you never would have heard of me."

But just about everyone has heard of Oscar Robertson. Nearly 25 years after he retired, Robertson's legend is secure.

But if you ask him, he never tries to be a legend - just a principled, disciplined man.

"My responsibility comes to myself," he says. "I'm not crazy; the things I do are levelheaded. The people who look at me, the way I live, and say `I want to be like that,' that's fine. I don't go out of my way to get any marks from anybody."