boutons_
02-12-2007, 10:00 AM
February 12, 2007
Sports of The Times
Remembering Big O’s Legacy Amid the Glitter
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/12/sports/12rhoden.1.190.jpg
By WILLIAM C. RHODEN (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/columns/williamcrhoden/?inline=nyt-per)
Oscar Robertson made his first N.B.A. All-Star team in 1961, his rookie season with the Cincinnati Royals. The Big O, all of 23, was just beginning a journey that would lead to the Hall of Fame.
Robertson would become the N.B.A.’s rookie of the year, make 11 more All-Star Game appearances and be voted most valuable player in three.
He remembers the first game like it was yesterday.
“It was an honor to make an All-Star team because you were picked by the players,” Robertson said yesterday from his home in Cincinnati. “It’s not what they have now, which is a total joke — to have fans vote. You went to the All-Star Game and there wasn’t all this fanfare. We played in Syracuse, it was snowing like hell, we may have walked to the game. Anyway, you get to the game and you start playing. You got back on the bus, one day off and played the next. All the stuff they have now is totally ridiculous.”
Robertson leaves today for Las Vegas, where he will join several thousand fans for what promises to be a fascinating All-Star Game.
“I think the marketing aspect of this game is going to be second to none,” Robertson said. “You’re going to have people coming there from all walks of life, all types of people; it going to be a marketing extravaganza.”
I said to Robertson, only half jokingly, that the basketball he now decries — more flash than substance — was a product he inadvertently helped create.
In 1964, he and other players threatened to not play in the All-Star Game in a dispute about pensions. Then, in 1970, Robertson, the president of the players association, filed a suit against the N.B.A. to stall, if not stop, a merger between the N.B.A. and the American Basketball Association until a number of free-agency issues could be resolved. The A.B.A., which started in the 1967-68 season, had given N.B.A. players tremendous leverage in what had become a hopeless battle with owners.
•
Before 1967, the N.B.A. had no collective-bargaining agreement; no professional sport had one. There was no minimum salary, no pension, no health or accident insurance, no life insurance, not even a trainer for road games. The players had proposed an insurance plan that would cost each team $1,500 a year. The proposal was rejected.
The “Oscar Robertson Rule” went into effect six years after he filed the lawsuit. The settlement between the N.B.A. and the players association made free agency possible and led to lucrative player salaries.
How did a naïve rookie become a union activist who took on the N.B.A.?
“Just like anything in life, you start out and you start to grow,” Robertson said. “You’re playing a game of basketball, all of a sudden someone gets hurt, they kick him out of the league, they’re not worried about him at all. Or if an owner doesn’t like the car you drive, he has perpetual rights to you forever whereby you can never play for anybody else. Or it’s the color of your skin.”
He added: “Sometimes in life when you get involved in things, you don’t know why you do them at all.”
The N.B.A. should insist on an educational component to every All-Star weekend. (This year, there is a screening of a film on James Naismith.) A league concerned enough with image to force a dress code down the players’ throats and to clamp down on players’ sassing officials should add a history component to the weekend for rookies, so they can understand where the league came from and how the tremendous salaries they have earned came to be. Never let them forget.
“We live in a fast society, we don’t remember anything over 10 years old,” Robertson said. “In every sport, people who play should know the history of the game. The N.B.A. should have some reading that’s mandatory to find out what’s going on. Where did basketball come from? Where did hockey come from? What are some of the problems that happened in each sport? The Oscar Robertson case — most guys don’t know anything about it.”
•
Some say that, for this generation of players, there is no longer anything to fight for. But there’s always something to fight for. For this generation, the fight is to win back the rights to the collective image that were bargained away as part of a collective-bargaining agreement.
“The game of basketball is show business: sell the caps, sell the shoes, sell the socks, sell the shirts,” Robertson said. “They’re paying the players because of the images. The players should have their own rights. They should never have given the rights over to the N.B.A. for them to market. But I guess because they’re making the money and you have guys satisfied, you’re never going to have any complaints about it.”
Oscar Robertson led a courageous battle for players against owners in 1970. His victory, in part, led to what he will see in Las Vegas this weekend: casinos, dancers, lights and glitter. Robertson’s league has grown from regional to national to global.
“It had to happen,” he said. “I don’t mind that. We’re going to a worldwide game with millions and millions and millions of people watching the game. It had to go in that direction. It’s like anything in life. You have move to forward or you become stagnant.”
The league and the Big O have come a long, long way from Syracuse.
E-mail: [email protected]
Sports of The Times
Remembering Big O’s Legacy Amid the Glitter
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/12/sports/12rhoden.1.190.jpg
By WILLIAM C. RHODEN (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/columns/williamcrhoden/?inline=nyt-per)
Oscar Robertson made his first N.B.A. All-Star team in 1961, his rookie season with the Cincinnati Royals. The Big O, all of 23, was just beginning a journey that would lead to the Hall of Fame.
Robertson would become the N.B.A.’s rookie of the year, make 11 more All-Star Game appearances and be voted most valuable player in three.
He remembers the first game like it was yesterday.
“It was an honor to make an All-Star team because you were picked by the players,” Robertson said yesterday from his home in Cincinnati. “It’s not what they have now, which is a total joke — to have fans vote. You went to the All-Star Game and there wasn’t all this fanfare. We played in Syracuse, it was snowing like hell, we may have walked to the game. Anyway, you get to the game and you start playing. You got back on the bus, one day off and played the next. All the stuff they have now is totally ridiculous.”
Robertson leaves today for Las Vegas, where he will join several thousand fans for what promises to be a fascinating All-Star Game.
“I think the marketing aspect of this game is going to be second to none,” Robertson said. “You’re going to have people coming there from all walks of life, all types of people; it going to be a marketing extravaganza.”
I said to Robertson, only half jokingly, that the basketball he now decries — more flash than substance — was a product he inadvertently helped create.
In 1964, he and other players threatened to not play in the All-Star Game in a dispute about pensions. Then, in 1970, Robertson, the president of the players association, filed a suit against the N.B.A. to stall, if not stop, a merger between the N.B.A. and the American Basketball Association until a number of free-agency issues could be resolved. The A.B.A., which started in the 1967-68 season, had given N.B.A. players tremendous leverage in what had become a hopeless battle with owners.
•
Before 1967, the N.B.A. had no collective-bargaining agreement; no professional sport had one. There was no minimum salary, no pension, no health or accident insurance, no life insurance, not even a trainer for road games. The players had proposed an insurance plan that would cost each team $1,500 a year. The proposal was rejected.
The “Oscar Robertson Rule” went into effect six years after he filed the lawsuit. The settlement between the N.B.A. and the players association made free agency possible and led to lucrative player salaries.
How did a naïve rookie become a union activist who took on the N.B.A.?
“Just like anything in life, you start out and you start to grow,” Robertson said. “You’re playing a game of basketball, all of a sudden someone gets hurt, they kick him out of the league, they’re not worried about him at all. Or if an owner doesn’t like the car you drive, he has perpetual rights to you forever whereby you can never play for anybody else. Or it’s the color of your skin.”
He added: “Sometimes in life when you get involved in things, you don’t know why you do them at all.”
The N.B.A. should insist on an educational component to every All-Star weekend. (This year, there is a screening of a film on James Naismith.) A league concerned enough with image to force a dress code down the players’ throats and to clamp down on players’ sassing officials should add a history component to the weekend for rookies, so they can understand where the league came from and how the tremendous salaries they have earned came to be. Never let them forget.
“We live in a fast society, we don’t remember anything over 10 years old,” Robertson said. “In every sport, people who play should know the history of the game. The N.B.A. should have some reading that’s mandatory to find out what’s going on. Where did basketball come from? Where did hockey come from? What are some of the problems that happened in each sport? The Oscar Robertson case — most guys don’t know anything about it.”
•
Some say that, for this generation of players, there is no longer anything to fight for. But there’s always something to fight for. For this generation, the fight is to win back the rights to the collective image that were bargained away as part of a collective-bargaining agreement.
“The game of basketball is show business: sell the caps, sell the shoes, sell the socks, sell the shirts,” Robertson said. “They’re paying the players because of the images. The players should have their own rights. They should never have given the rights over to the N.B.A. for them to market. But I guess because they’re making the money and you have guys satisfied, you’re never going to have any complaints about it.”
Oscar Robertson led a courageous battle for players against owners in 1970. His victory, in part, led to what he will see in Las Vegas this weekend: casinos, dancers, lights and glitter. Robertson’s league has grown from regional to national to global.
“It had to happen,” he said. “I don’t mind that. We’re going to a worldwide game with millions and millions and millions of people watching the game. It had to go in that direction. It’s like anything in life. You have move to forward or you become stagnant.”
The league and the Big O have come a long, long way from Syracuse.
E-mail: [email protected]