The Graceful Giants

(See Cover) These are the golden years for baseball, football and basketball, the big three of U.S. professional sport. Major-league baseball, expanded from coast to coast, has at last become national. Pro football, unequaled in its combination of violence and cunning, plays in stadiums that have been sold out for weeks in advance. Basketball, pro and amateur, is booming as never before.

Baseball has changed little since Babe Ruth first started swatting home runs over fences; football has been largely content to find new uses for old techniques of the pass and the T formation. But basketball, that peculiarly American sport, has undergone a dramatic transformation.

Within recent memory, basketball was a game of pattern plays as formal as any cotillion, of two-handed set shots that were lovely to watch but easy to block, of rules that set officials' whistles to shrilling at the flick of physical contact, and of defensive systems that held most scores well below the 60 mark. By those standards, today's game is absolutely unrecognizable in the professional National Basketball Association, which inevitably sets the style for college, high school and playground basketball.

Fast Break, Screen & Jump. As played by the pros, basketball is a rushing, bruising battle that leaves its gigantic players gasping for breath long after each game. Forcing the pace is a rule that requires a team to take a shot within 24 seconds of getting the ball. This means that at least 75% of the action develops from the kaleidoscopic swirl of the instant, and that play is dominated by:

The fast break, which sends three attackers sprinting down the floor against two defenders, or two against one.

The screen play, in which a player gives a teammate the necessary split second to shoot by planting himself between the shooter and his assigned defensive man.

The one-handed jump shot, which is almost impossible to stop without fouling the shooter.

Gone Goon. Basketball's offensive revolution has sent scores skyrocketing, until it now requires an average of 122 points to win an N.B.A. game. As the game has changed, so have the players. Teams once depended on three or four scorers; now every man on the floor can go over 20 points a game, the old yardstick of success. Says Los Angeles Lakers' Coach Fred Schaus, himself a pro only a few years ago: "It's incredible, but it's true that today's N.B.A. man, an average man, would have been a great star six, seven or eight years ago. Maybe now he's just a fourth or fifth man instead of a star."

Gone is the day of the glandular goon who could do little more than stand beneath the basket and stuff in rebounds. Philadelphia's Wilt ("The Stilt") Chamberlain, who leads the N.B.A. in scoring with an average 37.8, stands 7 ft. 2 in., but has the speed and agility to be a marvel were he half a foot shorter. St. Louis' Bob Pettit (6 ft. 9 in.) is quick and graceful, Boston's Bill Russell (6 ft. 10 in.) is a defensive and rebounding genius, Los Angeles' Elgin Baylor (6 ft. 5 in.) combines the brute strength of a pro football tackle with the supple coordination of an Olympic gymnast, and even at the advanced age of 32 Boston's Bob Cousy (dwarfish at 6 ft. 1 in.) remains the playmaking wizard of the game.

Complete Courtmen. Yet such are the demands of modern basketball that each of these players has a flaw, however slight. Chamberlain, Baylor and Pettit are less than superior as playmakers. Boston's Russell is an erratic scorer. Not only is the short Cousy no rebounder, but he is no great shakes on defense--despite his flashy interceptions.

Thus the dream of every basketball coach, both in the N.B.A. and among the amateurs, is to find the player who combines all the talents required by the modern game: scoring, playmaking, rebounding and defending. In the N.B.A.'s 1961 season, no player comes closer to fulfilling that ideal of the complete courtman than the Cincinnati Royals' Oscar Robertson, 22, a lithe (6 ft. 4 1/2 in.. 200 lbs.) Negro guard who was famed in college, as he is in the N.B.A., as "The Big O."

Last week, as the 1961 basketball teams headed down the stretch, N.B.A. statistics reflected Rookie Robertson's all-round excellence. His 30.1 game average placed him third among the league's scorers, a fact made all the more remarkable because, as Boston's Bill Sharman explains, "I've been the leading backcourt scorer in the league over the last nine years, and the best average I ever got was 22.3 points in 1958. Last year Detroit's Gene Shue beat that with a 22.8 average. Now along comes Robertson as a rookie averaging more than 30." Hitting on 47% of his shots, Robertson stands fifth in N.B.A. in accuracy. His rebounding (10 per game) is vastly respected. And with an average of 9.3 assists per game, Oscar Robertson has replaced the legendary Cousy as the league's leading playmaker.

Even more meaningful than the statistics are the tributes that come from rival players and coaches. Says Cousy himself: "Robertson is the best of his kind ever to come into the league." Says the Detroit Pistons' Coach Dick McGuire: "Oscar is better than Cousy ever was; Oscar is the finest player in basketball." Says Boston's sharpshooting Tommy Heinsohn: "He knows all the phases of the game--passing, shooting, rebounding. If he couldn't pass, you could play him differently, but if you double-team him for a second, you gamble. That calls for a pass, and he'll pass it."

Pure Product. In almost every way, Cincinnati's Robertson is a pure product of the sport of basketball as it has developed in, the U.S. The game was invented in 1891 in Springfield, Mass, by a gym instructor named Jim Naismith, who wanted to give his bored classes a switch from the daily grind of calisthenics. Today basketball is played with eager enthusiasm and improving skill by some 50 nations from Chile to China, but it has remained a distinctly American game. Its virtues are obvious : any number can play, indoors or out, in all seasons. It requires nothing more than a ball, and a basket that is much the same whether it hangs from a backboard in Madison Square Garden or a barn door in Kentucky. This season an estimated 150 million Americans will watch games played by some 20,000 high schools, 1,000 colleges, and swarms of amateur teams composed of players ranging from scurrying schoolboys to gimpy grandfathers.

What is more, to millions of Americans the game of basketball is more than a sport --it is the most important event on winter's social calendar. Once the winter wheat is in the ground in towns like Sharon Springs, Kans., there is little else to do but watch the games on Tuesday and Friday nights in the $190,000 school gym, the grandest building in the county. In Ohio, the citizens of Bethel Township regularly drop past Ray Morrison's general store to rock on their heels around the stove and talk of the local high school team (12 and 6 this season) and of Ohio State University's national champions, one of the great clubs of recent years.

But even the fans of Ohio and Kansas will admit that the biggest, noisiest and best basketball state of them all is Indiana, where every boy seems to be born with a hook shot and a stutter-step dribble. No one in Indiana sees anything odd about the fact that the gym in Huntingburg holds 6,300 persons, although the town's total population is 4,000. Folks from out of town just naturally want to drive in to see the games. Each March, Indiana explodes in the wildest high school tournament in the nation--four frenzied weekends of play that consistently draw more than 1,500,000 fans, last year grossed more than $1,000,000.

Into the Dust Bowl. Oscar Robertson, of course, learned his basketball in Indiana. Born on a farm near Charlotte, Tenn., Oscar was three when his family moved to Indianapolis, where his father landed a job in the city sanitation department. The Robertsons settled precariously in a grim, four-room, tarpaper-roofed house in the black ghetto on the west side of town. Just two blocks away was an out door basketball court known as the "dust bowl." In the dust bowl Oscar Robertson discovered basketball.

With no ball to shoot, young Oscar used to shy tin cans at the basket. When he was eight, he got a small ball that he would solemnly wash with soap and water every night. Not until he was eleven did he get his first full-sized ball, the discard of one of the families for whom his mother was then working as a domestic.

Everywhere that Oscar went, the ball was sure to go. He early became a basketball perfectionist. Nothing stopped his dribbling practice--eating supper, watching TV, reading. "I've got to control it," he would tell his brother Bailey, who later became good enough himself to win a spot on the Harlem Globetrotters. "I've got to control the dribble." Recalls his mother: "You couldn't sleep at night with that basketball going all the time. Bump! Bump! Bump!"

Cool & Hot. By the time he hit the eighth grade, Oscar was a skinny-armed, precocious hotshot who already was completely confident of his skill. In the city championship he dribbled away the last moments of each quarter, then coolly sank a basket as the last second ticked off.

Between his freshman and sophomore years at the all-Negro Crispus Attucks* High School, Oscar sprouted six inches to a weedy 6 ft. 2 in. (Oscar's height, the family insists, was inherited from a 6-ft. sin. great-grandfather, who was born a slave, died in 1954 at 116, reputedly the oldest U.S. citizen.) Playing against some of the best competition in the nation, Oscar made all-state three years, led his team to a 45-game winning streak and two state championships. Says Crispus Attucks' Coach Ray Crowe: "Oscar was good enough in high school to play pro ball."

Against the Grain. The 75 colleges that were after Oscar called so often that his father had the phone disconnected three times. Oscar finally chose the University of Cincinnati, partly because it was fairly close to home, mainly because it played a big-time schedule that hit Madison Square Garden, where he could test his game against the very best. Even after he had landed Robertson, Cincinnati Coach George Smith fretted that someone would steal his protege. "Every time Oscar left town," recalls Teammate Ralph Davis, who also moved up to the Royals from Cincinnati, "Smith would start phoning campuses to see if he had been stolen."

Robertson was a prize well worth hijacking. In high school he had ranked a solid 16th in a class of 171, but at Cincinnati his grades in business administration fell off to C; Oscar had come to play basketball. He kept at least four basketballs in his room. "When the dribbling stopped," says Davis, who lived next door, "you knew Oscar had gone to bed." By this time Oscar had come to have a paternally protective feeling about a basketball, once chewed out a university publicity man for casually bouncing a ball on the pavement. "You'll ruin that ball. You'll rub off the grain and throw it off balance."

Bank Draft. As a sophomore, making his very first start in Madison Square Garden, Robertson scored 56 points, at the time the biggest night anyone--college or pro--had ever had in that shrine of basketball. Playing forward throughout his college career, Robertson set 14 major national marks, including a game average of 33.8 points. By the time he graduated last spring, he had become the only college player to lead the nation's scorers for three straight years.

Robertson was still a sophomore when he was claimed, under the N.B.A.'s territorial rule, by the Cincinnati Royals, who then sat back nervously to see if he would graduate before the team went bankrupt. Robertson made it just in time, drove a hard bargain with the Royals, who realized that he could always peddle his spectacular talents to the showboating, all-Negro Globetrotters. His three-year contract calls for an annual salary of about $33,000, plus a percentage of the gate that should boost the total take to around $50,000.

Price of Success. Off the court, basketball's new star has not yet learned to cope with the intrusions on his privacy that inevitably come with sudden success. He is diffident except with longtime friends, quietly shrugs off praise of his achievements. Explains his mother: "Deep within, Oscar likes the publicity, but he doesn't want to lose his head and hurt himself." But Robertson is also capable of public flashes of wry humor. When a confused fan once asked what team he played for, Robertson deadpanned: "The Chicago Black Hawks, of course."

Last summer Robertson married petite Yvonne Crittenden, a girl he had met in college and had been too shy to talk to on their first date. Yvonne teaches first grade in Cincinnati, which is almost more than her hero-worshiping pupils can bear. One child proudly uses Yvonne's full married name at every opportunity: "Mrs. Oscar Robertson, may I sharpen my pencil?" "Mrs. Oscar Robertson, may I go to the rest room?" When the Royals are in town, Robertson hunches over the kitchen table and meticulously helps Yvonne keep her school records, takes her dancing (he is accomplished in such steps as the "horse" and the "slop"), spins his records of Fats Domino, and resolutely stays in bed when she goes off to work. "Maybe he thinks he's not going to get enough sleep," says Yvonne. "Maybe all pro basketball players are tired all the time."

Shut-Eye. If they are not, they should be. Pro basketball bristles with violence. Falling players leave slippery smears of sweat on the floor that have to be mopped up with towels. Trainers use freezing sprays of ethyl chloride to relieve the pain of a sprain--and keep the man in the game. An estimated 85% of the pros play with nagging injuries--charley horses, jammed thumbs, pulled muscles--and St. Louis' Pettit and Syracuse's Dolph Schayes have kept going with broken wrists. Robertson himself is just getting over a torn muscle above his right hip, which benched him for five games. After a game, win or lose, the exhausted players slump silently on stools in front of their lockers. Pro basketball is now so much tougher than big-league baseball that Cousy scoffs at any comparison: "One of those guys runs out a triple, and he looks like he needs a stomach pump."

Almost as debilitating as the contact injuries are the rigors of travel. Any N.B.A. team is apt to find itself playing seven games in as many cities within ten days. As the westernmost team, Los Angeles this season will travel 100,000 miles to play a 79-game schedule. Conspicuous as a herd of giraffes, the N.B.A.'s big men have learned to cope with an alien world of threatening doorframes and ridiculously small chairs. At night they drape their feet over suitcase racks placed at the ends of their Hollywood-style hotel beds. After a game, supper may be a piece of pumpkin pie served on a cardboard plate on the way to the airport. The players gulp it down, then plunge into sleep, mouths slack, heads banging against frosty windows. Says Robertson: "Whenever you get a chance to sleep, you just got to close your eyes and do it."

"It'll Get By." To Oscar Robertson, the game is worth the hardship. "I didn't get a kick out of college basketball," Robertson now admits. "It didn't excite me. But this game--the pro game--is plenty exciting." Playing guard for the Royals (he is too small for forward), Robertson has taken charge of the Royals, with the tacit backing of Coach Charley Wolf, just as he automatically has run every one of his teams from the seventh grade on. Robertson has learned to work in close tandem with Jack Twyman (6 ft. 6 in., 210 lbs.), the team's only other established star, but he does not hesitate to turn his sharp tongue on a veteran who has made a bonehead play. Says Cousy: "Robertson acts as though he's been in this league for ten years."

Robertson on the prowl is grace itself. He flows down the court, head bobbing, shoulders feinting, every part of his body blended into one rhythmical pattern of deception. At his side, controlled by a sensitive hand, bounces a basketball that seems to accompany him like an old and trusted friend. For the flicker of a second, a Royal breaks loose, and in that instant Robertson hits him with a pass. Says Robertson of the art of passing: "Throw it as close to your man's head as you can. It'll get by--he'll have to blink."

If no teammate gets away for a pass, Robertson can often do the job by himself. The instant his opponent lets his weight fall on the wrong foot, Robertson takes a giant step and starts to move like a sports car slamming into gear. Crouched over the ball, his left arm thrust out as a shield, Robertson maneuvers through the melee under the hoop until, in one blurred motion, he rises from the floor to hang alone in mid-air like a puppet on a string. At last he shoots--a precise, gentle release of the ball that is cocked behind his right ear, a final flick of his fingers. The mark of Robertson's shot is the hiss of the net as the ball falls cleanly through.

"Play Him Tight." Defending against such an attack is a thankless task--but the pros do their rugged best. Says Paul Seymour of his St. Louis team's tactics against Robertson: "We pick him up at three-quarters court. We haven't picked up a man back there in years." Alternatively, many teams sag their defense against Robertson to keep him from crashing through the middle.

Each of the N.B.A.'s stars faces special defensive techniques. Says Cincinnati's Wayne Embry of playing against Boston's Russell: "Get Bill off the boards. I try to push him out as far as he'll go. I try to bump him out with my thighs and forearms. You can't push Wilt out. He's too strong." Says Russell on defending against Chamberlain: "Make him take that fall-away shot of his--it takes him away from the backboard." Says Twyman about Baylor, one of the great stars in the history of basketball. "Play him tight at the beginning of the game. Your whole object in life after he gets the ball is to block him off, give him the outside shot." Says Syracuse's Coach Alex Hannum about Pettit: "Keep him off the offensive board. Face-check him sometimes, even if you have to sacrifice the idea of getting the rebound."

Elbow Ethics. Implicit in many such methods are tricks of the trade not exactly prescribed by the rules--and indeed N.B.A. officials are lenient of necessity. Admits one referee: "We don't call a foul unless the contact directly involves the play--except once in a while. If we called them all, we'd be blowing those damned whistles all night."

Given this leeway, rival centers struggle for position in their own private wrestling matches under the basket. Boston's barrel-chested Jim Loscutoff is respected for his skill at disconcerting a jump shooter by jabbing him in the ribs with a massive forefinger. New Boy Robertson is already an expert at putting a hand on his man's hip and swinging himself around his rival. (Says Schayes: "Someone is going to grab that arm some day and throw Robertson into the third row.") St. Louis' hulking Clyde Lovellette daintily holds his man by the seam of his pants. Sums up Boston's Heinsohn: "You've got to know where the referee is."

No pro gets upset when he catches an accidental elbow in a scramble for a loose ball. Detroit's Walt Dukes (7 ft., 220 lbs.) has the sharpest elbows in the league, beats a painful tattoo on the heads of friend and foe alike. Used intentionally, however, the elbow can be a far more effective weapon than a punch. Says one coach on the ethics of elbowing: "It's perfectly all right for me to belt someone if he flagrantly holds me repeatedly when we're not fighting over the ball."

The one unforgivable sin in professional basketball is "bridging," or "tunneling," in which a defensive man slyly ducks under a player who is driving for a layup. In one celebrated case of bridging, the Celtics' Bob Harris broke the left wrist of Schayes in 1954. Bridging is now rare, as is the unprovoked, intentional foul calculated to injure. "If a guy belts me on a legitimate play, fine and dandy," says Twyman. "I'll belt him down at the other end. But if a guy is dirty, really dirty, he's out to lunch. He can't watch the 80 players in this league all at once."

In the scientific scramble of modern basketball, the intangible of confidence can be all important. Robertson astounded even his Royal teammates once this year by boldly driving right up and over Wilt Chamberlain for a shot. "If you're not confident," says Robertson, "you've got no business playing this game. That shot just won't go in." Says Schayes: "I can sense when we've got a team licked. There's a little drooping of the shoulders, a little glassy look in the eye. When you see that, you try to stomp on him and keep him down. Eighty percent of the guys can't come back. Twenty percent can--they're the Pettits, the Robertsons, the Baylors and the Cousys."

The Sure Cure. There are plenty of critics of modern basketball and its pellmell, high-scoring format. Says Fordham's Coach Johnny Bach disgustedly: "I look for an N.B.A. team, possibly the Celtics, to score over 200 points some time this season." Since shooting is forced by the clock and favored by the rules on fouls, the N.B.A. players are happily turning into "gunners"--once a term of contempt for the men who did nothing but shoot. "The kids are making shots we wouldn't even dare take," says Detroit's Coach McGuire, a crack playmaker during his career. "The science is going out of the game and it's becoming dull. Who wants to watch Wilt stuff them in? We need playmaking badly." Cousy notes wistfully: "The shooting has reached such a status that the playmaker is now unnecessary."

One of the most persuasive answers to the critics is success itself. With the settling of the Lakers in Los Angeles this year, the eight-team N.B.A. has become a truly national league. N.B.A. attendance, which jumped 23% last year, is up another 20% so far this season. Robertson's Royals, although last in their division, have already doubled last year's total attendance. Each weekend NBC-TV brings the pros' hell-bent skills into 12 million homes across the nation. From its TV contract the N.B.A. makes well over $500,000 and the league is comfortably in the black. Says N.B.A. President Maurice Podoloff, a 5-ft. 3-in. man who looks round and bouncy enough to dribble: "The public certainly likes the game. They come to watch. Believe me, if there's any slackening of interest, we'll find ways of curing it--and in a hurry." Certainly the surest way of curing basketball's troubles, if troubles there are, is to find more men with the all-round talents of Oscar Robertson. To him last week came the ultimate accolade from one professional to another. "I'd pay money," said Syracuse's Coach Hannum, "to watch Oscar Robertson play basketball." And for so long as even Robertson's rivals feel that way, the fans are sure to flock.

* Named for the mulatto who was the first man to be killed by British troops in the Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770.

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