The Book of Basketball (96 page)

Clearly, something was a little
off
with the Big O. You never heard the word “happy” that often with him, except for that transcendent ’71 season when the Bucks destroyed everyone in their path. He ended up leaving Milwaukee just as unhappily as he’d left Cincinnati, furious that the team lowballed him (in Oscar’s mind) before the ’75 season. Sam Goldpaper’s subsequent
New York Times
story started, “Pro basketball has lost what once was its greatest and most complete player. Oscar Robertson, after 14 seasons and many contract disputes, announced his retirement last night.” You couldn’t get through the second sentence of Oscar’s basketball obituary without finding something negative. Twenty-eight years later, Jack McCallum’s
SI
feature wondering why Oscar had effectively disappeared from basketball started, “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.”

Again, complimentary … but negative. Nobody sifted through Oscar’s never-ending acrimony well enough to figure him out. Even when he heroically donated a kidney to his ailing daughter in 1997 (saving her life), the moment came and went; you probably didn’t remember until I reminded you. His biggest legacy had nothing to do with talent: Oscar’s ballsy performance as president of the Players Association led to skyrocketing contracts, the ABA/NBA merger, an overhaul of free agency and
every eight-figure deal we see today, only he never gets credit because the struggles of NBA players haven’t been romanticized by writers or documentarians. Even stranger, of all the NBA legends who ever lived, only Oscar doesn’t belong to a current franchise because the Royals moved to Kansas City in 1973 (and then Sacramento in 1985). He can’t go back home like Russell/Bird in Boston, or Magic/West/Kareem in Los Angeles, or even Willis/Clyde/Ewing in New York, simply because home doesn’t exist. He’s a historical nomad. He belongs to nobody. And maybe it’s better that way. To this day, Oscar remains damaged goods—a victim of his vile racial climate, someone who battled a rare form of post-traumatic stress disorder that can’t be defined. As his teammate during Oscar’s prime, you would have respected the hell out of him, you would have felt sorry for him, you would have marveled at him … but ultimately, I’m not sure you would have enjoyed playing with him that much. This was a man who decided during the epilogue of his book, “Once I heard someone say that in order to write love songs, you have to have been through some bad times. To write a love song, you had to have your heart broken. If that’s the case, I can state right here and now that I could write the greatest songs in the world.”

Of all the injuries that determined the ninety-six spots of my Pyramid, I can tell you this much: Oscar Robertson’s broken heart resonates the most.

8. JERRY WEST

Resume: 14 years, 12 quality, 14 All-Stars … ’69 Finals MVP … Simmons MVP (70) … MVP runner-up: ’66, ’70, ’71, ’72 … Top 5 (’62, ’63, ’64, ’65, ’66, ’67, ’70, ’71, ’72, ’73), Top-10 (’68, ’69) … All-Defense (4x) … records: FTs, season (840); points, playoff series (46.3) … leader: scoring (1x), assists (1x) … career: 27.0 PPG (5th), 27–7–6, 47% FG, 81% FT … 4-year peak: 30–6–6 … Playoffs (153 G): 29.3 PPG (3rd) … Finals: 30.5 PPG (55 G) … best player on one champ (’72 Lakers), best or 2nd-best player on 8 runner-ups (’62, ’63, ’65, ’66, ’68, ’69, ’70, ’73 Lakers) … averaged a 26–5–10 during L.A.’s 33-game winning streak (’72) … 25K Point Club

“Ahead of Oscar?” you’re saying. “Really?
Ahead of Oscar?”

My defense in five parts:

1. They made the signature West move (going right, leaning forward, ready to make one last high dribble for a pull-up jumper) the league’s logo. It remains the league’s logo to this day. This seems relevant. If the Academy decided that the Oscar trophy should look like Laurence Olivier instead of Marlon Brando fifty years ago, wouldn’t that have meant something?
   ⁴²
   

2. The Royals traded Oscar and the Lakers
   never
   would have traded West. (During the ’70 season, the Royals floated a West-Oscar or West-Wilt trade out there and the Lakers quickly said no.) Oscar’s first four years were unquestionably better than Jerry’s first four years; during the ’65 season,
   SI
   wrote, “[West] is, above all else, an exceptional basketball player of a cut and magnetism comparable (some even say superior) to Oscar Robertson,”
   ⁴³
   with Warriors coach Alex Hannum adding, “Oscar does the right thing more often, but in some phases I now believe West is superior to Robertson. He creates many problems for a defense, and he is more exciting because of the increased range of his long shot.” So let’s call it dead even for that year and the next two (West might even get a slight edge). West was undeniably superior for the next five seasons, with
   SI
   deciding in 1972, “There has been a groundswell for West the last few seasons, so that now he is often accepted as the equal, or the superior, of Oscar Robertson as the finest guard of all time.”
   ⁴⁴
   As Oscar broke down over the ’72 and ’73 seasons, West submitted two more spectacular years (making first-team All-NBA both times and making two Finals). Why take Oscar over West when the last two-thirds of West’s career was significantly better?
   

3. Any player from their generation would have rather dealt with West than Oscar as a teammate and if they say otherwise, they’re lying. West was just an easier guy to
   exist
   with. As early as 1965,
   SI
   wrote, “There is one intangible that nobody talks much about because it is hard to judge accurately, or even to judge at all. West seems to have a more settling influence on his team; he is not, like Robertson, a complainer. He does not bait officials.” Even opponents loved the Logo. When the Lakers held Jerry West Night in March 1971, Bill Russell paid his own way to be there and said during the ceremony, “Jerry, I once wrote that success is a journey, and that the greatest honor a man can have is the respect and friendship of his peers. You have that more than any man I know. Jerry, you are, in every sense of the word, truly a champion. If I could have one wish granted, it would be that you would always be happy.” Don’t these stories count in the big scheme of things?
   ⁴⁵
   

4. As I keep mentioning, I’m somewhat of an evolutionary snob. To re-borrow the car analogy from much earlier, you’d rather race a 2010 BMW than a 1964 BMW; you’d rather drive cross-country in a 2010 BMW; you’d rather bet your life on getting 250,000 miles out of a 2010 BMW. You just would. It’s the safe pick. They make finer automobiles now—better torque, better engines, better shocks, better balance, better acceleration, better engineering, better everything. With that said, they
   did
   make a couple of transcendent cars in the sixties. And you know who was like the ’64 Beemer? The Logo. Moses was the perfect self-made center, Bird the perfect self-made forward, and West the perfect self-made shooting guard—a little undersized (only six foot three, but with an 81-inch wingspan),
   ⁴⁶
   a good athlete (but not great), never dominating (but routinely unstoppable), and someone who willed himself to be better than he should have been. Watching him forty-plus years later is like watching a human basketball camp. Technically, he’s perfect. His jumper is perfect. His defensive technique is perfect. His dribbling is right out of an infomercial. He runs in the most economical way possible. He could go right or left, attack the rim, pull up on a dime, post you up—the man had no holes other than a genetic inability to play above the rim. I watched him enough on tape to make the following proclamation: throw 1966 West in a time machine, insert him into the 2008–9 season and he’d make the All-Star team easy. He had a “modern” game, for lack of a better word. If anything, he may have been born too soon; much like Maravich and DeBusschere, the three-point line would have been an enormous advantage for him. Since they didn’t have it back in the sixties, West worked for the best possible shots much as Oscar did, wrapping around picks for jumpers, backing defenders down to specific spots on the floor, pulling up for 15-footers on fast breaks, or simply beating guys off the dribble and getting to the line.
   

What bugs me about West is that—the same way Oscar was helped by a triple-double infatuation historically—West’s legacy was wounded by the lack of a three-point line, the lack of All-Defense teams (didn’t start until 1969) and that they didn’t keep track of steals until 1973–74.
⁴⁷

As much as I hate trusting numbers to paint an overall picture, this 13-month stretch that started with the ’65 playoffs and went through the ’66 playoffs does a decent job of describing why the Logo mattered so much:

’66 regular season:
79 games, 3,218 minutes (40.7 MPG) … 31.3 PPG, 7.1 RPG, 6.1 APG … made 818 of 1,731 FGs (47.3%) … made 840 of 977 FTs (86%) … record: 45–35

’65 and ’66 Playoffs:
25 games, 1,089 minutes (43.6 MG) … 37.0 PPG, 6.1 RPG, 5.4 APG … made 340 of 708 FGs (48%)) … made 246 of 279 FTs (88%) … record: 12–13 (lost twice in Finals)

Some things to keep in mind: First, Elgin blew out his knee in the ’65 playoffs and limped through the
’66
season (even missing 31 games).
Considering the Lakers squandered consecutive Finals to Boston teams that featured five Hall of Famers and three top thirty-five Pyramid guys (and nearly stole Game 7 in
’66
to boot), that’s pretty impressive for a team with one great player. (So maybe that player was a little greater than we thought?) Second, those 840 made free throws in
’66?
An all-time record. It’s never been topped. Not even by the Dipper. Including those 25 playoff games, imagine the sheer will of a six-foot-three guard getting to the line nearly 1,300 times in 104 games—one-fourth of which were games of the highest possible pressure—during a time when basketball resembled hockey and players were routinely creamed on drives. Along with Mikan, Russell and Jordan, he’s one of the four toughest NBA superstars ever. Third, West finished the
’66
regular season with the following rankings: second in points, fourth in assists, second in field goals made and attempted, tenth in field goal percentage, first in free throws made and attempted, fourth in free throw percentage and seventh in minutes, and if they’d kept track of steals, he would have cracked the top three there. (To put those numbers in perspective, not even Michael Jordan ever finished in the top ten in nine major categories.) Fourth, West set the record for most points per game in a Playoffs (five games or more), averaging 40.6 points during a remarkable ’65 playoffs that included one of the more heroic performances you never knew about: without Elgin, West carried the Lakers by averaging a jaw-dropping 46.3 points in the first round (squeezing them past Baltimore in six). Both of those records (40.6 and 46.3) still stand.

You won’t find a better stretch of all-around basketball. And that was a common theme of West’s career: he always delivered whatever his team needed. They needed him to shut a hot shooter down and he did it.
⁴⁸
They needed him to make a big shot and he did it. They needed him to score points for most of the sixties, so that’s what he did. During the last stage of his career (1969–1973), the Lakers needed West to be more of a ball-handler,
so that’s what he did (even cracking the top three in assists in ’71 and ’72). Because of his reckless style, he suffered so many injuries (and played through all of them) that people stopped keeping track: broken noses, busted thumbs, pulled hamstrings, sprained ankles, concussions, you name it. He raised his game so consistently that it earned him the “Mr. Clutch” moniker, delivering a few iconic moments along the way—like his steal and buzzer-beating layup to win Game 3 of the ’62 Finals, or his game-saving 60-footer in Game 3 of the ’70 Finals, or a 53-point, 10-assist explosion in Game 1 of the ’69 Finals that Russell himself blessed as “the greatest clutch performance ever against the Celtics.”

If there was a telling moment from West’s career, it was the way Russell’s Celtics grew to revere him as the years passed. During the ’69 Finals, Larry Siegfried was talking to Deford about the good fortune of West’s hamstring injury—West had scored 197 points in the first five games before pulling his hamstring late in Game 5—and explained, “[West] is the master. They can talk about the others, build them up, but he is the one. He is the only guard …. His tribute is what the players think of him. We’ve played at about the same time but, if we hadn’t, the one player I’d most like to see win a championship is Jerry West.” After the soul-crushing Game 7 defeat, John Havlicek told Terry Pluto, “The guy I felt terrible for in those playoffs was Jerry West. He was so great, and he was absolutely devastated. As we came off the court, I went up to Jerry and told him, ‘I love you and I just hope you get a championship. You deserve it as much as anyone who has ever played this game.’ He was too emotionally spent to say anything, but you could feel his absolute and total dejection over losing.”

And that’s what stands out about West’s career more than anything: he had
horrible
luck. What happens if Selvy’s shot falls? What happens if Elgin’s body doesn’t break down? What happens if the Lakers don’t stupidly waive Don Nelson, who played such a crucial role for Boston in the ’68 and ’69 Finals? What happens if West doesn’t pull his hamstring at the end of Game 5 in the ’69 Finals, or if Wilt doesn’t milk an injury and enrage his coach during the last five minutes of Game 7? What happens if Wilt and Baylor don’t get hurt during the ’70 regular season, or if Willis never limps onto the court for Game 7 of the Finals and drives the crowd into a frenzy? When everything finally and belatedly fell into place during the ’72 season—a record 69
wins, a 33-game winning streak and his first title—West may have shattered the record for Most Fans with No Discernible Rooting Interest Who Just Felt Overwhelmingly Happy for a Winning Player.
⁴⁹