Published in Harlem World on 2/4/21
Walking I feel one with wind. Worldly concerns dissolve as snow showers surround me. Flakes land with jet pilot precision where nature intends. Danger warnings demand I seek refuge but storm beauty seduces.
Johnnie Ehrenfeld and I at age fourteen trudged fifty blocks in ‘67 through a blizzard like this one to buy an Oscar Robertson “Big O” basketball and two uniforms at the old Madison Square Garden's Gerry Cosby's Sporting Goods store. Our Manhattan Yellow Pages marathon phone calls found a friendly church pastor who'd allow us to shoot hoops in his gym.
Clutching the boxed orange ball plus brown- bagged blue knee-high striped stirrup socks, 1milky tank tops and the era's pro-style short shorts after celebratory hot dogs at Nedick's under the Garden Marquee, we turned back uptown, fifty more blocks from chu1rch.
Excitement outlasted fatigue as we reached the parquet court strutting like stars. We lined up one on each side as the nine-team league Knicks did for layups that launched pregame warmups. I hummed the arena's organ tunes as I felt the ball's pebbled surface before hoisting shots. It took mighty heaves to reach the ten-foot high hoop; I was Little M at five feet, five inches, not the 6-5 Big O after all!
Having seen him torch the Knicks for the Cincinnati Royals in person and on Channel 9’s Saturday Night Sports Special (when hockey didn't preempt it) I could practice some moves. Robertson, fluid, had exquisite body control, as a YouTube video clip this morning reminds me. His individual award list is long and he late in career mentored the Milwaukee Bucks to a championship.
A hesitant lane driver because I wore glasses and lacking an accurate jump shot I became a tenacious defender so team captains would pick me for intramural tourneys at school. Hot shooters knew I could intercept passes, steal dribbles, make plays. In a church gym on a snow day I could do even more as hoop dreams engaged me.
Johnnie and I ran the length of the court all day long, acting out imaginary NBA games that we loudly announced with Marty Glickman and Marv Albert's trademark phrases. “The former's ‘Swish!’ for a basketball shot that went in without touching the rim or the backboard and 'Good like Nedicks!' call for a basket which referred to an early sponsor, a purveyor of orange juice and hot dogs, was for an earlier generation what the latter's 'Yes!’ was later on,” Stan Isaacs in 2001 wrote in Newsday.
Now 67 in Brooklyn amidst the Covid pandemic I text my adult son in Virginia as we watch Knicks games on television to the “swooping and hooping” eloquence of former Knicks all-star and champion Walt Frazier (my 1967 defensive role model).
Robertson at 82 is bitter that present stars don't know how his activism enriched them. The Big O in prime playing years told US Senate investigators that the reserve clause, binding players to single teams, was a modern form of slavery. In the US Supreme Court case of Robertson v NBA he toppled it plus the rule of compensating teams for player movements. This paved the way for today's standard free agency and skyrocket salaries (from the $898,310 minimum of a rookie college athlete to Golden State Warriors three-point bomber Stephen Curry's $43,006,362 this season).
The late Curt Flood, St. Louis Cardinals all-star center fielder and 1968 World Series hero, “changed baseball but killed his career,” Allen Barra's 2011 Atlantic essay observes. Flood refused a trade and sued Major League Baseball, losing his Supreme Court case in a precedent that inspired others but ruined him.
Robertson, a two-court champion, played on.
Once upon a time two teenage boys bought an Oscar Robertson “Big O” ball to live hoop dreams in a Manhattan house of worship’s empty gym on a snow day like this one. I look through my living room window and wonder who's playing today.
An aging Big O displays grace and power for a young Kareem Abdul Jabbar who will join him in the Hall of Fame.