The Big O
My Life, My Times, My Game
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Perhaps the greatest all-around player in basketball history, Oscar Robertson revolutionized basketball as a member of the Cincinnati Royals and won a championship with the Milwaukee Bucks. When he was twenty-three, in 1962, he accomplished one of basketball’s most impressive feats: averaging the triple-double in a single season—a feat never matched since. Cocaptain of the Olympic gold medal team of 1960; named the player of the century by the National Association of Basketball Coaches; named one of the fifty greatest players in NBA history; and inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1980—Robertson’s accolades are as numerous as they are impressive. But The Big O is also the story of a shy black child from a poor family in a segregated city; of the superstar who, at the height of his career, became the president of the National Basketball Players Association to try to improve conditions for all players. It is the story of the man forced from the game at thirty-four and blacklisted from coaching and broadcasting. But two years after he left basketball, after six years of legal wrangling, Robertson won his lawsuit against the NBA, eliminating the option clause that bound a player to a single NBA team in perpetuity and ending restrictions on free agency. The Big O is the story of how the NBA, as we now know it, was built; of race in America in the second half of the twentieth century; and of an uncompromising man and a complex hero.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As one of the NBA's all-time greats, Oscar Robertson has much to pass on to both his old fans and young basketball enthusiasts perhaps unfamiliar with his legacy. Whether it was winning Indiana's famed statewide high school tournament (and playing in the first all-black final, the first time black teams had made the final), winning a gold medal in the 1960 Olympics or making the NBA all-star team 12 times, the author certainly made his mark on sports history. But while listing his accomplishments and including the testimony of former teammates, coaches and opponents effectively details his greatness, the Big O feels compelled to constantly remind readers of his eminence with statements like, "By all accounts, I was the best all-around player of my era" though the case has already been clearly stated. He also spends much of the epilogue explaining how no modern player compares to him in his prime. Arrogance aside, Robertson's rise from sharecropper's grandson to world-class athlete and his dealings with overt racism throughout the journey (as a college player, he was told to leave an all-white Houston hotel in the middle of the night) offer wonderful lessons for young athletes. Robertson's experiences playing for the NBA (Cincinnati and Milwaukee) in its bumbling early days, such as the time his team arrived at their arena only to find the circus already set up, are entertaining, too. Still, one may wonder why Robertson, humorless to the final buzzer, came away with so much more bitterness than joy.
