Chances are you’ve seen it, and if you’re an NBA fan, you’ve glanced at the replay a few dozen times.
Stephen Curry, from just beyond half-court and with some time to work with, launches a 3 no one would get away with in the last seconds of overtime at Oklahoma City. It goes swish. Golden State beats the Thunder and the quest to top the Bulls’ 72 victories from 1995-96 carries on.
Taken by itself, this was remarkable stuff. However, it was impossible to ignore that Curry, the MVP and central figure in the Warriors’ run to an NBA title one season ago, had his best string of games in the wake of some remarks from the great Oscar Robertson.
Essentially, what Robertson said was that defenses were far tougher in his playing days, that teams today don’t know how to defend and give Curry too much room to, well, shoot from anywhere in the building, rather than get in his face from tip to buzzer.
The uproar was immediate. Some, especially current players, took umbrage at Robertson’s criticism, seeing it as the bitter, jealous thoughts of an old man, while others simply thought he was trying to rain on the historic run Curry and fellow Warriors were putting together.
But while the Big O may have proved too harsh in his assessment of Curry, you must understand where it comes from – namely, setting all kinds of historical marks through a life of basketball, only to get overshadowed by time and the reputations and accomplishments of others.
Oscar Robertson made his name at Crispus Attucks, a high school in Indianapolis. His team, with an African-American coach and African-American starting five, won back-to-back Indiana state basketball titles in 1955 and ’56, conquering a state with an uneasy racial history (the KKK was once headquartered there).
Why don’t we hear of this story more? Perhaps because, in 1954, tiny Milan made its famous run to the Indiana state title and the movie Hoosiers was based on it. Perhaps that was where Robertson’s frustration with history started.
It continued through Big O’s days at the University of Cincinnati, where he turned the Bearcats into a powerhouse – but never won an NCAA title and, worse yet, seeing Cincy win it all twice after he graduated.
The NBA delivered more frustration for Robertson. A great shooter to go along with his deft passing and effort on the boards, he famously averaged a triple-double for an entire season without the benefit of a 3-point line.
But his Cincinnati Royals (like so many others) couldn’t unseat Red Auerbach’s Boston Celtics dynasty. Oscar’s lone NBA title came late in his career, in 1971, when paired with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Milwaukee, and of course Kareem got most of the credit for it.
So it continued into the modern era. Magic Johnson was the closest thing to Robertson, and his feats sent Big O further into the shadows. Worse yet, when free agency came about, something that Robertson helped to earn for his peers and successors through a class-action lawsuit against the NBA, the rule that allowed teams to keep their stars was called the “Larry Bird Exception.” Oscar got shunned again.
To some degree, the passage of time can dim the legacy of any living sports legend. It’s inevitable. But the difference between a diminished name and a forgotten name is profound, and if nothing else, Robertson is making sure that we don’t forget him before his time on Earth is finished.
That shouldn’t be difficult on our part. We marvel at Wilt Chamberlain for dropping 100 in a game and 50-plus for a season, plus that whole ladies’ man stuff. We revere Bill Russell for 11 rings, praise Jerry West for his Logo stuff and consider Michael Jordan as something close to divine.
Yet none of them did as much, as well, on the court for a longer period of time as Robertson. It wasn’t his fault that most of his teams lacked the stacked rosters that most greats get to work with, nor could he control the advent of the 3-point line in 1979-80 that pushed up point totals for everyone that followed.
We get so dazzled by the latest great thing we see that we get amnesia about most that came before. By doing so, intentionally or not, we diminish the greatness of earlier times, and relegate legends to distant memory banks that only get found again for negative reasons.
Curry, and Golden State, are planting themselves in the NBA record books with a style all their own. It’s made them the best show in sports, and a welcome diversion from the ugliness that seems to permeate everywhere else in our society.
And it doesn’t diminish the Warriors one bit to point out that, in another time and in another place, great players like Oscar Robertson displayed their own majesty. Present glory need not replace past glory, and if Oscar Robertson did nothing else, he reminded us of that truism.
