A profoundly bitter product of everything that happened to him?

[chichi]

Had I heard too many stories about Oscar being a miserable fifa 15 coins crank? Was I still scarred from finishing his 2003 autobiography, The Big O: My Life, My Times, My Game, maybe the angriest, most self-congratulatory basketball book ever written by anyone not named “Wilt?” 29 Did I feel bad because Oscar was damaged goods, a profoundly bitter product of everything that happened to him? I don’t know. But he may as well have been wearing a BEWARE OF OSCAR sign. And so we killed time just twenty feet apart for the next three hours. I never said a word to him.

There are few happy Oscar stories. Teammates lived in perpetual fear of letting him down. Coaches struggled to reach him and ultimately left him alone. Referees dreaded calling his games, knowing they couldn’t toss the league’s best all-around player even as he was serenading them with F-bombs. Fans struggled to connect with a prodigy who had little interest in connecting with them. After he finished in the top five for assists and points for nine straight years, made nine straight first-team All-NBA appearances, averaged a triple double for the first five years of his career, won the ’64 MVP with Russell and Wilt in their primes and transformed the role of guards in professional basketball, his team still decided, “We need to get rid of him.” Even his hometown paper (the Cincinnati Enquirer) piled on by writing in February 1970, “For years, Oscar has privately scorned the Royals management; he has ridiculed Cincinnati and its fans; he has knocked other players, both on his team and others; and he has never been willing to pay a compliment. He is, has been and probably will grow old a bitter man, convinced that it was all a plot.” Of course, Oscar included this excerpt in his book thirty years later as proof that the notoriously right-wing newspaper was bigoted. Maybe both sides were right.

If Elgin was profoundly affected by racism, then Oscar was obliterated by it. He grew up like Bizarro Jimmy Chitwood in Bizarro Hoosiers, the never-released movie where a black basketball team prevailed … but not before facing profound prejudice and hostility along the way. 30 When Oscar’s Crispus Attucks High School became the first all-black champion in state history in 1955,Indianapolis rerouted its annual championship parade toward the ghetto, with the implication being, We don’t trust the blacks to behave themselves, so let’s keep this self-contained. Oscar never got over it. Nor did he get over Indiana University’s coach, Branch Mc-Cracken, for recruiting him by saying, “I hope you’re not the kind of kid who wants money to go to school.” (Note: If you don’t think Oscar didn’t immediately stand up and walk out of the room, then you don’t know Oscar well enough. Yes, that was a triple negative. I was due.) He chose the University of Cincinnati and had experiences that defy imagination six decades later. This stuff actually happened? His teachers belittled him in class and went out of their way to make him feel dumb. In Dallas, fans greeted him by tossing a black cat into his locker room. 31 In Houston, he couldn’t check into his hotel because of a NO BLACKS ALLOWED sign … only his team stayed there anyway, with poor Oscar stuck sleeping in a Texas Southern dorm room. In North Carolina, someone delivered him a pregame letter from the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan that simply read, “Don’t ever come to the South.” In St. Louis, he and a black teammate strolled into a restaurant and were greeted by stony silence, followed by every other customer clearing out within a minute or two. Even in downtown Cincinnati, they had “colored” water fountains and a cinema that wouldn’t allow blacks as patrons … a theater that stood only half a block from where he starred for the Bearcats. Night after night, Oscar was filling a gym with fans and couldn’t even walk down the street to catch a movie.