Collision Course Read online

  For

  John Ruschulte

  A true Cincinnati Royals fan and friend.

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. Bob Cousy & the Holy Cross Crusaders

  2. A Brief History of the NBA 1946–1951 & the Rise of Bob Cousy and the Boston Celtics

  3. Scandal Revealed in College Basketball: The NBA Escapes the Fallout

  4. The Shot Clock Ushers in the Modern NBA & Bill Russell Joins the Celtics

  5. The Rochester Royals Move to Cincinnati & Maurice Stokes Suffers Career-Ending Injury

  6. Oscar Robertson & the University of Cincinnati Bearcats

  7. The Big O Comes to the NBA & the ABL Folds

  8. The Royals Move to the Eastern Division & Cooz Retires a Champion

  9. Cousy Takes Over at Boston College & Jerry Lucas Joins the Royals

  10. The Royals Continue to Struggle in the Eastern Division & Cousy is Accused of Associating with Gamblers

  11. No Room in Cincy for Cooz and The Big O

  12. The Royals Move to Kansas City & Bob Cousy Resigns

  Bibliography

  Notes

  About the Author

  Introduction

  It has been more than forty-five years since the Cincinnati Royals left the Queen City for Kansas City and parts beyond. Today we know the franchise as the Sacramento Kings. There are still a lot of people who are old enough to have supported and remember the Cincinnati Royals, and its players. They still talk about the team and continue to ask the question—what went wrong? What caused the demise of the Royals, a team loaded with All-Stars and former Olympic players that couldn’t win a championship and which received only marginal support from ownership, the media, and the fans in Cincinnati?

  The answer lies somewhere in the sagas of two Hall of Fame NBA basketball players, Bob Cousy and Oscar Robertson, and how their brilliant careers on the hard-wood collided and destroyed the Cincinnati Royals franchise. It is a basketball story of huge significance.

  The lives of Bob Cousy and Oscar Robertson were as much alike as they were different.

  Cousy was a white player born and raised in the streets of tough neighborhoods in Manhattan and Queens. He attended college and played basketball at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts where he became an All-American.

  Oscar Robertson was a black player born and raised in a tough all-black ghetto in Indianapolis. He attended college and played basketball at the University of Cincinnati where he became an All-American.

  So it was that destiny brought together the brilliance of Cousy and Robertson to meet at an unharmonious crossing in Cincinnati.

  The professional basketball career of Bob Cousy is a paradox in leadership. While Cousy has been credited for saving professional basketball in Boston as a player, he is also credited with destroying professional basketball in Cincinnati as a coach.

  Bob Cousy grew up during World War Two, and while going to school he was told that America never lost a war. As Cousy honed his skills on the playgrounds of St. Albans, Queens, New York, he transferred that edict to the basketball court—you had to win every game you played. Going forward Bob Cousy won at every level in which he played. In high school he was an All-City player; he played on outstanding teams at St. Alban’s Andrew Jackson High School that almost won the city championship in a very close game his senior year. In college at Holy Cross, he was an All-American and his team won an NCAA championship. Moving on to professional basketball, Cousy was an All-Star and his Boston Celtics teams won six NBA championships, five titles in a row between 1959 and 1963.

  Then Bob Cousy retired as a player and began a coaching career. First, he coached at the college level at Boston College with minimal success. Then, in 1969 he was named coach of the Cincinnati Royals in the NBA and failed miserably.

  His failure as a coach was just a case of no player being able to rise to the high standards of play that he had set for himself. Cousy quickly learned that the pressure to win as a player as opposed to the pressure to win as a coach was vastly different. The pressure to win as a coach was filled with conflicting demands, to be honest with your players while being honest with the fans, management, and the games’ governing body. Success as a coach had a lot to do with relationships and keeping everybody happy and to do that which sometimes caused you to compromise your values.

  The story of Oscar Robertson’s basketball career from high school to college to the NBA is one of unparalleled brilliance. Oscar Robertson is arguably one of the five best basketball players of all-time at every level.

  Still there was something lacking in Robertson’s ability to lead and while he played on championship teams in high school and at the end of his professional career with the Milwaukee Bucks, those many years in between with the University of Cincinnati Bearcats and Cincinnati Royals seemed to be more about Oscar than about Oscar’s team; there were no championship seasons, and when Bob Cousy became coach of the Royals, that’s when the trouble began.

  When Bob Cousy became an NBA coach his personality came into play with achieving success with his players. Cousy entered the professional game harboring a deep-seated belief that most players at the pro level were highly pampered products of the college game who, unlike himself as a player, never gave 100% on the court.

  Jerry Lucas was one of most successful high school basketball players in history at Middletown High School in Ohio and went on to win an NCAA championship at Ohio State and play on two other runner-up teams. But when Cousy inherited Lucas as a player on the Cincinnati Royals he was deeply disappointed with him.

  Cousy felt that Lucas lacked the intensity and desire to win that he had had as a professional player. Although Lucas was an All-Star, Cousy was of the opinion that he used only about 80% of his potential on the court and was often shut off or nullified by players of less talent. After taking over as head coach of the Royals in 1969, Cousy quickly traded Lucas, a fan favorite in Cincinnati, to San Francisco.

  Before the season was over Cousy would also attempt to engineer a trade for Oscar Robertson, one of the most storied players in NBA history. Cousy felt that Royals were too much about Oscar rather than being a team. At the end of the season, Robertson would be traded and in return, the Royals would receive a couple of mediocre players and sink further in the standings. Cousy’s tenure as coach would ultimately result in the transfer of the Cincinnati Royals franchise to Kansas City.

  The fact is that someone or something ruined the promising Cincinnati Royals franchise in the NBA and professional basketball in the Queen City forever. There are plenty of suspects for which to assign blame: the rise of professional football in the city with the Cincinnati Bengals that hogged all the sports dollars in the fall; Major League Baseball was in full-throttle in Cincinnati with The Big Red Machine at the same time the Royals were reeling as Cousy and Robertson wound-up together; the Reds were setting attendance records from April to October drawing over two million fans at home. Also, both the University of Cincinnati and Xavier University basketball programs were fiercely popular and loyally supported by their fans in the city. The annual meeting of the two teams at Cincinnati Gardens usually had an attendance that would equal three of the Royals’ home games.

  Another prime suspect to be considered was the Royals absentee ownership of Louie Jacobs, the concessionaire king and the Godfather of sports, according to Sports Illustrated, who along with his two sons, Max and Jeremy and their Emprise Corporation out of Buffalo, ran the franchise on a short leash for a decade.

  But most people considering the demise of the Cincinnati Royals franchise more often than not point their fingers directly at Bob Cousy. When he was hired as the Royals coach in the spring of 1969, he attempted to transform the team overnight
and literally began a fire sale for most of the team’s most esteemed and skilled players, including Jerry Lucas and Oscar Robertson, not to mention Adrian Smith, the MVP of the 1966 NBA All-Star Game. The salient question is, if Bob Cousy was just taking care of business and attempting to bring a new style of pro basketball to Cincinnati, or if the “Cooz” had a personality conflict with The Big O left over from his playing days and needed to assure himself he was in control of the team.

  Both Bob Cousy and Oscar Robertson had developed not only enormous athletic abilities but enormous athletic egos to match their skills. So, it is no surprise that when the two were required to work in an asymmetrical relationship as player and coach it would become a collision of will and rendered the team dysfunctional.

  However, in all fairness, it should be remembered, that if it were not for Bob Cousy, George Mikan, Arnie Risen, Joe Fulks, and a few others, there may have not been an NBA for anyone to play in or for the fans to support. They were the round ball pioneers that kept the game alive when it was most vulnerable to total collapse during the period of vast fan suspicion about the honesty of basketball due to the college point-shaving scandals.

  The failure of the Cincinnati Royals franchise is a story of the early days of the NBA and two of the league’s greatest players. It’s a failure that could have been avoided if someone would have seen that the personalities of Oscar Robertson and Bob Cousy were on a collision course.

  1

  Bob Cousy & the Holy Cross Crusaders

  Bob Cousy was born on August 9, 1928, in New York, six months after his parents Joseph and Juliette (Colette) Cousy had emigrated from the Alsace-Lorraine region of France and entered the United States through Ellis Island.

  According to Bob Cousy, he inherited a dual personality from his parents. His father was low keyed and complacent. But his mother, as he described, was as French as Joan of Arc, and was quite emotional and very high strung. Cousy was of the opinion that his father gave him his self-confidence and his mother the overdrive to succeed no matter what the costs.

  Joseph Cousy supported the family by driving a cab. Bob Cousy spent his early years being raised in a tenement on the east side of Manhattan in Yorkville.

  When he was six years old Cousy donned his uncle’s top hat and grabbed his cane then announced to his mother, “Mama I will be a big man someday.”1 But no one could have foreseen just how much celebrity the pint-sized prophet would achieve.

  When Cousy was 12 years old the family moved to St. Albans, Queens where his parents had bought a three-story house. The Cousys divided the house into apartments and rented out the first two floors.

  Cousy soon discovered O’Connell Park where grounds director Morty Arkin introduced him to basketball. By the age of 13, Cousy started playing basketball on the schoolyard playgrounds or wherever he could find a pick-up game. It was there that Cousy’s extremely competitive nature was formed. He played those schoolyard games based on what he later described in his book The Killer Instinct as the twin principles that you gave it back “in spades” to anybody who gave it to you and that every loose ball was his.

  When he broke his right arm, he showed his budding tenacity by learning to dribble and shoot with his left hand. By the time he recovered, Bob Cousy was becoming a considerable force on the court.

  The coach of St. Alban’s Andrew Jackson High School noticed him playing in a schoolyard one day and suggested he come out for the team as he could use a left-handed shooter. The coach was stunned when Cousy told him he was actually right-handed.

  Cousy tried out for the team and was cut twice from the junior varsity team at Andrew Jackson High School. But Cousy was determined to hang-in-there and learn.

  With his extraordinary peripheral vision that allowed him to pass the ball without looking at the other player, Cousy soon became a high school standout and as a senior won the New York City high school scoring title.

  Cousy played his last high school game on March 16, 1946, in the New York City Public School Athletic League (P.S.A.L.) championship game at Madison Square Garden before 15,000 fans. At the time, Andrew Jackson High School, led by Cousy, had an 18-game winning streak.

  The championship game was against Erasmus Hall High School of Brooklyn. Later, Erasmus would graduate Chicago Bulls and Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf (class of 1953) and Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and Philadelphia 76ers basketball great Billy Cunningham (class of 1960).

  Erasmus would defeat Jackson for the championship in a close fought game 35–33. The New York Times would state in its article on the game, “Andrew Jackson was not so fortunate. Its winning streak was stopped at 18 games by an aggressive Erasmus quintet. Ronnie Nadell was the big gun for the Buff and Blue with 18 points, while Robert Cousy paced the losers with 14.”2

  Cousy was selected for the 1945–1946 New York Journal-American All-City Team that included the following first team players: Bob Cousy (Andrew Jackson), Vic Hanson (L.I.C.), George Feigenbaum (New Utrecht), Zeke Sinicola (Benjamin Franklin), and Abe Becker (Lincoln).

  While not much is known in regard to what happened to Vic Hanson, the only black player on the 1946 All-City team following high school, Cousy and the other three players would go on to play college basketball and two of three others besides Cousy would play in the NBA.

  George Feigenbaum would play college ball at the University of Kentucky and then play in the NBA between 1949 and 1953 with the Baltimore Bullets and Milwaukee Hawks.

  Zeke Sinicola became an All-American at Niagara University while leading the Purple Eagles to their first appearance in the NIT in 1950. Following college, Sinicola played with the Ft. Wayne Pistons between 1950 and 1952.

  Abe Becker went on to play at NYU and was captain of the 1950–51 squad. While the 1949–50 NYU team finished with a record of 8–11, against their arch-rival in New York, CCNY, the eventual 1950 NCAA champions, they would battle them tooth and nail before losing 64–61 as Becker scored 18 points. Abe Becker would go on to play in the 1951 College East-West All-Star Game.

  While Bob Cousy had played less than two years of high school basketball, it seems almost unbelievable by comparison to today’s standards that as an All-City Team player he would only be offered two college scholarships. One was at Boston College and the other at Holy Cross College.

  A young referee by the name of Lou Eisenstein had first recommended Cousy to coach Alvin “Doggie” Julian who had just taken the Holy Cross job. In the mid-1940s Julian had been the head coach at Muhlenberg College and gave Eisenstein the opportunity to work some of his games. Satisfied with the referee’s style, Julian recommended Eisenstein to a few other coaches. Grateful for the opportunity, Eisenstein told Julian that if he ever saw a way to help him, he would.

  Doggie Julian came to Holy Cross in the fall of 1945 as an assistant backfield coach for the football team and implemented a two-platoon substitution system. It was then that Lou Eisenstein contacted Julian and told him, “There’s a schoolboy on Long Island named Cousy and he’s only a sophomore. But he looks like something special.”3

  Julian followed up on Eisenstein’s tip and went to see Cousy play, then met his parents. Even though Cousy was not yet a star in New York high school basketball, Julian told Gary Black of the New York Holy Cross Club to keep in touch with the boy, although he was still two years away from graduation.

  The Holy Cross basketball program was not doing very well. From 1940 to 1945 the Crusaders had won only 22 games. In 1946, Doggie Julian was offered an extra $500 to become head coach of the basketball team.

  Although Holy Cross athletics programs had a solid reputation as a top collegiate performer in football, track, and baseball in the early 1940s, the basketball program was hampered by the fact that the school did not have a gymnasium. The team practiced in an old barn behind a chapel. But the administration made a decision to start building the basketball program and with lots of young athletes starting to return from World War Two (Bob Curran, U.S. Marines; And
y Laska, U.S. Army Air Force; and others) and Julian starting to recruit heavily from New York City high schools, (Joe Mullaney, Chaminade; George Kaftan Xavier; Dermott O’Connell, Cardinal Hayes; Ken Haggerty, Andrew Jackson; and others) they started to acquire some talent.

  Holy Cross is located in Worcester, Massachusetts about 40 miles from Boston. At that time the city had a population of approximately 193,694.

  In the 1940s, during the winter months, Boston was a hockey town. The city’s high schools didn’t even have basketball teams until after World War Two. But when Holy Cross, under Doggie Julian, finished with a record of 14–4 in 1945–46 and started to receive national attention, suddenly round-ball was all the rage in Beantown and soon the Crusaders with Bob Cousy would be selling-out Boston Garden.

  Holy Cross seemed like a good for fit for Cousy because he had two requirements for selecting a college. First, out of respect for his grandmother’s wishes, he wanted to attend a Catholic college. Second, he wanted to go to school outside of New York City.

  When Cousy visited Boston College he discovered that it was, for the most part, a commuter school, so he would have to live in rooming houses which did not appeal to him.

  Then he visited Holy Cross in Worchester, Massachusetts and found that they had dormitories. So, he gladly accepted the scholarship.

  When Bob Cousy enrolled at Holy Cross, the NCAA World War Two regulations were still in effect that permitted freshmen to participate in varsity sports. In 1946–47, Cousy’s freshman year, Holy Cross got off to a slow start. In early January 1947, the Crusaders didn’t exactly look like a championship team in the making. After being defeated by North Carolina State and Duquesne, the Crusaders lost their third straight game falling to Wyoming 58–57. At that point in the season, their record stood at 4–3. But all of sudden they caught fire and reeled off twenty-three victories in a row.

  As they gained momentum, on February 25 at Boston Garden, Holy Cross walloped Boston College 90–48. The 90 points broke the Holy Cross record for points in a game and also broke the arena record.