Free When the Garden Was Eden by Harvey Araton Page B

hoop games, pro basketball had no real identity to speak of. It was an inelegant game, the domain of whites and fittingly confined mostly to small, industrial cities. The Knicks might as well have been in one, too. They played many home games at the 69th Regiment Armory, where Jimmy Wergeles, the public relations man, would steer people in from outside for free. “To fill it up a little bit upstairs,” he said.
    But by the summer of ’68, the infusion of black talent was lifting the pro game to higher athletic and cultural levels. It could be argued that the metaphorical curtain was raised on this sport—destined to soar in the American social arena—by one little-known or long-forgotten exhibition on August 16, 1968. The site was the 15,000-seat outdoor Singer Bowl on the site of the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens. Underwriting the event was the F. & M. Schaefer Brewing Company. Televising it in the New York area was WPIX (Channel 11). Tickets were scaled at $5, $3, and $2, with 350 VIP seats selling at $25.
    The goal, said the game’s celebrity organizer, Oscar Robertson, was to memorialize Dr. King and raise money for his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “A quarter million dollars would be a nice round figure for us to raise,” Robertson, the president of the National Basketball Players Association, was quoted as saying in the New York Times on the morning of the game.
    At a time when pro basketball was no main attraction, only 7,500 people cheered the talents of Robertson, Wilt Chamberlain, Willis Reed, Walt Bellamy, Dave DeBusschere, and Earl Monroe. Hindsight tells us that the size of the crowd or the proceeds from the gate weren’t really the point. When asked about the game, Robertson had scant memory of where it was played and who had shown up to participate, or that he had appeared the following morning in a Times photograph, shaking hands with the dapper Mayor Lindsay, who had to be thrilled to be attending an event that united people instead of inciting them to general mayhem.
    Time has a way of blurring the details of even the most worthy endeavors, but what Robertson would never forget was the profound grief he felt that summer, the consuming need for him and his colleagues to collectively cry out. “It was a depressing time for blacks in America,” he said. “If you grew up as an African American, with the poverty and despair, I always said it was almost like being a nurse in a hospital, where you see blood and suffering all the time but eventually you get used to it. But when Dr. King was killed, a man who was showing us a way out, it was almost too much to bear. It was a terrible time, but I wanted us to stand up and say something, even though you had to be careful what you said if you were black, because you could lose what you had.”
    The man who never once slammed a ball through the hoop in an NBA game because he believed it was an inelegant act seldom had to be prodded to belittle the diminished state of fundamentals in the modern game. To the chagrin of David Stern and other league officials, Robertson rightly linked the lack of movement and teamwork to the dunk-and-pony shows that were seemingly designed to suit the pyrotechnic NBA arena experience. In other words, Robertson had made it his life’s calling to speak his piece, whether people wanted to hear it or not, on subjects related to what happened inside the lines or out.
    To some, he came off as bitter: born too early to be justly appreciated or compensated for the magnificent player he was. In an age before free agency, Robertson had to take what his owners gave him, but was typically front and center when the players began to collectively fight back, beginning with a movement to procure a pension plan. Robertson and the Celtics’ Tommy Heinsohn, mentored by union general counsel Larry Fleisher, were enraged when the owners didn’t take them seriously. They made plans for the players to boycott the 1964