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Complete Courtmen. Yet such are the demands of modern basketball that each of these players has a flaw, however slight. Chamberlain, Baylor and Pettit are less than superior as playmakers. Boston's Russell is an erratic scorer. Not only is the short Cousy no rebounder, but he is no great shakes on defense—despite his flashy interceptions.
Thus the dream of every basketball coach, both in the N.B.A. and among the amateurs, is to find the player who combines all the talents required by the modern game: scoring, playmaking, rebounding and defending. In the N.B.A.'s 1961 season, no player comes closer to fulfilling that ideal of the complete courtman than the Cincinnati Royals' Oscar Robertson, 22, a lithe (6 ft. 4½ in.. 200 lbs.) Negro guard who was famed in college, as he is in the N.B.A., as "The Big O."
Last week, as the 1961 basketball teams headed down the stretch, N.B.A. statistics reflected Rookie Robertson's all-round excellence. His 30.1 game average placed him third among the league's scorers, a fact made all the more remarkable because, as Boston's Bill Sharman explains, "I've been the leading backcourt scorer in the league over the last nine years, and the best average I ever got was 22.3 points in 1958. Last year Detroit's Gene Shue beat that with a 22.8 average. Now along comes Robertson as a rookie averaging more than 30." Hitting on 47% of his shots, Robertson stands fifth in N.B.A. in accuracy. His rebounding (10 per game) is vastly respected. And with an average of 9.3 assists per game, Oscar Robertson has replaced the legendary Cousy as the league's leading playmaker.
Even more meaningful than the statistics are the tributes that come from rival players and coaches. Says Cousy himself: "Robertson is the best of his kind ever to come into the league." Says the Detroit Pistons' Coach Dick McGuire: "Oscar is better than Cousy ever was; Oscar is the finest player in basketball." Says Boston's sharpshooting Tommy Heinsohn: "He knows all the phases of the game—passing, shooting, rebounding. If he couldn't pass, you could play him differently, but if you double-team him for a second, you gamble. That calls for a pass, and he'll pass it."
Pure Product. In almost every way, Cincinnati's Robertson is a pure product of the sport of basketball as it has developed in, the U.S. The game was invented in 1891 in Springfield, Mass, by a gym instructor named Jim Naismith, who wanted to give his bored classes a switch from the daily grind of calisthenics. Today basketball is played with eager enthusiasm and improving skill by some 50 nations from Chile to China, but it has remained a distinctly American game. Its virtues are obvious : any number can play, indoors or out, in all seasons. It requires nothing more than a ball, and a basket that is much the same whether it hangs from a backboard in Madison Square Garden or a barn door in Kentucky. This season an estimated 150 million Americans will watch games played by some 20,000 high schools, 1,000 colleges, and swarms of amateur teams composed of players ranging from scurrying schoolboys to gimpy grandfathers.