(3 of 8)
What is more, to millions of Americans the game of basketball is more than a sport —it is the most important event on winter's social calendar. Once the winter wheat is in the ground in towns like Sharon Springs, Kans., there is little else to do but watch the games on Tuesday and Friday nights in the $190,000 school gym, the grandest building in the county. In Ohio, the citizens of Bethel Township regularly drop past Ray Morrison's general store to rock on their heels around the stove and talk of the local high school team (12 and 6 this season) and of Ohio State University's national champions, one of the great clubs of recent years.
But even the fans of Ohio and Kansas will admit that the biggest, noisiest and best basketball state of them all is Indiana, where every boy seems to be born with a hook shot and a stutter-step dribble. No one in Indiana sees anything odd about the fact that the gym in Huntingburg holds 6,300 persons, although the town's total population is 4,000. Folks from out of town just naturally want to drive in to see the games. Each March, Indiana explodes in the wildest high school tournament in the nation—four frenzied weekends of play that consistently draw more than 1,500,000 fans, last year grossed more than $1,000,000.
Into the Dust Bowl. Oscar Robertson, of course, learned his basketball in Indiana. Born on a farm near Charlotte, Tenn., Oscar was three when his family moved to Indianapolis, where his father landed a job in the city sanitation department. The Robertsons settled precariously in a grim, four-room, tarpaper-roofed house in the black ghetto on the west side of town. Just two blocks away was an out door basketball court known as the "dust bowl." In the dust bowl Oscar Robertson discovered basketball.
With no ball to shoot, young Oscar used to shy tin cans at the basket. When he was eight, he got a small ball that he would solemnly wash with soap and water every night. Not until he was eleven did he get his first full-sized ball, the discard of one of the families for whom his mother was then working as a domestic.
Everywhere that Oscar went, the ball was sure to go. He early became a basketball perfectionist. Nothing stopped his dribbling practice—eating supper, watching TV, reading. "I've got to control it," he would tell his brother Bailey, who later became good enough himself to win a spot on the Harlem Globetrotters. "I've got to control the dribble." Recalls his mother: "You couldn't sleep at night with that basketball going all the time. Bump! Bump! Bump!"
Cool & Hot. By the time he hit the eighth grade, Oscar was a skinny-armed, precocious hotshot who already was completely confident of his skill. In the city championship he dribbled away the last moments of each quarter, then coolly sank a basket as the last second ticked off.