The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [11]
Cal Ramsey: Hell yes, there was a quota system in the NBA, and I was a victim of it. I’ll give you an example. I averaged 17.4 rebounds per game in my three years in college, averaging close to 20 rebounds per game the same year that Chamberlain averaged 18 and Elgin Baylor 18.3. You can look it up. I was drafted by the Hawks, so I played behind Hagen and Pettit. I wasn’t expecting to start over them. But man, I only played four games with the Hawks before they put me on waivers. [In those four games, Cal scored 17 points and had 19 rebounds in only 35 minutes]. I was claimed off waivers by the Knicks in November of 1959, and was waived two months later. I averaged more than 11 points and 7 rebounds per game (playing only 22 minutes per game) which today would have made me millions. And yet, I couldn’t stick with New York. The coach told me he had to cut me. Probably too many blacks, since we already had Willie Naulls and Johnny Green [on the roster].
I was far from the only black player that was good enough for the NBA but didn’t make it. When I played in the Eastern League, believe me, I saw lots of guys that were just as good, if not better, than players in the NBA.
Five years after drafting Russell (and trading him) and two years after drafting Ramsey (and waiving him), the Hawks used their 1961 first-round draft pick (eighth overall) on Cleo Hill from Winston-Salem Teachers College.
Ramsey: Hill was not a good college player. He was a great college player. He went to the Hawks, and got into some kind of beef with somebody, and essentially was blackballed from the NBA.
Cleo Hill was considered “too flashy” a player, which was just a thinly-veiled euphemism for “too black.” He played in only fifty-eight games his rookie season, running into problems with white Hawks stars Hagen, Pettit, and Clyde Lovellette. Like Ramsey remembered, Hill never again played in the League.
Ramsey: I do want to say that Hagen and Pettit, in particular, would work with me after practice and I never had any problem with them. St. Louis, the city, wasn’t great. There were restaurants that I was not allowed to eat in. But the team itself, I couldn’t complain about. [Black player] Sihugo Green was on the team—he was my idol when he played at Duquesne. I do feel that, for whatever reason, I was held back, and not given a chance, like many others of the time.
It wasn’t just the southern-based teams that made life difficult for black players in the 1950s. Bill Russell was reportedly rebuffed when attempting to buy a home in the Boston suburbs, and according to John Taylor’s book The Rivalry, Russell had to put up with racial slurs from his hometown Boston fans. Russell, at least, was a superstar, as were most of the black players in the League at the time. If there were only so many slots that owners could use for black players, they wanted the Elgin Baylors and Bill Russells of the world to be filling those slots.
Why did owners feel that they needed a quota system? They felt it was a “white dollar.” They felt the majority of ticket-buyers were white, and didn’t want to watch black players. Yet, look at the list of Rookies of the Year from 1956 to 1962. Six of the seven were black players, with Boston’s Tommy Heinsohn being the lone white Rookie of the Year during that stretch. In The Rivalry, Taylor recounts that “Heinsohn had established himself as a terrific player, a defensive rebounder as well as a gunner, but even so, everyone in the League, including Heinsohn himself, knew that Russell, not Heinsohn, had been the key to the Celtics’ first-place finish in the regular season.... The ostensible reason Russell did not receive the award was because he’d joined the team in mid-season. . . . Russell could not believe that the decision to deny him the award was not motivated by racism. The previous season, Maurice Stokes had become the first black player to be named Rookie of the Year, and it seemed clear to Russell that the owners wanted to assure