The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [12]
Rookies of the Year
1956: Maurice Stokes
1957: Tom Heinsohn
1958: Woody Sauldsberry
1959: Elgin Baylor
1960: Wilt Chamberlain
1961: Oscar Robertson
1962: Walt Bellamy
Al Attles was the thirty-ninth player selected in the 1960 NBA draft, from the virtually unknown school North Carolina A&T. It’s amazing that he lasted in the League. Here is his story as told to me in early February of 2007.
Al Attles: I was from Newark, New Jersey, and had some offers from the New York schools like St. Johns and NYU and some others. But I didn’t hit the books like I should have, and North Carolina A&T gave me an offer. I played four years at A&T. At first, it was on a look-see basis. I did well my first two quarters, and was able to play basketball all four years. I eventually made the Honor Roll there, even. The black college had the same problems as society, but it was a really self-sustained school. We didn’t have to go into the city that much. I never had to go to a segregated movie theatre, for example, and I really enjoyed those four years. I got drafted by the Warriors, but I never thought I would make the team. I thought I was going to be with the Warriors for one week.
See, I was offered a job teaching junior high school in Newark. I got my homeroom, and was thinking about what I would put up on the walls. But I got a greeting from the Army. I thought it wouldn’t be right to start a teaching job that I might have to leave following my Army physical. I went for the physical, and I had a bad back, and was classified “Y,” meaning that I could only be called if there were some sort of a breakout. I figured that I would play basketball for the Eastern League, and that I would teach. Then I decided I might as well go through with the Warriors tryout.
Here I am now, nearly forty-seven years later, with the same organization. Let me set this straight. There was a quota system. The most number of blacks on a team was four, and no more. That just couldn’t be a coincidence. There were what, eleven or twelve players on every team, and every team had four blacks on it. It was never written about, but everybody knew it. No one said anything, though. For instance, in 1960 I was trying out for the Philadelphia Warriors. We had five black players trying out. Then I found out they traded Woody Sauldsberry. I found out from a redcap at the Philadelphia Airport that Sauldsberry was traded. I thought that was crazy. He was Rookie of the Year just two years earlier. That meant that I had made the team, joining Wilt and Guy [Rodgers] and Andy Johnson [as the only black players on the team].”
Even the black NBA superstars acknowledged the quota system, whether or not they were affected. In his 2003 biography, The Big O: My Life, My Times, My Game, Oscar Robertson wrote that his brother, Bailey Robertson, never got a chance to play in the NBA. Although Bailey was drafted by Syracuse in the mid-1950s, they still had a quota system in those days, so there was no room for Bailey. Oscar Robertson wrote that the quota system vanished for good with the coming of the American Basketball Association and the explosion of black basketball talent that just couldn’t be ignored. In Wilt Chamberlain’s 1972 autobiography, Wilt: Just Like Any Other 7-Foot Black Millionaire Who Lives Next Door, Chamberlain wrote, “About the time I broke in, the NBA actually had a quota, an unwritten rule—no more than three blacks per team. And those had to be good blacks—starters, stars, not benchwarmers.”
In David Wolf’s 1971 book on Connie Hawkins, Foul, Wolf explains that the quota system was widespread in the early 1960s, not just in the NBA. “Connie was encountering the quota system. It was widespread in professional sports in 1962, and was another reason why countless schoolyard stars never escaped the ghetto,” Wolf wrote. “The quota can be a formalized agreement between owners and coach or among the owners themselves. More