Oscar Robertson Quotes

Cousy quickly learned that the pressure to win as a player as opposed to the pressure to win as a coach was vastly different. The pressure to win as a coach was filled with conflicting demands, to be honest with your players while being honest with the fans, management, and the games’ governing body. Success as a coach had a lot to do with relationships and keeping everybody happy and to do that which sometimes caused you to compromise your values.

To many white fans, the Attucks players were like the Harlem Globetrotters, entertainers who had come to play an exhibition. But the games meant something quite different to Principal Lane. He viewed each backwoods gym as a showcase for progress and each Attucks player a goodwill ambassador. A game at a rural schoolhouse was a chance to demonstrate to white fans, some of whom doubtless still had robes and hoods stashed in their closets, that black and white Hoosiers could compete without violence or incident. If Hoosiers could observe racial harmony while their sons competed in a packed gym, Lane thought, they would later come to believe in its possibility in schools and neighborhoods.

America's attention had turned to race relations during that winter of 1954-55, largely driven by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the nation's public schools would eventually have to be racially integrated. Crispus Attucks students were studying black history without being fully aware that their basketball team was making it.