Every time Stanley Johnson touched the ball Saturday night, a man representing the Toronto Raptors paid close attention. Each time Rondae Hollis-Jefferson made a defensive stop, the NBA man in Section 17 made a note of it.
It seemed a bit irregular, like Morgan Freeman watching “Star Search.”
A more valuable exercise might have been for Arizona’s precocious young players to take notes from Wayne Embry, whose basketball DNA can be traced to the 1958 NCAA tournament when the Miami (Ohio) big man had a 26-15 double-double against eventual national champ Kentucky.
“I’ve followed Arizona basketball since Fred Snowden was coaching,” said Embry, a Raptors’ adviser. “I enjoy being at McKale Center; I suspect I’ll be back because Sean Miller has built a real powerhouse.”
Powerhouse? That’s Wayne Embry, a 6-foot, 8-inch, 250-pound son of a small-town Ohio farmer who earned his way into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame as much by what he did in a business suit as in basketball gear.
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The best two-man game in Tucson during next week’s Cal-Stanford series won’t be at McKale. It won’t be Johnson and Hollis-Jefferson. It will be Embry and his former teammate, Oscar Robertson, the “Big O.”
They will speak March 6 at Ventana Canyon, part of the Tucson Urban League’s Equal Opportunity Day and awards dinner. The topic: “A Conversation on Race.” Former UA all-conference center Bob Elliott will be the moderator.
Don’t expect much chatter about the Big Dance.
Last year, the NCAA revealed it produced revenues of $769.4 million from the 2014 NCAA men’s basketball tournament, a fortune from which it would be wise to invest in men like Robertson and Embry. It could send them on a tour across America, visiting the locker room of every basketball team in Division I, a series of chats about life before basketball and life after basketball.
Imagine the educational opportunities for young ball players.
Playing at all-black Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis, Robertson and his 1955 state championship team were not allowed to have a downtown celebration because of the color of their skin.
“They didn’t want us,” Robertson told me. “So they sent us out to a suburban park.”
The guard was not recruited by his favorite school, nearby Indiana, even though he was considered the nation’s top high school prospect.
About that time at Ohio’s Tecumseh High School, Embry was the only black student in his class.
“I quit after the first day. I didn’t think I could take it, but my parents were successful in persuading me to go back,” Embry said Monday. “I wasn’t recruited to Dayton, the school I most wanted to attend, because the coach, Tom Blackburn, had scheduled games against teams in the South. He didn’t want to expose me to that kind of discrimination.”
When Embry had his 26-point, 15-rebound NCAA performance against Kentucky, he was not allowed to eat with his teammates in the dining room of a Kentucky hotel. He ate in the kitchen.
Now top college basketball players fly in chartered jets, stay in five-star hotels and become full-blown celebrities. When Embry and Robertson became teammates with the NBA Cincinnati Royals in 1961, they noticed that the rooming list always had an asterisk by their names.
“It was to alert the people at the hotel that we were black,” Robertson remembers. “They would put us in so-called special rooms.”
The culture in the NBA and in college basketball has changed mightily in the years since Robertson and Embry retired. Much of it can be traced to their pioneering; they helped to organize a players’ strike before the 1965 NBA All-Star game. Embry became the NBA’s first black general manager. Robertson was president of the player’s association.
Robertson became an ambassador for the NBA in the 1970s, the period of its most notable social gains.
“I would talk to young players about women and sex and alcohol and drugs and everything else,” he says now. “I don’t know if this generation appreciates how far basketball has come in terms of racial equality. It was a long fight. We created the player’s union and fought for pensions.”
Robertson’s first salary as a 1960 Cincinnati Royals rookie was $22,000. Embry’s rookie salary was $6,300. Neither contract was guaranteed.
Embry’s 2005 autobiography — “The Inside Game: Race, Power and Politics in the NBA” — would be beneficial reading for any prospective NBA player, at Arizona or at Northern Iowa.
“Black history is for everybody, not just black people,” said Embry. “I would like it if today’s players knew how those who played in the ’50s and ’60s improved the diversity and inclusion you see today.”
In 1965, Robertson’s wife, Yvonne, and Embry’s wife, Terri, both participated in the historic civil rights march in Selma, Alabama. The movie “Selma,” was nominated for an Academy Award.
Neither man has watched it.
“It’s still a little too sensitive for me,” said Robertson.
“When we speak at the Urban League in Tucson, Terri plans to talk about it,” said Embry. “It made a difference.”
As did Embry and the “Big O.”
