In , he became the first player in NBA history to average a triple-double for a season the only player in history besides Russell Westbrook. His playing career, especially during high school and college, was plagued by racism.
Robertson is a two-time Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inductee, having been inducted in for his individual career, and in as a member of the United States men's Olympic basketball team and president of the National Basketball Players Association.
Robertson was also an integral part of Robertson v. National Basketball Ass'n of Robertson was born into poverty in Charlotte, Tennessee , on November 24, When he was approximately 18 months old, his parents moved to Indianapolis, Indiana , where he grew up in the segregated housing project of Lockefield Gardens.
He learned how to shoot by using tennis balls and rags wrapped with rubber bands and tossing them into a peach basket in the back of his family's home.
Robertson attended Crispus Attucks High School , an all-black high school, where he was coached by Ray Crowe , whose emphasis on a fundamentally sound game had a positive effect on his style of play. As a sophomore in , he starred on an Attucks team that lost in the semi-state finals state quarterfinals to eventual state champions Milan , a story that would later be the basis of the movie Hoosiers. When Robertson was a junior, Crispus Attucks dominated its opposition, going 31—1, and winning the state championship, the first for any all-black school in the nation.
