Locker-room liberty: athletes who helped shape our times and the economic freedom that enabled them

Conditions for other players were still lousy: no health insurance, no pension, no money for exhibition games. Robertson became president of the NBA Players Union and filed suit to challenge the option clause. Meanwhile a new television contract, plus the appearance of the rival ABA, meant salaries started to take off, and with them individualism.

"Creativity became a more distinct part of the game," Robertson writes. "The ABA's reputation as an outlaw, playground league had its role in opening up the game.... Now there was a new breed."

Robertson, though schooled in basketball fundamentals, was part of that new breed simply by virtue of being six feet, five inches tall yet able to play point guard. He played like Earvin Johnson two decades before Magic entered the league, averaging a triple-double over a five-year period before the phrase had even been invented. Time magazine made him the cover boy for an article about how the game was changing for the better. "I represented a step forward in the game's evolution," he writes.

He represented a huge step forward in the evolution of the sport's business as well, winning the fight for free agency, which paved the way for basketball to become a global juggernaut in the 1980S. In just a generation, players went from being petrified of speaking their minds--"No owner was going to have on his team an outspoken black man making political statements," Robertson writes. "My career would be over; it was that simple"--to cutting rap albums, supporting Muslim organizations, and writing books about race in America.

By then, a lifetime full of race--and union-based slings and arrows had caused Robertson to see plots behind most every setback, making his name nearly synonymous with bitter whenever he's mentioned on ESPN. But while this feeling bubbles up in The Big O, so does his evident pleasure at owning a series of businesses in Cincinnati and helping a new generation play and live how they see fit.

Sadly, the most carefree and expressive player of the three biographies, Joe Namath, is the one who has become the most pathetic. Dick Alien, almost unbelievably, eventually forgave everybody (including himself) and has become a popular fan liaison in Philadelphia. Broadway Joe, however, is a national laughingstock after drunkenly trying to paw a female ESPN sideline reporter on national TV in December 2003.

Of the three books, Namath is by far the most ambitious in scope and therefore ultimately the most frustrating, because author Kriegel tries to get inside the head of a spectacular flameout without having any access to his subject. (Namath's brutish consigliere, Jimmy Walsh, demanded "a financial relationship and editorial control.") Along the way, though, Kriegel brings terrific insight into the perfect confluence of Namath's roguish charm, the dawn of sport's television era, and the carnival-barker creation of the American Football League, led in part by Jets owner (and former legendary MCA talent scout) Sonny Werblin.