In December of 1918, when the Rutgers basketball team played its home opener against Colgate, the strategy was simple: Get the ball inside to one of the best athletes in the east, Paul Robeson.

It was not easy.

As reported by the Daily Home News of New Brunswick, Colgate’s players “started by roughing Robey.”

The newspaper’s account, as detailed in the 1998 book “The Young Paul Robeson” by Lloyd Brown, continued, “frequently at the opening of the game he was knocked down. … Apparently the roughing was to no avail, for each time Robey came up with a smile, only to enter the fray with renewed pep.”

It should be noted that basketball was a more spartan game in that era. But the whistle-free hammerings of Robeson — and his bring-it-on response — were part of the deal for the pioneers who integrated college sports.

The spring marks the 100th anniversary of Robeson’s graduation from Rutgers, and most of his story is widely known: He was a two-time All-America in football and one of the greatest ends of his time, enduring dirty play and racist taunts from opposing teams and fans; he attained worldwide fame as a singer and actor; he was a staunch human-rights advocate who became blacklisted during McCarthyism.

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He is, by consensus reckoning, the most important and distinguished Rutgers alum in the college’s 253-year history. Yet his hardwood achievements, and the role he played in integrating college basketball, are hardly known. Even David Jones, director of Rutgers’ Paul Robeson Cultural Center, was unaware that Robeson played basketball at Rutgers when contacted for this story.

So as the Scarlet Knights prepare to wear custom-made Celebrating Black Culture uniforms and sneakers for Sunday’s home game against Minnesota (6:30 p.m., Big Ten Network), it’s time to shed some light on a vastly underappreciated piece of Robeson’s legacy.

'Even better in basketball'

Coming out of Somerville High School, Robeson was the only black student at Rutgers. He proceeded to earn 12 varsity letters with the Scarlet (no Knights yet) from 1915-1919. The story about how he made Rutgers' football team, although fairly well known, bears retelling. As recounted by his granddaughter, author Susan Robeson, the tryouts were brutal.

“It was one of the few times he was ready to quit something,” Susan Robeson said in a phone interview. “They ganged up on him and tore at his hands with their cleats. He was bruised and hurting. He came home and said, ‘Forget about it.’ But the ethic in the family and in the (African-American) community was, what you do paves the way for others. And so there was a greater responsibility.”

Robeson returned to the field.

“He went back out there and grabbed one guy in the tryout and raised him over his head like a doll, ready to smash him to the ground,” Susan Robeson said, “And the coach (Foster Sanford) said, ‘OK Robey you made the team. Put him down.’”

In addition to football and basketball, Robeson competed in track and baseball. In the most infamous episode of his college sports career, Sanford benched him when a visiting team from Virginia’s Washington and Lee University objected to his presence on the field.

“It wasn’t a Jim Crow campus because there weren’t any other people to Jim Crow,” Susan Robeson said. “But it was a racist environment.”

Things were somewhat better on the court, but basketball remained a lonely endeavor for one of the very few intercollegiate players of color. For example:

Rutgers’ archrival, Princeton, remained all-white until Art Wilson joined the team in 1946.

In 1947 Indiana’s William Garrett became the Big Ten’s first African-American player, breaking a so-called gentleman’s agreement to bar blacks from the conference.

In 1953, Seton Hall’s integrated squad was attacked by rioting Louisville fans after a game (during the contest the Pirates’ black 7-footer, All-American Walter Dukes, was punched in the face by a Cardinals player — and the officials whistled Dukes for traveling on the play).

In 1966, when Texas Western (now UTEP) became the first team with an all-black starting lineup to win the NCAA Tournament, no one at Maryland’s Cole Field House would bring out a ladder so they could cut down the net.

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So one can only imagine Robeson’s sense of isolation in 1916. He had just a few contemporaries, including Wilbur Wood at Nebraska and Cumberland Posey at Penn State. They were fouled by foes with virtual immunity and showered with invective from the bleachers, but their perseverance opened the door for Columbia’s George Gregory to become the first black All-American in 1931.

Despite the obstacles, Robeson in 1916-17 averaged 4.5 points per game, second-highest on Rutgers’ team. In 1917-18 he paced the Scarlet at 8.0, and in 1918-19 he averaged 7.3 during a 6-3 campaign — the program’s best since its 1906 inception. In the season’s biggest game, a 22-20 overtime loss to Princeton, the Daily Home News reported that “Robey” dominated Princeton captain William Gray “by a big margin” and quoted Robeson as saying afterward, “That was my last chance at Princeton and I sure did want to beat them. I played my hardest.”

As chronicled in “The Young Paul Robeson,” Rutgers’ 1919 yearbook described Robeson as “one of the best basketball players in college” and “one of the best players of all time” in the sport.

He must have loved hoops because while playing for Rutgers he moonlighted with the all-black St. Christopher Club of Harlem. According to the website of the Black Fives Foundation, which researches the pre-1950s history of African-Americans in basketball: “Though he was a football star, Robeson may have been even better in basketball. As a huge power forward with the nickname ‘Tiny,’ he led St. Christopher ‘St. C’s’ to three Colored Basketball World’s Championships.”

After Rutgers, Robeson also played semipro basketball with a group of fellow Columbia Law School students. One night in Yonkers, as reported in Brown’s book, Robeson was not allowed to use the gym’s locker rooms. He was forced to change in the toilet stall of a bathroom.

Paving the way

Fast-forward a century. Rutgers’ basketball team is 12-14 overall and 5-11 in the Big Ten. The young Scarlet Knights are looking to burst the NCAA Tournament bubble for Minnesota (17-10, 7-9). Most of the players who will take the RAC floor are African-American.

They are standing on Robeson’s shoulders.

“I couldn’t imagine the kind of discrimination he faced on the football field and the basketball court,” said Rutgers wing Ron Harper Jr., a Don Bosco Prep grad. “That just proves his mental toughness.”

In the fall Harper Jr. and fellow freshmen teammates Caleb McConnell and Montez Mathis took a course on Robeson. Co-taught by Susan Robeson, it mostly focused on his post-Rutgers activism and how that set the stage for Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

The seeds for Robeson’s activism were planted on the fields and courts where he got knocked down over and over — and kept getting up.

“I think it gave him that consciousness of, ‘It’s not just for yourself or your own glory that you do things,’” Susan Robeson said. “Your success and your failure and the way you carry yourself sets an example.”

She sees the echoes of his legacy today in Colin Kaepernick and other athletes who push for social justice, sometimes rattling the establishment in the process.

“I do think very much about that,” Robeson said. “What (Kaepernick) has done has taken tremendous courage and he’s paid a tremendous price, and done it with dignity. My grandfather always said, ‘I will not retreat, not 1,000th of an inch.' That’s a rare spirit.”

Robeson’s refusal to retreat helped change this country, and that ethos, often linked to his football background, was forged on the basketball court, too.

“He didn’t let anybody else’s words dictate what he thought; he was his own man,” Harper Jr. said. “It’s definitely an honor that he went to Rutgers and that I’m here wearing the same jersey.”

Susan Robeson’s latest book, “Grandpa Stops a War” (published by Triangle Square Books for Young Readers/Seven Stories Press), is written for children ages 4-9 and details Paul Robeson’s peacemaking efforts on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War.

Staff writer Jerry Carino: jcarino@gannettnj.com.