Star straddled sports and civil rights
Bill Russell basketball player/coach b February 12, 1934 d July 31, 2022
Throughout his basketball career, Bill Russell compiled a legacy of championship achievement unparalleled in any sport. He was indomitable on and off the court, and one of the most fascinating public figures to straddle sports and civil rights.
As the dominant defensive player of his generation, he won an Olympic gold medal for the United States basketball team in 1956, then over the next 13 years led the Boston Celtics to 11 NBA championships. When the Celtics named him head coach in 1966, he became the first black man to hold that role in a major professional sport in the US.
In his prime, the goateed, broadshouldered Russell was almost 100 kilograms of lean muscle stretched over a 2.06-metre (6ft 9in) frame. Fast and agile, he had a huge vertical leap and used his long wingspan to block shots with his arm outstretched like a bowsprit. He revolutionised the way basketball was played on defence.
‘‘The only thing we know for sure about superiority in sports in the United States of America in the 20th century,’’ journalist Frank Deford wrote in Sports Illustrated in 1999, ‘‘is that Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics teams he led stand alone as the ultimate winners.’’
Amid the celebration of his prowess as a player, Russell also struggled with the festering problems of prejudice and segregation. Born in the South, he was often described as private, introspective, and prickly, a man who searched for ways his children could grow up ‘‘as we could not . . . equal . . . and understanding’’.
As early as 1958, he accused the National Basketball Association of using a quota system to limit the number of black players on each team. He took part in civil rights marches with the Rev Martin Luther King Jr, but questioned the non-violent strategy of the movement.
When civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963, Russell accepted an offer by Evers’ older brother, Charles, to run a youth basketball camp in Jackson, to bring white and black children together. He received death threats but refused to back away from his views.
Russell’s steely outward personality and pointed manner of speaking didn’t endear him to some fans in Boston, which had a long history of racism. The Red Sox baseball team didn’t integrate until 1959, and protests over court-ordered school desegregation in the 1970s were among the most violent in the country. Russell described the city as a ‘‘flea market of racism’’ in his 1979 book, Second Wind: Memoirs of an Opinionated Man.
Despite his success with the Celtics – the team had never won a championship before his arrival – Russell did not receive business endorsements and found himself shut out of exclusive neighbourhoods when he was looking to buy a house. In 1968, his home was broken into and ransacked. Racial epithets were written on the walls, and faeces left on his bed.
‘‘It had all varieties, old and new, and in their most virulent form,’’ he wrote in Second Wind. ‘‘The city had corrupt, city hall-crony racists, brick-throwing, send-’em-back-to-Africa racists, and in the university areas phony radical-chic racists . . . Other than that, I liked the city.’’
In 1975, he declined to attend his induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, upset that he would be the first African American player to be enshrined. ‘‘The only athletes we should bother with attaching any particular importance to are those like [Muhammad] Ali, whom we can admire for themselves and not for their incidental athletic abilities.’’
In 2011, President Barack Obama presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour, for both his athletic accomplishments and his advocacy for human rights.
William Felton Russell was born in Louisiana to a father who worked in a paper bag factory. His childhood was filled with searing memories of prejudice, with daily indignities and outright threats directed at his parents.
When he was 9, his family moved to Oakland, California, in the hope of escaping the institutionalised segregation of the South. His parents separated, and his mother died a few years later. He and his older brother, Charlie Russell Jr, who became a playwright, leaned on each other for support.
Tall and uncoordinated as a youth, Russell tried organised basketball for the first time in junior high school but failed to make the team. He later got a spot on his high school’s junior varsity team only because of a sympathetic coach. In addition to starring on the basketball court, he was one of the country’s premier high jumpers in the 1950s.
Russell helped the Celtics to their first NBA championship in 1957. After Wilt Chamberlain entered the NBA in 1959, the rivalry between the two – who were close friends – became a highlight of the league. Chamberlain may have posted better individual statistics, but Russell’s team came away with most of the victories.
He was named the league’s most valuable player five times, and in 1980 US basketball writers voted him ‘‘the greatest player in the history of the NBA’’.
Russell retired from basketball in 1969, and settled in Washington state. After a period of solitude, he worked as a commentator and acted in a handful of films and television shows before returning to basketball as a coach.
His marriages to Rose Swisher, his college sweetheart, and Dorothy Anstett ended in divorce. His third wife, Marilyn Nault, died in 2009. Survivors include three children from his first marriage.
In a sign that relations between Russell and Boston were beginning to improve, Russell made several trips back to the city to mark sporting anniversaries. In 2013, a statue of him was unveiled at Boston’s City Hall Plaza. He agreed to the monument only after city officials pledged to establish a grant to fund a youth mentoring programme.
The statue shows Russell, knees bent, with ball in his hands ready to make a chest pass, an image of the consummate unselfish team-mate. The stone is engraved with a quotation from Russell: ‘‘The most important measure of how good a game I’d played was how much better I’d made my team-mates play.’’ –