A LEGEND ON THE COURT and in his home
In his private life as much as his public one, Bill Russell led by example, encouraging his children to be curious, enterprising, and committed
Late in the summer of 1980, Karen Kenyatta Russell and her father were making the nearly 3,000-mile drive from Seattle to Washington, D.C., so she could begin her freshman year at Georgetown. Flying would have been easier, but they had packed a lot of things, and her father loved cars and the open road and new memories. So this choice was perfect.
One evening, they were cruising through the Midwest in their Jaguar, the radio pulsing, when the music was interrupted by a tornado alert. Listeners were urged to seek shelter. It sounded treacherous.
“And my dad looks at me, and I look at him,” Karen Russell said, “and we drove straight to where the tornadoes were. We were like storm chasers before people even did that. I think my father invented everything.”
That’s what it was sometimes like having perhaps the greatest basketball player of all time, Bill Russell, for a father. He was fearless and stubborn and loving, and he often told his three children that he learned as he went, and so should they.
Russell’s death on July 31, 2022, at the age of 88 rekindled appreciation for his accomplishments as a Celtics legend who won 11 world championships, and for his work as a civil rights activist. His No. 6 was retired throughout the NBA and a black patch displaying the number was put on the right shoulder of every player’s jersey.
William Jr., Jacob, and Karen grasped Russell’s towering essence, but he was also just Dad, a role he relished but that the public rarely saw. William Jr. died of cancer in 2016,
but in recent interviews, Karen, 61, and Jacob, 64, described the fatherly side Russell kept private, the side they remember most.
The cross-country drives. The bicycle lessons. The failed cooking attempts. The stern glare that made their puppy have accidents in the house. The joyous cackle that warmed those around him.
“He laughed,” Karen Russell said, “like he was being tickled.”
‘The Russell Hotel’
Russell and his first wife, Rose, lived in Reading for most of his 13-year Celtics career, which ended in 1969. Despite the 6-foot-10inch center’s celebrity status, racial tensions in the mostly white suburb made life uneasy.
Once, Karen Russell said, her father was mowing the lawn when a man pulled up, yelled, “Hey, boy,” and asked how much he charged for landscaping. Russell quipped that he was not paid well, but that he at least got to sleep with the woman who lived in the house.
Hooligans used to knock over their garbage cans and leave trash strewn in the yard, and when Russell contacted the police, he was once dismissively told that raccoons were to blame.
“So my dad applied for a gun permit, and the raccoons never came back,” Karen Russell said. “He’d joke that the raccoons can read gun permits.”
Some matters were more troubling. In a well-documented incident that would define the racism Russell experienced in Boston, vandals broke into his home, smashed his trophies, shattered Rose’s perfume bottles, and defecated in the couple’s bed.
Russell tried to shield his children from these dark moments, but it was not easy. During one road trip to Russell’s home state of Louisiana, Karen Russell said, the family often had to sleep and eat in the car because of uncertainty about where they would be welcomed.
In 1943, When Russell was 9, his family relocated from West Monroe, La., to Oakland during the “Great Migration” to escape segregation and racism in the Deep South. Russell and his older brother, Charlie, slept in the onebedroom apartment’s living room, and a cot was set up in the kitchen for friends needing temporary housing during their own journeys.
That goodwill made a lasting impression on Russell. When Black celebrities came to Boston for sporting events or performances, he insisted that they stay with him in Reading rather than potentially face discrimination at the city’s hotels and restaurants.
“Weirdly, that turned into this incredible childhood,” Karen Russell said. “We got to meet people based on the fact that they didn’t feel safe in Boston. Our house turned into a hub of cultural activity.”
Muhammad Ali taught the children to box. Roberta Flack played their piano. Maya Angelou wrote a poem about Karen. The list went on, from Wilt Chamberlain and Johnny Mathis to baseball stars Roberto Clemente and Bob Gibson.
When the Celtics drafted or signed Black players, Russell usually housed them until they could find a place to live. He also hosted team Christmas parties.
“There was a reason our house was called ‘the Russell Hotel,’ ” Jacob Russell said.
A Boston upbringing
Despite the racial tension, the family generally felt safe in Reading. Russell taught the children to ride bicycles and let them pedal around for hours as long as they returned by sundown.
There was a basketball hoop in the halfmoon driveway, but Russell rarely used it. Jacob could recall him dunking just once. Their two acres were perfect for neighborhood football and baseball games, and the children played street hockey, too.
But Russell wanted them to be well-rounded. A large dictionary sat on a stand in the house, always cracked open, and whenever an unfamiliar word came up in conversation, the children looked it up. The encyclopedias on the shelves served a similar purpose.
The children loved attending Celtics games at Boston Garden but were not allowed to go on school nights. The one part they dreaded came before games, when their father insisted on combing their hair. He didn’t have a gentle touch.
“It invariably resulted in tears on my part,” Jacob Russell said with a chuckle.
They sat with their mother near the Celtics’ bench and had a wonderful view as Russell guided one of the most dominant teams in sports history. But even that could get boring for grade-school students with fluctuating attention spans.
Jacob and William Jr. once ventured to the Garden’s upper deck, and when word spread that they were Russell’s children, they began signing autographs. The boys were taken to coach Red Auerbach’s office later, and Russell made it clear he was not pleased.
“My father had simple rules,” Jacob said. “He said when you meet someone you look them squarely in the eye and give them a firm handshake. He said you always say, ‘yes, please’ and ‘no, thank you.’ ”
And, they learned, you do not wander around Boston Garden alone signing autographs.
‘Ask them to change it’
Russell and Rose separated around the time his Celtics career ended in 1969, and they divorced four years later. He lived in southern California for a few years before being hired to coach the SuperSonics and moving to the Seattle suburb of Mercer Island, his home until his death. Jacob and William Jr. split their time between parents; Karen was in sixth grade when she joined her father in Seattle in 1973.
One complicating factor of the separation was that Rose was an excellent cook and Russell was not.
“He tried, and he was terrible,” Jacob Russell said. “I remember he tried to make spaghetti for us and he burned it.”
One summer in California, Russell took the children to IHOP every morning. They could order dinner food for breakfast if they pleased. They loved it.
When Karen was in middle school, she’d make sandwiches for Russell’s golf outings and drive his cart while doing homework between holes. At home in Mercer Island, she’d cook big egg breakfasts. She enjoyed the responsibility but mostly cherished the bond.
Russell encouraged Karen to read a newspaper article each morning so they would have something to talk about at the table. The discussions were formative.
Karen, for example, was unfamiliar with the concept of recycling, but when she read a story about a local processing plant and told her father about it, they decided to start recycling.
“I remember I read another story about the United Farm Workers, and there was this boycott of grapes,” she said. “And my dad loved grapes. Loved, loved, loved grapes. So I was like, ‘Here’s our breakfast, Daddy. And I think we should boycott grapes.’ And we read the article and we boycotted grapes. It was such a perfect thing.”
Karen began to embrace her father’s commitment as an activist. She joined the basketball team at Mercer Island Middle School, where the mascot, the Islander, was a caricature of a Native American with a bone through its nose.
“It was terrible and super-racist,” Karen said. “And my dad said, ‘Well, ask them to change it.’ ”
Administrators initially dismissed her, saying it was simply a Polynesian islander. But Karen was not satisfied. And sometimes it helped having Bill Russell for a father. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a close friend, visited the mostly white school and spoke out against the mascot’s image. It was removed soon thereafter.
Play dates and pranks
Jacob Russell got to drive his father’s Lamborghini when he was just a teenager. Well, he could move it from the garage into the driveway, wash it, and then steer it back.
But countless family memories involved the open road, thanks to Russell’s endless love affair with the automobile. They sped up and down the coast in Russell’s sports cars and downshifted to a station wagon for a vacation in the Canadian Rockies.
“If you can imagine my father camping,” Jacob said. “It’s actually kind of funny.”
Karen and her father once loaded a trailer with basketballs and sneakers and drove it to a Native American reservation in South Dakota. She loved her cross-country drives with him, their talks as long and winding as the terrain.
She had never been separated from both parents for more than two weeks at a time before she went off to college, and she was anxious about being at Georgetown alone. That made Russell anxious, too.
“So he set up some play dates for me,” said Karen, 61. “And he said, ‘Here are some families you can call if you ever need help.’ ”
Russell contacted his close friend Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who coauthored Russell’s 1979 memoir and lived in nearby Baltimore.
Russell told Karen that Branch’s family could take her to their beach house on Maryland’s eastern shore, but he added an awkward disclaimer: They were nudists.
“So for years, they were like, ‘Come to the shore. Come to the shore,’ ” Karen said. “And I’m like, ‘Oh, I can’t. I’m busy.’ So, 12 years ago, Taylor and Daddy and I are having dinner, and I said, ‘Taylor, I have to confess something that’s been bothering me for decades. When I was at Georgetown, you guys were so nice inviting me to the beach house. But I just felt uncomfortable because you were nudists.’ ”
Branch looked confused, and Russell launched into his trademark cackle.
“It was a decades-long prank by my dad,” Karen said, laughing and sighing. “He was so proud of himself.”
When Karen attended Harvard Law School, she and Russell detoured through Canada on their drive from Seattle so they could see the Northern Lights and stop at Niagara Falls. (Russell didn’t enjoy that part very much, as the raincoat provided for the “Maid of the Mist” ferry ride covered little of his massive frame.)
Karen emulated her father’s sense of humor and loved when they could share in the levity. While they were unpacking in her Cambridge dorm, the father of another student told her that her dad looked just like Bill Russell.
“I didn’t miss a beat,” Karen said. “I just go, ‘Who’s Bill Russell?’ That one made my dad laugh for years.”
A father’s legacy
Russell constantly encouraged his children to pursue their dreams. When Jacob had reservations about attending art school because the career path might make it hard to provide for a family, Russell pushed him to try it anyway.
When Karen graduated from Harvard, Russell asked her to pay it forward by mentoring three Black people. He chose that number because he wanted her to understand that two might fail, and that there was nothing wrong with failure.
Karen worked on Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign and would call Russell while writing job descriptions for campaign employees. The father and daughter wanted to create opportunities for people of color who might otherwise have been dismissed before even having a chance.
“A lot of the jobs needed someone with experience, and a lot of people just didn’t have it,” Karen said. “So Dad and I would discuss the wording and get creative with the job descriptions to get some more people in the door.”
Jacob went to art school before beginning a long career in the Seattle transit system, where he is now an engineer. William Jr. was a truck driver. He was known as “Dollar Bill” because he gave away money when he saw someone in need. When he died seven years ago, he left hundreds of books for his fellow long-haul truckers.
Karen is a lawyer, civil rights advocate, and public speaker. She cannot believe that her father has been gone for more than a year now, but his love and teachings still guide her.
“He really, really, from the bottom of his heart wanted people to find their highest and best use, however they defined it,” Karen said. “And he had this way of helping people find their superpowers, which I now realize is so unique.”