San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Cousy’s regrets in regards to Russell
He won 6 rings with teammate but wishes he’d backed him more
Early in his dramatic life, Bill Russell, the great Boston Celtics center, learned a motto passed down from his grandfather to his father to him: “It is more important to understand than to be understood.”
Russell would modify that: “If you disrespect that line, you disrespect me.” When Russell walked onto the court for pregame introductions, he did so theatrically, defiantly, and with a look that he would describe years later as “a big batch of smoldering Black Panther, a touch of Lord High Executioner and angry Cyclops mixed together, with just a dash of the old Sonny Liston.” Boston Garden fans didn’t understand.
They didn’t understand that Russell was born in rural Louisiana in 1934 where he saw his parents suffer the indignities of segregation or that in St. Louis, then the NBA’s southernmost city, fans at Kiel Auditorium shouted at him “Baboon!” and “Black gorilla!”
Even now, upon Russell’s death last Sunday at age 88, he departs the stage as NBA royalty and with an air of mystery, and he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Among the most important American athletes of the 20th century, Russell lived a full and vibrant life, on the court and off. He won an unprecedented 11 NBA championships in 13 seasons and five MVP awards. He revolutionized defense with a shot-blocking skill that traumatized opposing shooters, engaged in epic battles with Wilt Chamberlain that became a drawing card for the league, and later, with the Celtics, became the NBA’s first African American coach.
He was all-in as a social justice activist. He spoke out against a quota that limited NBA roster spots for Black players, marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., stood up for Muhammad Ali’s right to refuse induction during the Vietnam War, and once led a civil rights march through Boston from Roxbury to Boston Common.
Bob Cousy, the point guard and captain of the old Celtics dynasty, received word from his daughter Marie about Russell’s death. Cousy turns
94 on Tuesday and has been recovering from a kidney stone.
His daughter heard him say, “My old friend Russ beat me to it” — to death, he meant. Over the past three years, the Celtics dynasty — with Russ and Cooz as basketball’s Ruth and Gehrig — has lost Hall of Famers Frank Ramsey, John Havlicek, Tom Heinsohn, K.C. Jones, Sam Jones and now, No. 6, Russell.
There is much beneath Cousy’s comment that Russell beat him to the hereafter. For my book, “The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics, and What Matters in the End” (2018, Penguin Press) I interviewed Cousy 53 times over a threeyear period during which he candidly, often painfully, catalogued his life’s journey. Our conversation kept returning to Russell. Cousy was trying to reconcile his relationship with Russell, which always remained distant.
For seven seasons, Russ and Cooz were respectful teammates. In the locker room, Russell could be an inveterate tease, with a laugh-squeal that was legendary; Cousy was more of a serious, solitary figure. Yet there was a competition between them, a rivalry among teammates for a city’s devotion, for credit, for supremacy. Ego, competitiveness, and respect figured into it.
On the court Cousy and Russell were interlocking pieces, particularly in executing the Celtics’ fast break. But Russell heard white fans at Boston Garden cheer more loudly for Cousy than for him and watched white sportswriters seek out Cousy, not him. In all that, he felt the sting of prejudice.
Cousy retired in 1963 in an
Boston Celtics Hall of Famers Bill Russell and Bob Cousy take in the action during a Celtics-76ers game in Boston on Apr. 7, 2000. The teammates won six NBA titles together.
Russell (6) runs interference for Cousy (14) in a game against the Los Angeles Lakers. They were teammates from 1956-63.
emotional ceremony at the Boston Garden, which local writers called the Boston Tear Party. Even as Cousy said it was the greatest day of his life, Russell whispered to coach Red Auerbach, “When I retire,
I will never do Years later, in the Boston suburb of Reading, Mass., vandals broke into Russell’s home, spraypainted racist graffiti on walls and defecated on his bed, a horror he never spoke of publicly.
No wonder Russell often said that he played for the Celtics, not for Boston.
Not until Russell arrived during Cousy’s seventh season with the team did the Celtics win their first NBA title, one of six they won together. After Cousy left, Russell played on — and won five more.
Now in history the Celtics are known as and Cousy knows what happened. “Reality happened,” he told me. “Let’s face it, if we don’t acquire Russell, of this happens.”
Still, it is as if the competition between them never ended, at least in Cousy’s mind. In 2010 Barack Obama awarded Russell the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Cousy, whose Houdini of the Hardwood inventiveness lives at the soul of today’s NBA game, wanted the Presidential Medal of Freedom, too. He received it in 2019.
He’d been Russell’s teammate for only seven years. But those weren’t just any seven years, and Russell wasn’t just any teammate. I sensed in our interviews that Russell had become like a mirror held up to Cousy: In the reflection, Cousy saw his own failing. Cousy was viewed as one of the good guys by the NBA’s early Black players. He roomed as a rookie in 1950 with Chuck Cooper, the first Black player drafted by an NBA team, and they became lifelong friends.
Still, he harbors regrets about his time with Russell. He wishes he had spoken out publicly against the racism that enveloped Russell. He wishes, too, that, as Celtics captain, he had told Russell privately, “Russ, I’ve got your back.”
But he did not say or do that. In February 2016, Cousy wrote a mea culpa letter to Russell. He said he was sorry they hadn’t shared a more meaningful relationship, and he accepted full responsibility for that. Two and a half years later, Russell phoned Cousy. Cooz hoped their conversation would rise to a more substantive level. Still, he was grateful for the call.
Russell had reached out to Cousy decades before. On Cousy’s retirement in 1963, he gave him a desk clock inscribed,
That clock still rests on a mahogany table in Cousy’s dining room.