BarcelonaBill Russell’s father, kind of seeing how the workers at the gas station where he was standing in line let white customers pass, decided to leave. But the owner of the gas station pulled out a gun, which he pointed at her face. He made him stand in line, in the sun, until all the whites had their tanks full. And the mother, one day when she went out to church in a beautiful new dress that she had bought, was forced by a white policeman to go home and change, as he was not willing to be seen on the street a black woman in a white dress. Life was not easy in 1930s Louisiana.
Bill Russell, one of the greatest players in basketball history, was born in Monroe, Louisiana in 1934. The United States of the Great Depression, of the broken dream. Of millions of people up and down, with empty pockets and looking for a destination. From the crosses burning at night and the lynchings in the South, from the great movement of African Americans to the North or the West, fleeing racism. So did the Russells, to Oakland, California. But nothing good awaited them. Poverty, low wages, a less obvious but equally cruel racism. The Russells lived in government-protected buildings while the father spent days away from home driving cars. When the mother died of a heart attack, the father left the truck to be closer to his children: he found work in a steel factory. He came home late with some kind of burn, always. These were the first heroes of Russell, a boy with wild eyes who, little by little, realized that nature had given him a gift: he was very tall. Russell could have been just another name, an anonymous person. But he was a genius. “I never wanted to be a victim,” explains Russell, who died this Sunday at the age of 88. “If I want to be remembered for anything, it’s for being a civil rights activist,” he would add. One of the greatest players in basketball history helped change things by winning titles. Thus he brought down barriers.
At over six feet, Russell just needed someone to trust him. That’s life. In the middle of a system that closes the doors to you even when you’re a moron, sometimes you need someone to show you that you can be the owner of your destiny. In high school, Russell was seen as more of an athlete, as they didn’t think he could grasp the collective concepts of basketball well. A point of racism, indeed. For decades, blacks were given physical jobs, like what happened to my father. And in sports, they were given a chance running and jumping, but not managing basketball or American football teams. White coaches believed that blacks were strong, but not smart. Little did they know Russell. George Powles, his coach at the McClymonds Institute, saw it differently. She trusted him. Everyone thought that Russell played in a strange way, but McClymonds understood that this young man was especially good at defending. He had logic in someone who had suffered so much at such a young age. Russell would spend hours training alone, sometimes in front of a mirror, studying defensive moves. He went so far as to spend money to secretly watch practices of other high school teams to see how their next rivals played. He studied them to stop them. And the legend began when the Celtics signed him in 1956.
When he retired in 1969, Russell was the player with the most championship rings in the NBA: he won 11 in 13 seasons, all with the Boston Celtics. He did not average more than 15 points per game, but in rebounds the average was 22. With his long arms, Russell became the best player in college and won the NCAA twice with San Francisco. The son of the Great Depression was now King Mides: everything he touched turned to gold, like in the 1956 Olympics, when the United States won every game. In the final, the Soviets didn’t even reach 60 points, running into a giant Russell. He became so famous when he was still a youngster that the Harlem Globetrotters put a lot of money on the table for him to join their show. Russell preferred the offer that Red Auerbach, the coach of the Boston Celtics, would make him.
Fate would be a bit ironic. He, who was from Oakland, near Los Angeles, would become the scourge of his neighbors. He left the West Coast and went east, to the Celtics, who seemed like an ill-suited place for a young black man like him. The team founded by Irish people, where all the public then were white and celebrated St. Patrick’s Day. In fact, when Russell was already on the team and the arena was sometimes not filled, a poll taken in the city said that one reason many people did not go to see the Celtics was because “there are too many black players “. In the dressing room everything was different. “I would come in and it was one of the few places where I was completely free. Where I was only valued for what I could do,” he would recall about Auerbach, who knew Russell would change the rules of basketball. Already in one of his first games, in fact, he grabbed 36 rebounds. Russell found a coach who understood and respected him. And a squad where others were in charge of scoring, with names like Heinshon, Sharman, Cousy and Havlicek. In his first year in Boston, the Celtics would win a championship ring in 1957. In his second year, they did not, as they lost to the Hawks when Russell was injured. And then, the glory: eight consecutive championships, which no one else has ever done. And the victim used to be Wilt Chamberlain, with whom he held epic duels. Chamberlain was the great scorer of the moment, first with the Sixers and then with the Lakers. And Russell, the great defender. Whenever the faces were seen in 7 game finals, green was the winning color.
The relationship between Auerbach and Russell was so good that in 1966 the veteran coach announced that Russell would be his replacement on the bench. A black man had never managed an NBA team. And, in fact, he would win two more rings combining the work of coach and player. The last of them, in 1969, was the most special. Russell was at a difficult time in his life. Kennedy’s assassination had convinced him that the United States was a dark country, where it was too difficult to change things. He was divorced and didn’t understand how the Vietnam War was going. Also, he had some racist incident with fans, who even attacked his house after he said he didn’t owe the fans anything, he was just doing his job. That would be his worst season in terms of regular season stats. The reign of the Celtics seemed to be over, but the team reacted in the play-off and reached the final against Chamberlain’s Lakers. The final would be decided in the last game, the seventh, in California, where Russell would demonstrate his talent as a defender and as a coach and win the 11th title of his career.
Russell would not have much luck as a manager after that. It didn’t matter, he was already a legend. The biggest until a new batch of young people arrived who didn’t want to be a victim either. Players like Magic Johnson or Michael Jordan, who may never have fully appreciated that they had found open doors, since Russell had made them small. In fact, Russell was voted the best player in NBA history in 1980, before this new batch reinvented a game that Russell had changed. “He was the biggest force of nature I’ve ever seen in a sport,” Auerbach would say of a player so tall he could cross the fast lane, lay down blocks, grab rebounds and dunk the ball in the basket. A brave player who was also not afraid when it came to getting wet against racism. In 1963 he was in Washington, in the front row when Martin Luther King said the famous phrase “I have a dream“. Many times Russell had marched alongside Luther King, whose assassination he would mourn. When anti-racism activist Medgar Evers was murdered, Russell created with the victim’s brother a basketball campus in Mississippi where play black and white children together.
And in 1967 he supported Muhammad Ali when US authorities prosecuted the greatest boxer of all time for refusing to be drafted into the army during the Vietnam War. Ali, who had changed his name and converted to Islam to match a name and religion he saw as the heritage of plantation owners who had brought African slaves to America, lost his world title and received death threats Russell did not hesitate to support him at the famous meeting in Cleveland in June 1967, along with other black athletes who did not want to be victims and also did not want to be crushed. No, that was neither Ali’s war nor Russell’s war. They struggled at home, where there was so much work to do. Where there is so much work to be done, in the United States. On NBA courts, racism is gone. On the streets, there are still people walking out with the same fear that Russell’s parents did in Louisiana in the 1930s. Before they were made to wait at gas stations or sit at the back of buses. Now the police are suffocating you until you stop breathing.
