Bill Russell article from American Legacy (long)

["Josh Ozersky" <jozersky1@xxxxxxxxxx>]

This is the full original text of my
cover story on BR for American Legacy
Magazine -- the African-American sister
publication of American Heritage.  It's long,
but the history-minded among you may
enjoy it.

Josh

"Felton X"

He was the greatest winner in sports history, and changed the game of
basketball forever. But his greatest example was the one he set as a man.



The facts of his career are stark: he was the star of a college team that went
56-1 over two years, winning consecutive NCAA championships. He went off to
the Olympics, where he was the star of a gold medal team that won by an
average of thirty points. He went directly from there to the NBA, where he
turned a good team into a world champion. He might have qualified for the Hall
of Fame had he retired then; but he played for thirteen years, and won the
championship in eleven of them. He is beyond a doubt the greatest winner in
the history of sports; and also the first African-American star in
professional basketball; and also the first African-American coach in any
major sport.

But it's as a man that Bill Russell matters most.

Unlike his only peers -- Babe Ruth, Wayne Gretzky, and (maybe) Michael Jordan
-- Russell was never loved by fans, and seldom emulated by players. Bostonians
of his time preferred a losing hockey team to the most dominant basketball
squad in history; and while many players tried to be fearsome shot-blockers,
few had the patience for his ultra-cerebral, no-frills brand of ball.
Sportswriters hated him so much that he was kept off the all-pro team in years
he was voted the league MVP. And of course his vast pride prevented his ever
accommodating anything he considered the slightest bit inhumane, or
unbefitting his dignity as a human being. He refused to sign autographs, even
to children. He only let the Celtics retire his number on the condition that
all fans be excluded from the 1972 ceremony. He turned down his election to
the Hall of Fame. He was calling himself "black" and visiting Sudan and
Liberia when "the Negro's" civil rights were still a subject of debate on
editorial pages. In 1958, living in one of the most racially divided areas in
the world, he wrote in Sports Illustrated that "I do not like most white
people because they are white. Conversely, I like most black people because
they are black." No man was ever less suited to being a celebrity athlete than
he was -- a fact in which he took considerable pride.

He was born in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1934, and moved to Oakland at a
third-grader. Instilled with a powerful sense of pride by his family, whose
patriarch had been a Monroe legend for his courage ("The Old Man" had once
faced down the Klan). Indomitable men like The Old Man and Henri Christophe,
the founder of Haiti, impressed themselves on his mind a boy; and his family's
standards for personal integrity were absolute. Even after he was making
100,000 a year, his father continued to work in an Oakland foundry rather than
be dependent on any man. This was the mentality he brought to basketball. He
understood that jealously guarding his dignity would cause him trouble. "If
there was a popularity contest he wasn't going to get it," remembers Arnold
"Red" Auerbach, his coach during the championship run. "If it came to any kind
of a vote, he wasn't going to get it. So he had one philosophy: everything
else will fall into place if you just win."

Winning, Russell felt, was the one thing he could control. So he set out to
win. He had discovered, as a rangy kid in Oakland, that he could jump higher
than anyone else, and would stay in the air longer; he was, it turned out, a
world-class track athlete. But he wasn't interested in succeeding merely as a
human pogo stick, any more than he was willing to trust his success to the
whims of politics. He couldn't shoot the ball, and had no gift for the
specialized art of scoring directly under the basket. So he, along with his
equally reflective teammate at the University of San Francisco, KC Jones,
began to rethink the game.

Remember, basketball, then as now, wasn't "just a game"; it was a current in
the flowing stream of cultural history. Any black player of the 1950s could
have told you that. Its orthodoxies, though theoretically abstract, were
authoritarian, and based on traditional prejudices. Basketball was thought,
for example, to be a game, like football, where the coach devised the strategy
and the players merely "executed" it; improvisation and creativity being
dangerously individualistic. Likewise, it was assumed that basketball was a
game played on the floor; jumping wasn't just unimportant, it was something to
be actively discouraged. A defensive player was taught never to leave his
feet; and on offense, the jump shot was still considered a dangerous novelty,
a sure sign of societal decay. Attempting to play while in the air was
"playground stuff," then as now an all-purpose put-down for any kind of
creativity or virtuosity .

And it was a game played on the ground, where big men, as 50s hoop immortal
Bob Cousy remembers, "were primarily Frankenstein lookalikes, more cumbersome
than athletic." They tended to be stocky and muscular, not slender and reedy.
Russell was 6'9" and 220 pounds dripping wet; how could a player like that
compete against men thirty or forty pounds heavier? But Russell's sky-high
skill level, combined with his track-star body and what Cousy called "an
almost animalistic motivation," made these notions medieval overnight. Russell
was thinner and faster than everyone he played, and it allowed him to dominate
them as no one had ever been dominated. Leaping had been considered bad
because it overcommitted the body; but Russell was so quick that he could wait
until the ball was out of a player's hand before he left his feet. Or if he
was faked, and jumped too soon, he could still recover and block the ball from
behind. Plays like that existed far outside of the coaching manual, but he was
too good, and too proud, to be chided. And opposing players soon became
terrified of being embarassed by him. Once, KC Jones remembers, a guard broke
downcourt for what should have been an easy lay-in. "We chased him, Russell
and I, and Russell started making noise with his feet, saying 'I got him!' And
I said 'no, I got him!' The guy was so worried about us that he missed the
layup." He laughs. "Neither of us was where anywhere near him."

Russell wasn't merely dominant; he thought the game through in a way no one
had before. A supreme individualist in life, he was the ultimate team player
in basketball - for his own reasons. His teams would have to win for him to
succeed; team basketball was the way to win; therefore he would be the best
team player in the world. If he blocked a shot, he would try to block it into
the hand of a teammate; every rebound was thrown up court, to try to get a
teammate an easy layup. (Often he would run ahead of the pack to get it
himself.) And on the defensive end, he and Jones essentially reinvented the
game, bringing a rare analytical energy to what was then an essentially static
game. They watched every opponent, cataloging his tendencies. They came up
with new strategies for defending two or three men at once. They invented the
art of jumping straight up, rather than at, an opponent, allowing his long
arms and cat-quick hands to make last-second adjustments while airborne. He
ran out to cover guards a foot shorter than himself; he thought his way to
rebounds he couldn't get to by jumping. He was unorthodox, creative,
improvisational. And along the way, he changed basketball into the vertical
game it is today. There would be no more stand-still jump shots or lumbering
Frankensteins after Bill Russell. Taking an obscure Jesuit college to two
championships and a 56-1 record without any real scoring ability was
inconceivable. How could it happen? Who was this guy?

It was a question fans would be asking themselves for years. Russell learned
early that the cheers and boos of a crowd were fickle, and unconnected to him
as a person. Drafted by the Boston Celtics in 1956, he found himself in a city
as racially divided as any he had known. "I had never been in a city more
involved with finding new ways to dismiss, ignore or look down on other
people," he would later write - adding, "Other than that, I liked the city,")
The Celtics were a finesse team at the time, scoring a lot of points under Red
Auerbach's (and Bob Cousy's) up-tempo, fast-breaking style. They lacked
defense and rebounding; Russell as a rookie averaged nearly 20 a game, the
best in the NBA by far. Of his defense, words could hardly do justice, and the
Celtics won the first of their many championships that year. But even so, the
crowds never got to know him.

Still, he became the focus of much attention, which irritated him. It wasn't
just the obvious, galling fact that many of the same people who cheered him
during a game would go to almost any lengths to keep from moving into their
neighborhood. It was that, even aside from race, there was something about the
relationship between fans and athletes that was dehumanizing. For the same
reason, autograph seekers found him stubbornly reluctant. He noticed that they
would seldom look him in the eye; and how their odd mixture of servility and
rudeness was, like crowd abuse, degrading to everyone involved. So at first,
he would try to explain his philosophical objection, often at length: They
didn't know anything about him as a man, and so why should his signature mean
anything to them? He would spend ten minutes explaining himself to them when
he could have gotten rid of them in a few seconds by signing; but invariably,
they would stalk away, having only registered his refusal.

Eventually, he stopped talking to them entirely, developing a whole array of
defenses. "I use the glower," he wrote in 1979. "I play the silent sphinx; I
use the wisecrack; sometimes I can be downright rude." The glower was his most
effective weapon, though, fitting in with timely sterotypes. "The Grade A
glower," he would write, had "a big batch of smouldering black panther, a
touch of Lord High Executioner and angry Cyclops mixed together, with a just a
dash of the old Sonny Liston."

But if his notoriety had a price, it offered a priceless opportunity as well.
As a public figure in a major city, he could speak his mind about race and
society knowing that, at least as long as he was winning championships, he
would be listened to. In 1959, the State Department offered to send him abroad
as a "basketball ambassador." He requested a trip to Africa. In Sudan,
Liberia, and the Ivory Coast, he began to feel and articulate a powerful sense
of African pride - for which, along with his refusal to condemn the fledgling
Black Muslim movement, Boston sportswriters responded by jeering him as
"Felton X," and painting him as a bearded radical.

He was bearded, that much was true; but while a radical on the court, he was
deeply apolitical as a private man, and profoundly suspicious of all social or
political authority. It was merely his refusal to get with the program that
rubbed the media the wrong way. He was determined to speak his mind. Standing
on the Great Pyramid in 1964, it struck him how even the calendar was a vast
and secret imposition - first imposed by the Egyptians, and then the Romans.
"All those Caesars, pharaohs and popes didn't hesitate to declare that they
were the arbiters of time and that their lands were the center of the earth,"
he later wrote, adding with typically mordant understatement, "This is a
common way for cultural bias to begin." He was determined that as little as
possible would be imposed on him. So he defended his freedom as tenaciously,
and as effectively, as he defended the basket.

It wasn't easy. In St. Louis, where the Celtics played the Hawks for their
first championship in 1957, Jim Crow was in full effect, and Russell couldn't
get served in a restaurant; he had to take all his meals in his hotel room. In
1961 he boycotted an exhibition game in Kentucky because two of his teammates
had been refused service in a restaurant; around the same time, he and the
other Celtics returned the ceremonial "key to the city" to the mayor of
Marion, Indiana for the same reason. None of these stances endeared him to the
press.

Oncourt, though, his special genius for basketball flourished. Better still,
he soon found offensive players who were as calculating and gifted as himself,
equals against whom he could finally measure his skills. Some of these battles
were epic, played on a level miles above the "kid's game" resentful
sportswriters would sometimes grumble about. He took a special private joy in
guarding Cincinnati's Oscar Robertson; the public had no idea what game was
being played out there. On one occasion, having deceived each other so often,
with feints within feints within feints, the two came eventually to a
standoff. "We just stared at each other, like two roosters, both of us
twitching," he remembered.

because of all the hundreds of moves we had tried on each other in scores of
games, we were at a stalemate. Oscar just stared right at me, his eyes never
moving toward the basket or another player. His arms didn't move either, only
his fingers. With the only part of his body I wasn't watching, he flipped the
ball up there blind. Plink! The ball swished through the basket while he was
still staring at me. We both laughed all the way up the court. I got such a
kick out of it that I sprinted out ahead of Wayne Embry, took a lob pass, and
dunked it at the other end, still laughing. The game was sweet at moments like
that.

And of course the premier spectacle in the NBA were his titanic battles with
Wilt Chamberlain, who was to power what he was to quickness. Their individual
rivalry was like something out of Hindu mythology; but Russell's team usually
won, especially in the postseason. Wilt however, entering the league in 1959,
presented Russell with the challenge of a lifetime. This was no Frankenstein.
Wilt was also a great athlete, fluid and graceful, but five inches taller and
eighty pounds heavier, every bit of it muscle. What Russell had been to
defense, Wilt was to offense: he had scored 100 points in a game once and, as
a rookie, averaged fifty points a game. When the two faced off, it was
Russell's ability to get inside Wilt's head that tended to make the
difference. He would strive to contain Wilt for three quarters, making him
take shots he didn't like, from farther away than he wanted to, and then
easing off, letting Chamberalain score a dozen points when the game was no
longer in doubt. Wilt would feel that he had won the matchup; Russell would
know that his team had won the game. Though Wilt's teams would win their share
of games over the years, that was the pattern of both men's careers.


After ten years in the league, Russell's knowledge of the game and of his
teammates was unrivalled; it was only natural then, when Auerbach retired in
1966, for him to make Russell player-coach. The Celtics had never bothered
much with the professionalized rigmarole of Xs and Os. There was no master
plan: the team played as Russell did, knowing each other and their opponents
and the game well enough to play it without a clipboard-bearing general
telling them how. And anyway, as Auerbach says, "no one could motivate Bill
Russell better than Bill Russell."

By this time, the legendary spring in Russell's legs appeared only in spurts,
and the aging Celtics now faced a new generation of quick, vertical,
calculating athletes in his own image - men like Elgin Baylor, Jerry West,
Nate Thurmond, and others. If it could have been said that Russell was merely
a physical freak, who dominated a time of low athletic standards, it was
impossible to say that now. He was the coach of the sport's most most famous
franchise, and still the most feared defender in basketball, even as a geezer,
playing against the best young athletes in the world. ("Russell was so good it
was scary," the Knicks' Walt "Clyde" Frazier would say of him, years later.)
He had finally lost the title, to a Wilt Chamberlain 76ers team, in 1967. But
at the very tail end of his career, he was able to win it back, and then win
it one more time, in 1969 against a Laker dream team featuring Baylor, West
and Chamberlain. By that time, the public was almost educated enough about
basketball to begin to appreciate him.

And by that time, his politics, such as they were, were no longer
controversial. By 1969, "black power" was already old hat; and even in the
backward realm of sport, political stances, while derided by the media and
fans, had become more commonplace. Before Cassius Clay became a Muslim, or
Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave the black power salute on the Olympic
grandstand, he had spoken his mind. Now, he continued to do so, without
anybody thinking it was remarkable. More than any of his achievements as an
athlete, that is what he deserves to be remembered for.

He would go on to have mixed success as a coach, executive and sportscaster,
before settling into his current role as the most personable of sages,
publishing books like his irreplaceable 1979 memoir Second Wind: The Memoirs
of an Opinionated Man, and last year's Russell Rules 11 Lessons on Leadership
from the Twentieth Century's Greatest Winner. He advises the young Celtics,
and laughs freely in interviews, having mellowed without ever becoming
sentimental. Having never compromised his individuality one iota when young,
his old age is now his to enjoy without apologies. Like having more
championship rings than fingers, it is a privilege he earned the hard way.