RE: Bill Russell article from American Legacy (long)

["Wright, Cecil" <Cecil.Wright@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Roy...I'll be sure to look for it.  Some of you know that this is a sensitive topic of conversation for me as a black who grew up in the Boston area during the whole era of busing and Louise Day Hicks.  But I do not believe that stories about Russell, go in depth enough to show the truth about his life and the racial overtones which was part of it.

I think that many folks would just say let's be done with it and hope it all fades away from our memories.

I'll always remember that Bill Russell, whom I later met at his restaurant called "Slades", was one of the athletes who showed up in support of Muhammed Ali after he refused induction to the military.  Up until then, I had never really linked them in any way.

Cecil  

-----Original Message-----
From: Enrile, Roy [mailto:renrile@qualcomm.com]
Sent: March 10, 2003 2:42 PM
To: celtics list
Subject: RE: Bill Russell article from American Legacy (long)


NBA TV this weekend had their premier show on Biographies, and they
started it off with Bill Russell.  I'm sure they'll keep reshowing it
this week.

It was a nice coincidence that it came on soon after the article.
They actually did go into some of the racial issues he faced.

There were interviews with opponents, and people close to him(Red,
Tommy, Satch, KC).  Also a lot of game clips.  He looked like a guy with
Keon Clark athleticism and linebacker intensity playing against YMCA
guys taking set shots.  Lot's of controlled shot blocks and open dunks.
Must have been very intimidating.



-----Original Message-----
From: Wright, Cecil [mailto:Cecil.Wright@JUSTICE.GC.CA] 
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2003 7:20 AM
To: celtics list
Subject: RE: Bill Russell article from American Legacy (long)

Hi Josh,

I also appreciate this article on Russ.  But I am wondering why it
doesn't really delve into what he and his family endured while he lived
in Reading?  It's possible that the author was unaware or just didn't
want to mention all the bullshit that Russ and his family was able to
put up with.

The other question I have, is why there has not been a movie or
documentary made about his life?  Does anyone know?

Cecil  

-----Original Message-----
From: Josh Ozersky [mailto:jozersky1@nyc.rr.com]
Sent: March 07, 2003 11:42 AM
To: celtics list
Subject: Bill Russell article from American Legacy (long)


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.