Re: Bill Russell article from American Legacy (long)

["Greg Odegaard" <grodeg@xxxxxxxxxx>]

For what it is worth the ESPN documentary done a few years back is probably
the best "story" of the great BR's life.  I got an original copy from the
producer if anyone might want a copy for a trade or something.

Greg
----- Original Message -----
From: "Wright, Cecil" <Cecil.Wright@JUSTICE.GC.CA>
To: "celtics list" <celtics@igtc.com>
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2003 11:00 AM
Subject: RE: Bill Russell article from American Legacy (long)


> 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.