Bill Russell was not the greatest player in basketball history. He was the sport's greatest winner. Maybe any sport's greatest winner.
William Felton Russell was born on February 12, 1934 in West Monroe, Louisiana. When he was 8 years old, his parents decided that living in the segregated South wasn't worth it, and that living in a housing project in Oakland, California was an improvement.
Russell attended McClymonds High School in West Oakland (named for a superintendent of the city's schools), at roughly the same time as Baseball Hall-of-Famer Frank Robinson, baseball All-Stars Curt Flood and Vada Pinson, Olympic sprinting champion Jim Hines, Congressman Ron Dellums. Before them, it was attended by Baseball Hall-of-Famer Ernie Lombardi. After them, it was attended by baseball player turned NFL referee Aaron Pointer and his sisters, the singing Pointer Sisters; basketball All-Stars Paul Silas and Antonio Davis, baseball player Lee Lacy, rapper Stanley Burrell a.k.a. MC Hammer, and actor Yahya Abdul-Mateen II.
He was nearly cut from the basketball team as a freshman, but head coach George Powles encouraged him and worked with him on fundamentals. Russell later said, "To play good defense... it was told back then that you had to stay flatfooted at all times to react quickly. When I started to jump to make defensive plays and to block shots, I was initially corrected, but I stuck with it, and it paid off."
To say the least. He was recruited by the University of San Francisco, a Catholic school in the bigger city across the Bay. Head coach Phil Woolpert not only welcomed black players such as Russell and K.C. Jones, but emphasized defense and patience, which suited Russell's game. UCLA coach John Wooden called him "the greatest defensive man I've ever seen."
In the 1954-55 season, the Dons began a 60-game winning streak that lasted into the 1956-57 season, after his graduation, and remains the 2nd-longest streak in men's college basketball history, surpassed only by the 88-game streak of Wooden's 1971-74 UCLA. It included the National Championships of 1955 and 1956. In 1955, Russell was named the Most Outstanding Player of the NCAA Tournament. In 1956, it went to Hal Lear, a white player from Philadelphia's Temple University, which only finished 3rd, losing in the Semifinals to Iowa, which USF beat in the Final.
Like the man who would become his great rival in the NBA, Wilt Chamberlain, Russell was also an outstanding high-jumper on his university's track & field team, scissor-kicking his way (in the days before the Fosbury Flop) to a peak of 6 feet, 9 1/4 inches -- roughly his own height.
Abe Saperstein, the white owner of the all-black Harlem Globetrotters, wanted Russell, but would only speak with Woolpert. Knowing this, Russell flat-out refused to play for him. He did play for the U.S. Olympic team, along with his USF teammate K.C. Jones, and they won the Gold Medal in Melbourne, Australia. Since Australia is in the Southern Hemisphere, the Olympics were held in November, and Russell wasn't able to join his professional team until December.
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With the 1st pick in the 1956 NBA Draft, the Boston Celtics -- having just completed their 1st 10 seasons, and not yet having appeared in an NBA Finals -- selected Tommy Heinsohn, forward from the nearby College of the Holy Cross, a player that Russell once held scoreless in a 1st half.
With the 2nd pick, the Rochester Royals selected Sihugo Green, a guard from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. Green was a decent player, but hardly the kind of star you would expect to go as the 2nd pick overall.
With the 3rd pick, the St. Louis Hawks drafted Russell. It looked like the Hawks had gotten the best player of the 3. But later that day, the Hawks traded the rights to Russell to the Celtics, for center Ed Macauley and forward Cliff Hagan. The Hawks won just 1 title, and were forced to move out of St. Louis, to Atlanta, where they have been a perennial letdown. It is the biggest transactional blunder in the NBA's 76-year history.
What about the Royals? As the biggest star coming out of college basketball, Russell was already believed to be ready to demand big money, which most NBA team owners didn't have. Hawks owner Ben Kerner and Royals owner Les Harrison didn't have it. Celtics owner Walter Brown did, because he also owned his arena, the Boston Garden, and the other team that played there, the NHL's Boston Bruins.
What's more, Brown owned the Ice Capades. At the time, it was a bigger moneymaker than the NBA or the NHL. So was the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. So Brown made a deal with Harrison: Select somebody other than Russell, and I'll add Rochester to the Ice Capades' tour. It was an offer Harrison couldn't refuse. (And no heads -- human, horse, or otherwise -- were hurt in the process.)
It was a short-term fix for the Royals. But that's the way the NBA had to operate at the time. A year later, Harrison moved the Royals to Cincinnati. They won the NBA Championship in 1951. In the 71 years since, this franchise, now known as the Sacramento Kings, has never been back to the NBA Finals. But Harrison did what he had to do to stay in business, and that meant giving up a chance at a man who could have become one of the NBA's greatest players ever, and did. Russell asked Auerbach for $24,000, or $1,000 less than the team's best player, Bob Cousy, was making. He got it.
Under head coach Arnold "Red" Auerbach, the Celtics already had All-Stars Heinsohn, Cousy and Bill Sharman. With Russell, they marched to their 1st NBA Finals, against... the Hawks. Game 7 at the Boston Garden went to double overtime, and the Celtics won it, 125-123. In the 1958 Finals, Russell injured his ankle, and the Hawks won the title. They've never won the title again, and Russell would never lose another Finals.
The New York Yankees once won 5 straight World Series. The Montreal Canadiens once won 5 straight Stanley Cups. At the time, the NBA was a smaller league with fewer Playoff rounds. At one point, it had just 9 teams, and New York Knicks broadcaster Marv Albert said that the purpose of the regular season seemed to be to eliminate the Knicks from the Playoffs. And it wasn't getting some great athletes: For example, Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson had both played college basketball, but chose baseball instead. But the Celtics won 8 straight championships.
They beat the Minneapolis Lakers in 1959. They beat the Hawks again in 1960 and 1961. The Lakers moved to Los Angeles, and the Celtics beat them in 1962 and 1963. The Celtics beat the Philadelphia Warriors, with Wilt Chamberlain, in the Eastern Conference Finals in 1958, 1960 and 1962; then, with the Warriors having moved to San Francisco, beat them in the NBA Finals in 1964.
Earlier players like Cousy and Sharman retired. New players like Sam Jones and John Havlicek came in. The Celtics kept winning. Chamberlain was traded to the Philadelphia 76ers, and the Celtics beat them in the Conference Finals in 1965, 1966 and 1968, although the 76ers did beat the Celtics in 1967, ending their eight-peat en route to Chamberlain's 1st title.
All this while, Russell was named to the NBA All-Star Game 12 times, every year from 1958 to 1969 -- every season in the league, except his 1st. He was named the NBA's Most Valuable Player 5 times: In 1958, 1961, 1962, 1963 and 1965.
In 1965, Chamberlain became the 1st NBA player with a contract that paid him $100,000 a year. Russell went to Auerbach, and asked for $100,001. He got it.
In 1966, Auerbach, retaining his title as general manager, appointed Russell as head coach. Aside from Fritz Pollard at the dawn of the NFL, Russell was now the 1st black head coach in any of North America's "Big Four" sports. He had certainly earned it: He was the ultimate team player. He didn't have the gaudy statistics of Chamberlain, but he made everyone on his team better.
He had also reminded his team of its responsibilities. He knew he wasn't the only black contributor. His college teammate K.C. Jones, the unrelated Sam Jones, Tom "Satch" Sanders, and, briefly, the man who would go on to become the 1st black head coach of an NCAA Champion, John Thompson, were keys to Celtic success.
In the 1958 off-season, Russell was a member of an NBA All-Star team that toured the U.S. They stopped in North Carolina, a segregated Southern State, and the team's black players were denied rooms in a white hotel. In 1961, the Celtics were scheduled to play a preseason game at the University of Kentucky's Memorial Coliseum. It would take until 1970 for Kentucky to play a black player, although Russell and his black teammates were allowed to play in the game. But they were refused service at a local restaurant. So they refused to play in the game, and flew home at their own expense rather than do so.
In 1967, he joined Jim Brown, UCLA basketball star Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), and other black athletes at the "Cleveland Summit" in support of Muhammad Ali, who had been convicted of draft evasion and stripped of the Heavyweight Championship of the World.
While the Celtics lost to the 76ers in the 1967 Conference Finals, they reversed that result in 1968, and they went on to beat the Lakers in the NBA Finals. In a calendar year that saw the assassination of Martin Luther King, James Brown have a Top 10 hit with "Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)," The Supremes step away from the sequins and the glamour to have a Number 1 hit with "Love Child," Muhammad Ali continue his fight for reinstatement, the protest of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the Olympics, and Abdul-Jabbar and Elvin Hayes of the University of Houston boycott the Olympics, a black head coach had won a World Championship. Sports Illustrated named him its Sportsman of the Year.
Russell had let it be known that the 1968-69 season would be his last as a player, retiring at age 35. Once again, the NBA Finals turned out to be Celtics vs. Lakers. The Lakers would have Game 7 at The Forum, outside Los Angeles in Inglewood, California.
Jack Kent Cooke, builder of The Forum and owner of the Lakers, and also the NHL's Los Angeles Kings, had prepared the building for the Lakers' 1st World Championship since moving to Los Angeles in 1960. (They had previously won titles in Minneapolis in 1949, '50, '52, '53 and '54.) Balloons were suspended from the ceiling, in anticipation of the celebration.
There was good reason for this anticipation. The Lakers had 4 men on their roster who went on to the Basketball Hall of Fame: Guards Jerry West and Gail Goodrich, forward Elgin Baylor, and, acquired the previous off-season, center Chamberlain. Goodrich was an excellent passer. West was that, and the best shooter the game had ever seen, and a great defensive player. Baylor was the flashiest player in the league, with offensive moves no one had ever seen before. And Chamberlain was the greatest basketball player who ever lived.
Due to the aging of the Celtics, for the 1st time, they went into an NBA Finals as an underdog. And, sure enough, the Lakers took the 1st 2 games in Inglewood. No one was really surprised when the Celtics took the next 2 at the Boston Garden. Or when the Lakers won Game 5 at home. Or when the Celtics won Game 6 at home. There was no way Bill Russell was going to lose his last game at the Boston Garden.
But no home team had ever lost an NBA Finals Game 7. Home teams were 8-0. And so, for Game 7, with every good reason to believe that it would happen, Cooke ordered the balloons, yellow with "World Champion Lakers" written in purple on them, suspended from the rafters of The Forum. In every seat, and all 17,568 were filled, a flyer was placed, stating, "When, not if, the Lakers win the title, balloons will be released from the rafters, the USC marching band will play 'Happy Days Are Here Again' and broadcaster Chick Hearn will interview Elgin Baylor, Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain in that order."
Cooke was counting his chickens before they hatched. West, trying to get through a hamstring pull in Game 5, went out for a pre-game shoot-around, and saw the balloons, and yelled at Cooke. Russell saw them, and walked over to West, and said, "Those fucking balloons are staying up there."
Russell told his players to take advantage of West's injury by running the fast break every chance they get. And, early in the 4th quarter, Chamberlain, proud of the fact that he had never fouled out of a game, was assigned his 5th foul. One more, and he was out. He had to take it easy on defense. With 5 minutes left, and the Celtics leading 103-94, he injured his knee, and walked to the bench.
Laker coach Butch van Breda Kolff sent backup center Mel Counts in -- and with 2 minutes left, it was Boston 103, Los Angeles 102. Chamberlain told van Breda Kolff he was ready to go back in. VBK said, "We're doing fine without you." They were not doing fine without him: They were still behind. And so, in the most important two minutes of his coaching career, down by one point, Butch van Breda Kolff left the greatest player of all time on the bench. It remains the greatest coaching blunder in the history of the NBA.
The game ended Celtics 108, Lakers 106. Two points made the difference between the Lakers finally winning their 1st NBA Championship in Los Angeles, and letting the balloons come down, and the most humiliating defeat in NBA history.
Russell had retired with 13 seasons, 12 Finals berths, and 11 World Championships. Only the late Henri Richard of the Montreal Canadiens has matched this achievement of having more championship rings than he had fingers. Yogi Berra of the New York Yankees won 10 World Series. The record for NFL Championships is 7, held by Tom Brady. For men who have not been caught cheating, it's 6, by Fuzzy Thurston, Forrest Gregg and Herb Adderley.
Bob Ryan, former sports columnist for The Boston Globe, who probably knows more about basketball than anyone who's never played it or coached it, said in 2019, "If Bill Russell came back today with the same equipment and the same brainpower, the same person exactly as he was when he landed in the NBA in 1956, he'd be the best rebounder in the league. As an athlete, he was so far ahead of his time. He'd win three, four or five championships, but not 11 in 13 years, obviously." (Ryan had previously called the 1986 NBA Champion Celtics the best team in NBA history, with Russell's 1965 Champion Celtics 2nd.)
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Just after graduating from USF in 1956, Russell married classmate Rose Swisher. Together, they had 3 children: Daughter Karen, and sons William Jr. and Jacob. They divorced in 1973. In 1977, he married Dorothy Anstett, Miss USA 1968. They divorced in 1980. In 1996, he married Marilyn Nault, and they stayed together until she died in 2009. He later married Jeannine Russell, and they were married until death did they part.
In 1970, The Sporting News named Bill Russell their Athlete of the Decade for the 1960s -- ahead of Ali, who had not yet been reinstated (that would come later in the year) or had his conviction overturned (that came in 1971). The Celtics retired his Number 6 in 1972. USF also retired it. To this day, he is the athlete most connected with Number 6. Stan Musial had worn it with great distinction in baseball, and Al Kaline still was at that point. Later basketball stars Julius Erving and LeBron James would wear it in tribute to Russell. Perhaps internationally, English soccer legend Bobby Moore might be better known for wearing it. But in North America, 6 belongs to Russell.
He was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame as a player in 1975, and as a coach in 2021. He is 1 of 5 men elected as both. The others: John Wooden, Lenny Wilkens, and his Celtic teammates Bill Sharman and Tom Heinsohn -- but not, as yet, his Celtic teammate K.C. Jones. (No women have yet been so honored. Dawn Staley is most likely to become the 1st.)
After 2 seasons as a broadcaster for ABC, a profession at which he was uncomfortable -- he said, "The most successful television is done in eight-second thoughts, and the things I know about basketball, motivation and people go deeper than that" -- Russell was named head coach of the Seattle SuperSonics. Although he enjoyed the Seattle area, and buying a house in Mercer Island where he would live the rest of his life, he found coaching without himself as a player considerably more challenging. After 4 seasons, making the Playoffs only once, he was let go. He coached once more, with the Sacramento Kings in the 1987-88 season.
Knicks Hall-of-Famer Bill Bradley, a graduate of Princeton University, said Russell "was the smartest player ever to play the game." He was named to the NBA's 25th, 50th and 75th Anniversary All-Time Teams. He, Cousy, George Mikan and Bob Pettit were the only players named to all 3 teams. (To be fair, the 25th Anniversary Team only had 12 players, while, for the other anniversaries, they named 50 and 75 "greatest players.")
As part of the league's 50th Anniversary celebrations, he did a joint interview with Chamberlain, with whom he had 8 Playoff series, winning 7. On the night in 1961 that Chamberlain set a still-standing record of 55 rebounds, it was against Russell -- but the Celtics beat the Warriors, anyway.
Their relationship had been tricky. They had dined with each other's families as players, but after Russell criticized Chamberlain over van Breda Kolff holding him out in 1969, things soured. But by the time of their 1996 joint interview, things had picked up a bit. Wilt revealed that Bill had taken to using their middle names, calling him on the phone and saying, "Hello, Norman? This is Felton."
When Chamberlain died in 1999, Russell spoke at his funeral. With that experience in mind, he acted as a peacemaker to end the feud between former Laker teammates Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant.
In 2009, the NBA Finals Most Valuable Player Award was renamed the Bill Russell Award. Russell presented the 1st such award to Bryant, and didn't seem to care that Kobe was a Laker -- or a native of the Philadelphia area, home to the Celtics' other major rival. In 2011, he was a guest at the White House for a celebrity basketball game in honor of President Barack Obama's 50th birthday, and Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2013, he was honored with a statue at Boston's City Hall.
But the man who titled one of his autobiographies Memoirs of an Opinionated Man never stopped speaking his mind. He had a Twitter account, but didn't start using it until September 26, 2017. In solidarity with blackballed quarterback Colin Kaepernick, he used it to show himself down on one knee, while wearing his Medal of Freedom, and wrote, "Proud to take a knee, and to stand tall against social injustice." When Donald Trump continued to say that the gesture was unpatriotic, Russell, almost literally, doubled down.
Bill Russell, an American hero, died this morning, July 31, 2022, at his home in Mercer Island, Washington, after being unwell for a while. He was 88 years old.
Official statement from the Celtics' organization: "Bill Russell's DNA is woven through every element of the Celtics organization, from the relentless pursuit of excellence, to the celebration of team rewards over individual glory, to a commitment to social justice and civil rights off the court. Our thoughts are with his family as we mourn his passing and celebrate his enormous legacy in basketball, Boston, and beyond."
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver: "I cherished my friendship with Bill and was thrilled when he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I often called him basketball's Babe Ruth for how he transcended time. Bill was the ultimate winner and consummate teammate, and his influence on the NBA will be felt forever."
Michael Jordan: "Bill Russell was a pioneer -- as a player, as a champion, as the NBA's first Black head coach and as an activist. He paved the way and set an example for every Black player who came into the league after him, including me. The world has lost a legend. My condolences to his family and may he rest in peace."
Magic Johnson: "Bill Russell was my idol. I looked up to him on the court and off. His success on the court was undeniable; he was dominate and great, winning 11 NBA championships. Off the court, Bill Russell paved the way for guys like me. He was one of the first athletes on the front line fighting for social justice, equity, equality, and civil rights. That’s why I admired and loved him so much. Over the course of our friendship, he always reminded me about making things better in the Black community. Despite all of his achievements, he was so humble, a gentle giant, a very intelligent man, and used his voice and platform to fight for Black people.
"Since the day we met, he mentored me and shared advice. Later in life, he never missed an opportunity to tell me how proud he was of me for what I was doing in Black America throughout the country. I will forever remember his cackling laugh, sense of humor and love for the game of basketball.
"This is a tremendous loss for the entire basketball world. Cookie and I are praying for Bill’s family and loved ones, our NBA family, and the entire basketball community."
Charles Barkley: "Bill Russell's passing is not just an NBA loss, it is a world loss. When your actions match your words on important issues, you are a great man, not just a great basketball player. The word 'hero' is tossed around a lot, but today it is perfect. RIP great man BR."
Stephen A. Smith: "An activist, a pioneer, a humanitarian. He made the world better for us all. #RIPCHAMPION"
Jon Stewart: "Bill Russell was one of the kindest, most thoughtful people I’ve ever met. Once called out of the blue because he thought I looked sad on TV…best pep talk of my life. RIP"
Barack Obama: "Today, we lost a giant. As tall as Bill Russell stood, his legacy rises far higher—both as a player and as a person."
Some things are more important than winning. Bill Russell was great at those things, too.