William Felton Russell made his living in a profession that judges success by an unequivocal bottom line: Winning. How much of that did you do?
Bill Russell by that measure was simply the greatest, most accomplished professional athlete in the history of North American team sports. There were not enough fingers and thumbs for his 11 NBA championships including eight in a row as the centerpiece of the dynastic Boston Celtics from 1956 to 1969.
Add an Olympic gold medal, two NCAA championships and two high school state titles and see the most gilded winner of them all. All sports. All time.
So it seems impossible to say this truth about Russell as we reflect on an epic life that ended peacefully Sunday at age 88, wife Jeannine by his side at their Seattle-area home:
Basketball wasn’t what he did best.
Winning wasn’t what needs to be mentioned first when his greatness and importance is parsed.
He would become an NBA star, but was never that first or only.
He was a Black man in America, first and always, hardened by the injustice around him and fighting it all his days. He was never a greater champion than as a champion of social justice.
“Today, we lost a giant,” tweeted former President Barack Obama on Sunday.
From the family’s statement announcing his passing:
“For all the winning, Bill’s understanding of the struggle is what illuminated his life. From boycotting a 1961 exhibition game to unmask too-long-tolerated discrimination, to leading Mississippi’s first integrated basketball camp in the combustible wake of Medgar [Evers’] assassination, to decades of activism ultimately recognized by his receipt of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Bill called out injustice with an unforgiving candor that he intended would disrupt the status quo…”
Oh yeah: He also was a five-time NBA MVP who averaged 22.5 rebounds a game in his career.
As a kid in South Florida but born in Massachusetts, I latched on to those dynastic Celtics as my first favorite basketball team, some three decades before the Heat came along. Russell and John Havlicek were my guys, along with Sam Jones, who had that sweet bank shot of the glass.
The boy in me was seeing just the great defender, shot blocker and rebounder in Russell, not the struggle, not the man who had such a complicated relationship with Boston for its racist side. He’d sometimes hear slurs shouted to him from fans. Celtics fans.
Russell lived then in Reading, a suburb just north of Boston.
