Bill Russell

American basketball player

• Born: February 12, 1934
• Birthplace: Monroe, Louisiana
• Died: July 31, 2022
• Place of death: Mercer Island, Washington

Revolutionizing the strategy of basketball with an emphasis on aggressive defense, Russell introduced to the sport a style of play never before used or advocated. His defensive play made him one of the most celebrated players in the history of the game.

Early Life

Bill Russell was born in Monroe, Louisiana. His mother, Katie, who died when Russell was twelve years old, exerted a strong, lasting influence. She named Bill for William Felton, president of Southeastern Louisiana College, and made it clear that her children would be college graduates. Russell’s father, Charles Russell, was a hardworking wage earner who held several jobs: factory laborer, truck driver, construction worker, hauling business owner, and ironworker in a foundry. He was also a semiprofessional baseball player, as had been his brother, Robert. Robert Russell, just short of making the Negro Major Leagues, blamed his failure on his being right-handed. Robert insisted that his nephew do everything with his left hand.

When Russell was nine years old, the family left Louisiana for better economic opportunities in Detroit, Michigan, but soon afterward moved to West Oakland, California. Bill’s brother, Chuck, proved to be an outstanding athlete in baseball, football, basketball, and track, and later became a successful playwright. Two years older than Bill, Chuck cast a shadow over Bill through high school. Unlike Chuck, Bill was not gifted with coordination and muscle until late in his senior year. His gawkiness and awkwardness gave him a self-admitted inferiority complex which, through later athletic stardom, was replaced by an outgoing, although enigmatic, personality.

Russell, six-foot-ten and 215 pounds in his prime, had a fierce integrity, frequent cackling laugh, incisive wit, competitive intensity, and far-ranging, intellectual mind. His interests included music appreciation and reading as well as assembling electric trains and investing in a Liberian rubber plantation. His ego was described by Boston Celtics teammate Tom Heinsohn as the largest on the team, while another Celtics teammate, Tom Sanders, emphasized Russell’s capacity to needle people and keep them slightly off balance.

Russell married four times, to Rose Swisher, Dorothy Anstett, Marilyn Nault, and Jeannine Russell. He had three children from his first marriage: William Felton Jr. (called Buddha), Jacob Harold, and Karen Kenyatta.

Life’s Work

Russell’s older brother, Chuck, was named to Bay Area all-star teams in basketball, football, and track, playing for Oakland Tech. When Bill enrolled at McClymonds High School, he intended to escape Chuck’s shadow. However, coaching personnel and students expected Russell to lead McClymonds in similar fashion. Russell proved instead to be skinny and awkward. One sport in which Russell became proficient, however, was table tennis, which improved his reflexes and coordination. As his height and weight increased, Russell’s efforts in basketball and track improved.

In his senior year, Russell was a starter, and McClymonds won the Bay Area basketball championship. A winter graduation enabled him to play with a California high school all-star group that toured northward into Canada, playing against top high school and even small-college competition. The trip was a turning point for Russell, as his play dramatically improved and his mind constantly analyzed the game. He also gained his first insight into his jumping ability.

Despite Russell’s starting role on a championship team and his noticeably improved play with the touring group, only the University of San Francisco (USF) offered a basketball scholarship. Russell had never heard of the school. While waiting for USF head coach Phil Woolpert to contact him, Russell took a job as an apprentice sheet-metal worker. Playing in a McClymonds alumni game, Russell experienced a first that was enjoyable and terrifying at the same time: He jumped high enough to look down into the basket. A new dimension entered Russell’s expanding range of skills.

Russell’s freshman coach at USF, Ross Giudice, introduced him to the hook shot and spent innumerable post-practice and weekend hours helping Russell sharpen his game. During that season, Russell averaged twenty points per game and started to develop remarkable, one-of-a-kind defensive skills. Giudice was so impressed that he told Woolpert that the potential was there for Russell to become the greatest player in history.

Another great help to Russell was K. C. Jones, his dormitory roommate and teammate. Jones and Russell decided that basketball was a geometric game, and repeated analyses led them to develop and redevelop concepts and strategies from that time throughout their careers. Their approach eventually revolutionized theories of rebounding and defense, but it did not result in instant success. The USF varsity team fell well short of championship-level play. A ruptured appendix removed Jones as soon as the season started, and other illnesses and injuries depleted the roster. Russell looked back with no excuses, however, and ascribed the squad’s mediocrity to lack of teamwork.

In Russell’s junior year, everything changed. Jones was back, Russell was the acknowledged leader, and tough team defense keyed San Francisco to an amazing year. After losing to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in its third game of the season, the USF Dons swept its next twenty-six games to win the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship. By then, Russell had been tabbed by Howard Dallmar, coach of Stanford and a former standout player in the National Basketball Association (NBA), as one player who could stop George Mikan, who was professional basketball’s best player at the time. The Eastern press was not convinced, though, calling Tom Gola, senior leader of defending champion La Salle, college basketball’s best player. The issue was settled in the NCAA title game. Russell scored twenty-three points, had twenty-two rebounds, and constantly harassed La Salle shooters, while teammate Jones kept Gola scoreless from the field for twenty-one minutes, in an 89–77 win. Russell tallied 118 points in five play-off games, breaking Gola’s NCAA record of 114, and was named the tournament’s Most Valuable Player.

Russell’s superior defensive play led to significant rule changes. He was a jumper, able to redirect many of his teammates’ errant shots to the basket. The NCAA rules committee responded by instituting a rule against what came to be called goaltending. Also, to keep tall players from establishing an unyielding position under or too near the basket, the free-throw lane, or key, was extended from six to twelve feet, a rule quickly referred to as the Bill Russell rule.

After his junior year, Russell was invited by US president Dwight D. Eisenhower to the White House to discuss a national fitness program, and he was designated the college basketball representative on a physical-fitness council, joining Willie Mays and Bob Cousy, among other athletes. Russell, by this time, had tried varsity track and became a friend and intense rival of San Francisco State high jumper, Johnny Mathis, who was destined to be a popular singer. At the Modesto Relays, Russell outjumped Mathis, six feet seven inches to six feet six inches. Russell’s interest in track lasted past his graduation when, intent on being a 1956 US Olympian, he entered both the basketball and high-jump trials. The high jump narrowed to four contestants for three spots, and Russell tied Charlie Dumas who would later be the first person to leap seven feet for first place. Since Russell had already been selected as one of only three collegians on the twelve-person US Olympic basketball team, he withdrew his name from the high-jump ranks.

Prior to the Olympics, Russell had led San Francisco to an undefeated season and a second consecutive NCAA title. In the process, the Dons had won fifty-five games in a row, then an NCAA record. When the NBA draft came around, Russell discovered that the Boston Celtics had dealt veteran scorer Ed Macauley and rugged Kentucky all-American Cliff Hagan to the St. Louis Hawks for their draft rights. The Rochester Royals selected first, taking Sihugo Green, a top-rated guard, bypassing Russell because they believed that Maurice Stokes, the NBA Rookie of the Year, supplied them with the same kind of rebounding strength. Additionally, Russell’s presence on the Olympic team would remove him from much of the regular season. It was rumored, too, that the Harlem Globetrotters would outbid any NBA team to get Russell.

Arnold “Red” Auerbach, coach of the Celtics, picked Russell anyway. His Celtics had always been a high-scoring team but needed a strong center. Russell led an undefeated Olympic team that bested the Soviet Union’s team 89–55 in the gold medal game, and then rejected a Globetrotter offer which was well above Boston’s offer. By the end of his first NBA season, Russell proved to be the Celtics’ long-needed ingredient. They celebrated their first NBA championship, and Russell had turned pivot play around forever. Thus, in one year, Russell had been the dominant force on three championship teams, in the NCAA, in the Olympics, and in the NBA.

In his second year, Russell was severely injured during the third game of the championship finals. Boston, without its shot-blocking, rebounding genius, lost to the Hawks in six games. During that season, Russell set a single-game rebounding record of forty-nine, which he later increased to fifty-one, set a playoff single-game rebounding record, a single season’s rebounding record, and was the runaway choice as the league’s Most Valuable Player. Curiously, he was bypassed for the All-League Team.

In the following season, Russell broke his own season’s rebounding record, enjoyed a .598 shooting percentage from the field (the best of his career), and led Boston to a sweep of the Minneapolis Lakers for the league crown. He was named All-League center. Over the next seven seasons, Russell led the Celtics to eight league championships in a row and nine out of ten. During that period, Russell was constantly compared to Wilt Chamberlain, the seven-foot two-inch record-breaking scorer whose style of play contrasted sharply with Russell’s. Opinion was divided as to which powerful center was better, but Russell earned more championship rings.

In 1966–1967, Russell succeeded Auerbach as head coach and, though leading the Celtics to a 60–21 overall season record, finished behind the Chamberlain-powered Philadelphia 76ers, whose 68–13 mark set an NBA record at the time. The 76ers handily beat Boston four games to one in the playoffs, and many believed that Russell and the Celtics were items of the past. Instead, Boston came back in 1967–1968 to beat Philadelphia in three straight playoff games, after being down three games to one, and then beat the Los Angeles Lakers in six games for its tenth NBA title in twelve years. Sports Illustrated chose Russell as its Sportsman of the Year. When Russell took the team to another title in 1968–1969, the Celtics claimed the best championship streak in sports history, eleven titles in thirteen tries, and Russell had been the central figure in each. Russell retired after that season. His statistics across his thirteen-year career reflect his dominance in the NBA: 21,620 rebounds, second in NBA history, and 14,522 points. He won the Most Valuable Player award five times, led the league in rebounds four times, and participated in twelve All Star games.

Russell faced hostile, racist crowds while playing and coaching in the NBA, similar to the hostility and hatred he faced as a youth in Oakland. In an interview with Sports Illustrated in 1999, Russell remembered how the police routinely harassed him with racial epithets in the streets of Oakland when he was a teenager. When he became the first African American to manage an NBA team, many Celtics fans boycotted the team’s games, and the press was sometimes hostile. Teammate Heinsohn remarked that Russell led the league in regrets. Russell remembered that the mayor of Marion, Indiana, presented each of the Celtics with a key to the city, but after the ceremony, Russell and K. C. Jones were refused service in a local restaurant. He spoke of receiving honors in Reading, Massachusetts, which was followed by the citizens of a wealthy section of that town circulating a petition to keep him out when they learned he planned to move there. In spite of it all, Russell told Sports Illustrated that, even in the face of racism, “I never permitted myself to be a victim.”

Sam Schulman, principal owner of the then-hapless Seattle SuperSonics, lured Russell back into NBA coaching in 1973. In Russell’s initial season, the SuperSonics won ten more games than in the previous year, and in 1974–1975, Seattle made the playoffs for the first time in its history. The team repeated that achievement in 1975–1976, but Russell had already started to lose faith in too many of his players. He started a fourth and final season with little determination and regretted that he had not resigned earlier. That regret, however, did not keep him from re-entering the NBA as manager of the Sacramento Kings more than a decade later in 1987. After leading the team to a dismal record of seventeen wins and forty-one losses, he resigned midseason in 1989 and retired permanently from basketball.

Russell began a second career on the lecture circuit, advising businesses how best to achieve success. Russell took up golf, ventured into films, did several radio shows for the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) and basketball broadcasts for ABC-TV, and later held television contracts with the Columbia Broadcasting System and the Turner Broadcasting System. He also did Bell Telephone commercials and even served as a substitute for talk-show host Dick Cavett.

In 2007, Russell gained the attention of basketball fans once more by persuading basketball superstars and former Lakers’ teammates Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant to end their long feud. That same year, with his daughter, Karen, Russell recorded public service announcements for the Foundation for Sarcoidosis Research to raise national awareness of the disease; both Russell and his daughter had sarcoidosis, an inflammatory autoimmune disorder of unknown cause that can affect any organ, although usually the lungs, and may be fatal.

Russell received many honors during his career. He was named to the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1975, the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in 2006 (one of the first five to be chosen), and the Fédération Internationale de Basketball (FIBA) Hall of Fame in 2007. He was placed among the fifty greatest players in NBA history in 1996. He earned two honorary doctorates, one from Suffolk University and one from Harvard University, in 2007. In 2009, the NBA Finals most valuable player award was rechristened the Bill Russell NBA Finals Most Valuable Player Award. In 2011, President Barack Obama honored Russell with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2021 Russell was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame again, this time for his efforts as a coach.

Significance

Russell’s fame was a result of his consistently superb efforts as an unselfish team player who intimidated opposing shooters, who blocked shots that almost always triggered fast breaks for his team, who believed in and used a psychology that worked to his team’s advantage, and who led in a style that went unchallenged. Coach Auerbach, knowing the importance of winning in professional sports, guaranteed Russell that he would never talk statistics at contract time. This was exactly what Russell, the ultimate team player, wanted to hear. In his own view, he never graded himself as a player higher than sixty-five against a perfect game standard of one hundred. Posterity thought differently. In 1980 the Basketball Writers Association of America chose him as the greatest player in the history of the NBA. Although that accolade came before the arrival of greats such as Michael Jordan and LeBron James, many still believe Russell to be, at minimum, the greatest defensive player as well as team player.

More important, Russell recognized that there was far more to life than basketball. From his pedestal of fame he stood tall on matters that counted. Teammate Cousy referred to Russell as a crusader. Certainly, he was among the first African Americans in sports to speak out on racism in the league, in sports in general, and in society. Russell remembered how his grandfather had cried when, in the Celtics locker room, he had seen John Havlicek, a White player, showering alongside Sam Jones, who was Black. Russell remained politically active, speaking about racial issues nationally as well as locally, such as in the case of Boston schools.

Russell spoke out against the NBA’s unwritten, but patently obvious, “quota” rule, and was fined for doing so. He was among those who defended boxer Muhammad Ali while condemning newspapers and magazines for their yellow journalism. When he was the first Black person selected to the Basketball Hall of Fame, already in its fifteenth year at the time, he refused to be inducted, criticizing the organization’s standards and its racist leadership. Likewise, when the Celtics held a ceremony to retire his uniform number in 1972, he did not attend out of resentment toward racist fans and his wariness of the media. However, in a 1999 reenactment of the ceremony that he attended, he received a long standing ovation.

Bibliography

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Cohen, Robert W. The Fifty Most Dynamic Duos in Sports History: Baseball, Basketball, Football, and Hockey. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2013. Print.

Goudsouzian, Aram. King of the Court: Bill Russell and the Basketball Revolution. Berkeley: U of California P, 2010. Print.

Havlicek, John, with Bob Ryan. Hondo: Celtic Man in Motion. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1977.

Heinsohn, Tommy, with Leonard Lewin. Heinsohn, Don’t You Ever Smile? Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976.

Heisler, Mark. Giants: The Twenty-Five Greatest Centers of All Time. Chicago: Triumph, 2003.

Hubbard, Donald, and Jo White. One Hundred Things Celtics Fans Should Know and Do before They Die. Chicago: Triumph, 2010. Digital file.

"Legends Profile: Bill Russell." NBA, 13 Sept. 2021, www.nba.com/news/history-nba-legend-bill-russell. Accessed 4 Oct. 2021.

Linn, Ed. “I Owe the Public Nothing.” The Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 1964.

Nelson, Murray R. Bill Russell: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 2005.

Powell, Shaun. "Successful, Shor-Lived Coaching Days Get Bill Russell into Hall Again." NBA, 1 Sept. 2021, www.nba.com/news/bill-russell-hall-of-fame-profile-2021. Accessed 4 Oct. 2021.

Russell, Bill, and Taylor Branch. Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man. New York: Random, 1979.

Russell, Bill, with David Faulkner. Russell Rules: Eleven Lessons on Leadership from the Twentieth Century. New York: Dutton, 2001.

Taylor, John. The Rivalry: Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, and the Golden Age of Basketball. New York: Random, 2005.