Bill Russell is one of the greatest professional basketball player of all time. His career is a case study of adversity overcome, of potential tapped to perfection, and of determination to maintain an identity in racist times.
Background
William Felton Russell was born on February 12, 1934, in Monroe, Louisiana, United States; son of Charles (a laborer and trucking company owner) and Katie Russell. His father worked in a paper bag factory. It was not the sort of life that Russell’s father, a proud man, envisioned for his children. When Bill was still a youngster, his father sought to move the family out of Louisiana. Russell’s mother died at the age of 32, and the brothers Bill and Charlie were left in their father’s care.
Education
Bill went to McClymonds High School where he started playing basketball. His coach, George Powles, encouraged the youngster to develop his skills and become a good player. He was offered a scholarship from the University of San Francisco (USF). He was very happy to receive this scholarship as it provided him an opportunity to escape a life of poverty and racism.
Bill thrived at USF under Coach Phil Woolpert who helped him develop his unique technique of defense. He became the centerpiece of a USF team that became a formidable college basketball team.use.
In 1956 Red Auerbach—the Celtics’ head coach and general manager—targeted Russell in the NBA draft, seeing the solution to his team’s shortcomings. Once again, there was an element of chance involved: Auerbach had never seen Russell play and instead had to rely on the word of a trusted peer. Moreover, the Celtics needed to move up in the draft order to pick him; with Russell coming off two straight NCAA titles, some team was bound to take the plunge. So the Celtics traded centre Ed Macauley and the rights to guard-forward Cliff Hagan, who had yet to play in the NBA owing to his military service, to the St. Louis Hawks shortly after the Hawks used the second overall pick of the draft to select Russell. Both Macauley and Hagan would eventually land in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, an indication of how highly Auerbach valued Russell.
Russell’s impact was immediate. The Celtics won a title in his rookie year, and he became the league’s first African American superstar, though not its first black player (who was Earl Lloyd in 1956). He missed out on the NBA’s Rookie of the Year award, ostensibly because teammate Tom Heinsohn had played the entire season whereas Russell had missed time as a result of his participation in the Melbourne 1956 Olympic Games (where he helped the U.S. men’s basketball team win a gold medal). But there was more to it than that: the white Heinsohn was simply a more attractive candidate for many voters. Russell, outspoken and relentlessly intelligent when it came to matters of race, was not just the NBA’s first black superstar; as the Celtics quickly came to dominate the NBA, he also became an activist on par with Muhammad Ali. Russell would not stand for racism in sports, which was ironic, given Boston’s historical notoriety in that department.
The Celtics kept winning, and he remained the engine that made them go. Frustratingly, his sheer basketball excellence made his actions not only excusable for fans but tolerated in a way that bordered on dismissive. His on-court achievements did not give him a platform; instead, they granted him a strange kind of amnesty—the very greatness that should have forced others to listen somehow overshadowed any trouble he might have wanted to stir up.
By the end of his career, however, Russell himself had come to see the turmoil of the 1960s as far more important than the silly little game he played for a living. As the decade progressed, the Celtics continued to make history. In 1964 they became the first team in the NBA to start an all-black lineup. Auerbach’s lineup came out of necessity; he was notoriously indifferent to social causes and the opposing backlash. It was, however, a milestone made possible by Russell’s performance and larger significance. When Auerbach retired after the Celtics won the 1965–66 NBA title, Russell succeeded him as coach. Granted, it was in part because no one could deal with the moody Russell except Russell himself, but it still made him the first African American coach in NBA history, as well as the first to win a title when Boston took the 1967–68 championship. Russell took home one more championship before hanging up his sneakers for good in 1969. He had made great strides within the game of basketball, but the restless, conscientious Russell felt that there were bigger battles to fight. After his retirement, he served as head coach of the Seattle SuperSonics (1973–77) and the Sacramento Kings (1987–88), served as a commentator on television broadcasts of NBA games, and continued to remain active in social causes. His autobiography, Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man (cowritten with Taylor Branch), was published in 1979. Russell was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1975, and in 2011 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Bill is one of the most successful players ever to have graced American basketball. He won 11 NBA championships as a player with the Boston Celtics in 13 seasons. He is just the second player to have ever made 51 rebounds in a single game and the first NBA player to average more than 20 rebounds per game for an entire season.
Bill won five regular season MVP awards and was selected three times to the all-NBA First Teams. He was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2011 for his accomplishments in the Civil Rights Movement, both on and off the court.
During his career, Russell supported the American civil rights movement, spoke out against the Vietnam War, and did much that, had it come from any lesser athlete, would have been cause for immediate controversy.
Quotations:
"Success is a result of consistent practice of winning skills and actions. There is nothing miraculous about the process. There is no luck involved."
"The most important measure of how good a game I played was how much better I’d made my teammates play."
"Learning is a daily experience and a lifetime mission. I truly believe in the saying "We work to become, not to acquire."
Membership
Russell is a member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, having been initiated into its Gamma Alpha chapter while a student at University of San Francisco.
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
His height is 6 ft 10 in (2.08 m).
Quotes from others about the person
"How much does that guy make a year? It would be to our advantage if we paid him off for five years to get away from us in the rest of this series."
Hall-of-Fame player Dolph Schayes
Connections
Bill married his college sweetheart Rose Swisher in 1956. They had three children and divorced in 1973. He married former Miss USA, Dorothy Anstett, a white woman, in 1977. Their marriage was short-lived as they divorced in 1980. His third marriage was to Marilyn Nault which lasted till her death in 2009.
