Boston, Massachussetts.- The scene occurred on all the nights indicated on the calendar. On one side of the locker room, whether local or visiting, a figure of enormous size, with long legs and arms, was tied to a bucket. Almost like a ritual, one that either due to physiological needs or out of habit happened on every day that the Boston Celtics had to go out to play, Bill Russell always vomited. The competitive tension, his high expectations of himself and the rest of the group, as well as the habit built up over the years, turned that unpleasant drink into a tradition within the green discipline.
Throughout all the nights in which the Celtics played something, which were not a few between 1957 and 1969, something went through Russell’s body that forced him to expel him in the most abrupt way, a symbol of how important he was to the inside win. Such was the depth of this particular tradition that on one occasion in a game against Philadelphia it came to Red Auerbach’s ears that Bill had not vomited. Moment in which the coach ordered the team to stop warming up and return to the locker room until Russell performed his pre-match habit, almost as a punishment or a condition of possibility to be in a position to win the game.
Winning was not an option, nor was it a desire, but rather a need, a duty to fulfill, to extend a legacy that, 53 years after leaving the NBA as a player, no other has come close to matching. Eleven rings is the sentence that condenses an extraordinary career, but that ignores everything that was behind one of the most important people in American sports and the NBA itself throughout its more than seven decades of existence.
“For Bill every game was a championship match, a challenge, a test of his manhood,” Wilt Chamberlain recounted in his 1973 autobiography.
Mystique and reality are two aspects that are intertwined when talking about Russell’s Celtics. A dynasty with all its letters, the longest the league has seen, but it was not exempt from problems, limitations, obstacles and difficulties. And it is that the example of the moments before the important matches only represent the tip of the iceberg regarding the competitive and winning character of the green legend who died on July 31, 2022 at the age of 88.
Finding a parallel to his desire for victory is difficult. Only those closest and who shared experiences with the interior can give a good account of it. His mental strength allowed him to avoid serious injuries and carry on as if nothing had happened, avoiding racist insults from the stands, both from rival fans and even local fans.
That strength lay in his ability to abstract from the environment, something key in all athletes, but which draws attention at a time when the professionalization of the game was still in its infancy. The snapshots of that time made it possible to capture a player who, from the bench, observed what was happening on the court with a penetrating gaze, analyzing everything that was truly important with the aim of finding a solution or maximizing it. “Winning is an acquired habit; when you win for a long period of time, there are a couple of words you say: luck and accident, ”Russell himself wrote in a book published in 2002. For the myth, winning justified the means: a fight, a substitution in time, a adjustment, a key reading of the rival attack. Everything made a difference in order to reach the final goal.
However, that sick desire to win had an engine behind it that largely explains the durability of the Celtics’ project: the union and rapport of the group. “The most important part of winning is the joy,” he noted in the aforementioned book 11 Lessons on Leadership From the Twentieth Century’s Greatest Winner. “You can win without joy, but winning without it is like eating in a four-star restaurant when you’re not hungry. Joy is a stream of energy in your body, like chlorophyll or sunlight, that fills you up and makes you naturally want to do your best.”
Separating Russell from his context is a serious mistake, not only because of the most obvious, but also because his leadership was shared with other important names that maximized his impact at all levels such as Sam Jones, Tom Heinsohn and, of course, Red Auerbach.
Before arriving in the NBA, Bill Russell had already conquered all possible peaks for the majority of mortals (two university titles and an Olympic gold), but he had never been able to truly trust his coach. The physical, technical and tactical superiority of the interior made him someone differential on the field, hence his impact in Boston took little time to be seen. But Russell had certain gaps to fill, as well as a strong personality that didn’t always mesh with those around him. Auerbach knew how to understand him and, above all, respect him, both forging a relationship that exceeded all the limits established between player and coach.
“Red was the first coach to personally train me,” the player recounted years later. “No matter how good you are, you need someone to bounce ideas off of and push back some new thoughts. Because if he doesn’t, that can quickly become routine. Those conversations were always helpful because he used language that I could hear.”
That relationship meant a trust and synergy that fueled Russell at critical moments. If there is something more complicated than winning in elite sport, it is to do it consistently and repeatedly. The Celtics achieved it with tremendous effort, to such an extent that their championships became meaningless. But behind each one of the eleven that they added there was a work story that had as its axis that union between Red and Bill. If the coach had to publicly scold his star, he did it, if he had to be candid and give him space too, just as if it was necessary to delegate to the vision of the interior to get ahead.
But all those words are useless if they are not endorsed by facts, something that Auerbach always took care to take into account. The coach was supportive of every major decision involving Russell, from his refusal to play in a preseason game at Kentucky because they wouldn’t let African-American players in in 1961 to trusting Bill on the Celtics’ bench after his withdrawal.
And it is that talking about Bill Russell means mentioning one of the athletes most committed to civil rights and the fight against racism and segregation in the United States in the 20th century. Native to the South (Monroe, Louisiana) but raised on the streets of Oakland in public houses, the late legend lived through both forms of oppression for African-Americans in the first half of the last century. All this forged in him a strong conviction about himself, but also a remarkable sense of dignity, which he never betrayed by falling into the favor of white society or the majority public opinion.
Portrayed on many occasions by the media at the time as someone “unfriendly” or “always seemed angry”, Russell built a wall around himself to contain all the hatred he had to endure for a double condition from which he could not escape. First, he was black in a segregated society, and second, he was one of the top athletes in the NBA. A fact that made him hear insults of all kinds, acts close to physical violence and even an infamous attack on his home in a town near Boston that marked a before and after in his relationship with the city. Bill always distinguished between franchise and fans, that is the only way to explain why his bib retirement ceremony took place behind closed doors and with those closest to him, years after hanging up his boots.
Now that Russell has said goodbye forever is when his legacy away from the courts is on track to surpass everything he did dressed in green. His determination to try to turn things around for African-American players and, by extension, the entire community was noted early on, vindicating the Celtics intern in 1956 that he wasn’t there to fill a quota, but to be important and because he truly deserved the position. American society had to go through a complicated path in the sixties due to the refusal of certain sectors to put an end to a more than evident segregation at all levels. Something that Russell, like many other athletes, fought from his particular tribune.
There were two moments in particular in which the Celtics player knew how to show his face.
First, on June 4, 1967 when, together with Jim Brown, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and others, they held a joint act in support of Muhammad Ali, who refused to be part of the forced recruitment for the Vietnam War. Russell would cap his support for the boxer with an article in Sports Illustrated on June 16 of that year where he wrote: “Ali has something I have never been able to achieve and something very few people I know have. He has an absolute and sincere faith. I’m not worried about Muhammad Ali. He is better prepared than anyone I know to withstand the trials that await him. What he worries me about is the rest of us.”
Russell’s second act of difference occurred on the tragic day of April 4, 1968, the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. The 24 hours that followed that event were an example of the ascendancy that both Bill and Wilt Chamberlain had in the NBA at the time, and that it revolved around the possibility of refusing to play a key game in the Playoffs. Hours and hours of reflection and discussion between the protagonists of the game that concluded with the determination to move forward in one of the “scariest and most peaceful sporting events I have ever seen,” according to the chronicler of the New York Times.
The death of Bill Russell marks the disappearance of a unique personality. Compared to other athletes who were limited to only transcending the field of play or whose social impact was somewhat blurred, the legend of the Boston Celtics managed to materialize both ways in a way that no other has achieved to date.
He was, is and will be the quintessential winner in sport.
He fought for those who had no voice and suffered the consequences without his discourse being changed by the threat of hate.
There will be no other like Bill Russell.
Information: NBA.
