John Riordan: NBA icon Bill Russell changed the game and changed society
MVP: Bill Russell with LeBron James after James was named NBA Finals Most Valuable Player in 2016Â (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)
This sporting week began on a sad note as America and the world of basketball mourned the loss at 88 of all-time Boston Celtics and NBA icon, Bill Russell.
And it will conclude on a slightly awkward note that he would have chuckled at; over the next few days, Premier League players are tapering off their first-whistle ritual of bending one knee before games begin.
As I agonised over how I would mould a tribute to Russell, a universally admired and adored champion of basketball and of civil rights, news came through of the decision brokered by players and the Premier League to wind down the anti-racism gesture which was launched two years ago.
From now on, the brief moment of solidarity will be restricted to opening rounds like the one kicking off today in London and âSay No to Racismâ weeks in October and March.
I don't know how to feel about it, especially since it's clearly a conclusion not arrived at lightly with multiple motivations that orbit in and around good faith. Also it did seem to start looking like some of the kneel-downs were becoming half-hearted, if we're being honest.
From what I've read about Bill Russell over the years and especially this week in the yards of obituaries pouring out in his honour, the big centre who revolutionised the defensive side of basketball would have laughed his trademark deep laugh. A knowing laugh, a scorning one mined out of decades of learning the discomfort and pain that travels alongside action.
Five years ago, the first NFL season of the cursed Trump administration was embroiled in the sort of soul-searching you'd expect of a predominantly Black league operated by white owners, almost all of whom were sympathetic to the racist reprobate occupying the White House.
And so the players decided that the option - unenforced on any of their colleagues - to bend the knee during the playing of the US National Anthem would be a powerfully effective visual in protesting racial injustice.
Characteristically, the then US President called on NFL owners to fire any player who decided to deploy the freedom of speech portion enshrined in their rights as citizens. His emotive use of terms like "son of a bitch" landed pitch perfectly with his target audience whose grim desire to rack up bogeymen was relentless. This was the same guy who most recently was spotted hosting the Saudi-backed LIV golf series at his New Jersey country club, not far from the site of the 9/11 attacks directly and indirectly connected with the regime using him and his ilk for bare-faced sportswashing.
In solidarity, Russell posted a photo of himself on Twitter, one knee down and one hand gripping the Presidential Medal of Freedom the previous incumbent had bestowed upon him. Just as he had aligned firmly with Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King when they each sought change in the 60s, he was with the footballers a half century after he retired from playing.
There is no higher civilian award in the US than the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That day, Barack Obama described the 11-time NBA title winner as âsomeone who stood up for the rights and dignity of all menâ. It was 2011 and neither man could have possibly foreseen how quick the descent into dangerous division the nation was about to experience.
Russell's basketballing CV will always be incomparable and unsurpassable. He dragged the Celtics on an eight-title streak that stretched from 1959 to 1966, thanks mainly to the fast break style of play he imposed on his opponents as well as his own team. He changed the game by stopping scores and creating counter attacks.
He changed the game by being the first Black man to coach an NBA side, his final pair of titles as a Celtic earned while he combined playing and coaching in 1968 and 1969.
And all the while he was changing the game as an activist just as all of society changed irrevocably around him.
Much as he imposed his playing style on the league, his yearning for change stemmed from what had been imposed on him. His achievements on the hardwood were not why Obama and countless others admired him so deeply. It was the adversity he had to overcome off the court which set him apart.
From his earliest memories as a hated second class citizen in Louisiana through to the relative refuge of Oakland where he and his family (soon to be without a mother figure) migrated in post-war panic.
Above all, it was spending his professional playing days in the hostile environment presented by the staunchly Catholic Irish and Italian city of Boston. It might not have been the Jim Crow South but this was a town with a lot of evolving yet to do. They were not ready for a Black athlete on their basketball team and he was reminded over and over that he wasnât welcome.
âTo me, Boston itself was a flea market of racism,â Russell wrote in his earth shatering 1979 memoir, Second Wind. âIt had all varieties, old and new, and in their most virulent form. The city had corrupt, city-hall-crony racists, brick-throwing, send-âem-back-to-Africa racists, and in the university areas phony radical-chic racists (long before they appeared in New York).â The break-ins of his house in the suburbs where he should have felt safe only ended after he told the police of his intention to acquire a gun permit.
But his teammates felt safe with him. After Satch Sanders and Sam Jones were refused service at a cafe in Kentucky in 1961, Russell led a boycott of that nightâs game, a stunning act of protest at such an early point in the civil rights movement.
âWeâve got to show our disapproval of this kind of treatment or else the status quo will prevail,â the player said of the moment. âWe have the same rights and privileges as anyone else and deserve to be treated accordingly. I hope we never have to go through this abuse again.
âBut if it happens, we wonât hesitate to take the same action again.âÂ
Any time the Celtics faced a do-or-die playoff game when Bill Russell was in the line-up, their record was flawless. He was at his greatest when there no other options but to win. His relationship to the institution he built up around him was almost transactional. His loyalty was reserved for his team, his coach Red Auerbach and the Celtics. But not Boston.
For years, it was a broken relationship and a sorry section of his chapter there. He didnât want the public to attend his jersey retirement and for decades, he declined the offer of a statue being built in his honour.
As noted by Bill Simmons in his well-respected tome about the sport, , the post-career home Russell chose to settle down in couldnât have been further away from Boston. Mercer Island all the way across the country, 3,000 miles away in Seattle, seemed like the safest gambit to put all the non-basketball grief behind him.
Around the time the kneel-down necessity emerged in the NFL, prominent NBA stars were being told to âshut up and dribbleâ by right-wing loons fixing on the same old grievances that smouldered around Russell 50 years prior. Infamously, when he was able to access the FBI file which obsessed over him decades before, he discovered that he was described as âan arrogant Negro who wonât sign autographs for white childrenâ. The same demands of the Black athlete happening over and over: âperform with your team and donât talk back, donât speak upâ.
In 2009, the Most Valuable Player award for the NBA finals series was renamed the âBill Russell NBA Finals Most Valuable Player Awardâ. It meant that up until as recently as June, the grand old doyen of the sport would amble calmly onto the temporary stage at the centre of the court, into the mob of players celebrating their victory and as they reverently parted to make space, he would hand the coveted trophy to the player who had excelled by pushing his team to win.
It will be a badly missed moment next year but his value to the game and to society will never diminish.
