![]() ![]() He averaged more than 20 points and 20 rebounds a game for his three varsity seasons. in Russell’s junior year, the team won 55 straight games. Jones, a future Celtic teammate, in leading San Francisco to N.C.A.A. Russell was given a scholarship and became an All-American, teaming up with the guard K.C. A former basketball player for the University of San Francisco, Hal DeJulio, who scouted for his alma mater, recognized Russell’s potential and recommended him to the coach, Phil Woolpert. His mother died when he was 12, leaving his father, who had opened a trucking business and then worked in a foundry, to bring up Bill and his brother, Charles Jr., teaching them, as Russell long remembered, to work hard and covet self-worth and self-reliance.Īt McClymonds High School in Oakland, Russell became a starter on the basketball team as a senior, already emphasizing defense and rebounding. When Bill was 9 years old, the family moved to Oakland, Calif. A gas-station attendant sought to humble his father, while Bill was with him, by refusing to provide service, an episode that ended with Charles Russell chasing the man while brandishing a tire iron. ![]() He recalled that a police officer once threatened to arrest his mother, Katie, because she was wearing a stylish outfit like those favored by white women. He remembered a warm home life but a childhood seared by racism. 12, 1934, in Monroe, La., where his father, Charles, worked in a paper bag factory. “I have very little faith in cheers, what they mean and how long they will last, compared with the faith I have in my own love for the game.” “In each case, my intention was to separate myself from the star’s idea about fans, and fans’ ideas about stars,” Russell said in “Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man (1979),” written with Taylor Branch. He ignored his election to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame - situated squarely in Celtics country, in Springfield, Mass. 6 in March 1972, the event, at his insistence, was a private ceremony in Boston Garden. Guarding his privacy and shunning displays of adulation, he refused to sign autographs for fans or even as keepsakes for his teammates. Russell’s primary allegiance was always to his teammates, not to the city of Boston or to the fans. Early in the 1960s, his home in Reading, Mass., was vandalized. When he joined the Celtics in 1956, he was their only Black player. He was bruised by the humiliations his family had faced when he was young in segregated Louisiana, and by widespread racism in Boston. His blocked shots - the total is unrecorded, because such records were not kept in his era - altered games.īeyond the court, Russell could appear aloof. He didn’t have much of a shooting touch, but he scored 14,522 points - many on high-percentage, short left-handed hook shots - for an average of 15.1 per game. Russell pulled down 21,620 rebounds, an astonishing average of 22.5 per game, with a single-game high of 51 against the Syracuse Nationals (the forerunners of the Philadelphia 76ers) in 1960. titles from 1959 to 1966, far eclipsing the Yankees’ five straight World Series victories (1949 to 1953) and the Montreal Canadiens’ five consecutive Stanley Cup championships (1956 to 1960). He led the Celtics to eight consecutive N.B.A. He won a gold medal with the United States Olympic basketball team in 1956. ![]() He led the University of San Francisco to N.C.A.A. “What I wanted was to let those guys know I support them,” he told ESPN. owners to fire players who were taking a knee during the national anthem to protest racial injustice, Russell posted a photo on Twitter in which he posed taking a knee while holding the medal. ![]() In September 2017, following President Donald J. President Barack Obama awarded Russell the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, at the White House in 2011, honoring him as “someone who stood up for the rights and dignity of all men.” He was among a group of prominent Black athletes who supported Muhammad Ali when Ali refused induction into the armed forces during the Vietnam War. He went to Mississippi after the civil rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered and worked with Evers’s brother, Charles, to open an integrated basketball camp in Jackson. He took part in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and was seated in the front row of the crowd to hear the Rev. ![]()
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