I am mourning Bill Russell, a man who helped break my teenage heart when basketball was often the center of my world, the player who, more than any other Boston Celtic, was the executioner of The Philadelphia 76er’s, my team.
I am mourning him because I was probably secretly in love with him (and John Havlicek), a secret I had to keep to myself when the Sixers’ Wilt Chamberlain was his preeminent rival. With one exception, glorious 1967, the Sixers were always beaten by the Celtics and Russell was the reason why.
Every time they played, I watched or listened to the play-by-play on the radio. With the repetition of a boy’s nightmare, I can still hear in my mind the lines “Russell with the rebound, the outlet pass to KC who’s cutting to the middle, to Havlicek … for the layup.” Again, again, again. On the broken concrete of the West Lawn Playground Court, I did my best to reverse that dominance. I narrated an endless end-of-games against the Celtics. With thousands of shots in winter light, I became Hal Greer firing over Russell’s outstretched arm. We never lost when I played the Celtics. In the dusk, in the cold, I renewed the clock’s last seconds until my shot cut the cord with that best sound ever, the clip, the swick of a clean make. Russell was my respected adversary, my fantastic partner in imagination.
Something else was at work that was more important than the game itself, a quality of perception I did not understand or even recognize at the time. I narrated myself into the shape of black players on that winter court. I did not think of them as less than me or different or as mere athletes. These were exceptional men of dignity and grace, and I admired them. When I saw Russell heavily involved in the Civil Rights movement, I made a nebulous connection between conscience and the game. Watching him in both his endeavors, on the court, and in putting his body and life on the line to refuse the domination of injustice, changed my thinking and rearranged my cultural DNA for the better (I hope).
What a marvelous human being he was — the great player of unselfish winning, of team before self, of generosity with the ball, of hustle, of love for his teammates, of everything I ever longed to be.
Aerial combat: Bill Russell floats high above the hardwood to block a shot by Wilt Chamberlain in this 1960 game at New York’s Madison Square Garden. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)
