Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics was a champion without peer, in more ways than one.
Heinsohn, “all I know is, the guy won two NCAA championships, 50-some college games in a row, the Olympics, then he came to Boston and won 11 championships in 13 years, and they named a fucking tunnel after Ted Williams.”him preparing to unselfishly pass the ball to a teammate. There were other moments of rapprochement between Russell and the city over the years, most vividly his appearance at the 1999 ceremony for the re-retirement of his jersey number , but old scars still burned to the end.
“It had all varieties, old and new, and in their most virulent form,” he wrote in [his 1979 memoir] “Second Wind.” “The city had corrupt, city hall-crony racists, brick-throwing, send-’em-back-to-Africa racists, and in the university areas phony radical-chic racists.… Other than that, I liked the city.”
Boston still wrestles today with the reality of its ingrained racism. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, activists shone a spotlight on that racism, with the rise of the civil rights movement and riots spawned by enforced busing. Racist violence and blatant bigotry were on full display, too. As the most visible Black man in Boston, Russell often found himself at the receiving end of such vitriol, all too often from fans in the stands at the Boston Garden.
Eventually, Russell came to occupy a mental space that allowed him to continue with the game: As far as he was concerned, he was playing for his teammates, and not for the louts in the stands. So far as I know, he never signed one autograph, preferring instead a few shared words and a handshake.
with several of the NBA’s most prominent “big men.” He sized them up one by one, leaned in, and whispered, “I would kick your ass.” And he laughed, and laughed, because he knew he was right.In the words of Maya Angelou, “And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.
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