EDITORIAL: Bill Russell was a force as an athlete-- and a man

Aug. 3—If you want an idea of what Bill Russell meant to sports, and to the world, you would only have needed to scan the crowd at the 2013 unveiling of a Boston City Hall statue in his honor.

If you were there that day, you would have seen Russell's former teammate Tommy Heinson holding court amid Boston Celtics executives. You would have seen Russell's fellow Basketball Hall of Famers Charles Barkley, Julius Erving and Clyde Drexler. Football great and civil rights activist Jim Brown was there. So were the smooth and soulful singers Johnny Mathis and Bill Withers. Then-Gov. Deval Patrick was on hand, and President Barack Obama reportedly got a peek at the statue before it was presented to the public.

Russell, the ultimate team player who never wanted a statue erected in his honor, repeatedly described himself as "embarrassed" by the attention during the unveiling. But the depth and breadth of the crowd was a testament to the Louisiana native's influence.

Quite simply, Russell, who passed away Sunday at age 88, was the most consequential athlete in Boston sports history, and one of the most important athletes in American history.

The sporting achievements are well-known: two NCAA basketball championships with the University of San Francisco, an Olympic gold medal, and 13 NBA championships in 15 years with the Celtics, the last two as a player coach.

Russell was the ultimate team player. He never put up the gaudy statistics posted by his fiercest rival, Wilt Chamberlain. He never averaged more than 17 shots a game in any of his 15 seasons. Michael Jordan, by contrast, never averaged fewer than 18. He was a relentless defender and practically invented the blocked shot — a statistic that wouldn't be tracked until after he retired. At 6 foot, 10 inches, his agility and leaping ability were off the charts. So was his sense of the game. He was the smartest player on the court.

Ted Williams, Bobby Orr, Tom Brady and David Ortiz are all giants of Boston sports. But Russell stands alone in any talk of a mythical "Mount Rushmore," Richard Johnson, curator of the Boston-based Sports Museum, told Steve Buckley of The Atlantic.

"There's a Mount Rushmore, and then there's Bill Russell," Johnson said. "No disrespect to the others, but he gets his own mountain. And it's for the man, not just the champion."

Russell was a fearless advocate for civil rights at a time when the country — and Boston in particular — did not want to hear the words of a smart, uncompromising Black man. He was a "woke" athlete before the phrase became a sneering reference to the idea that an athlete could also speak to the horrors of war and the scourge of racism and the ideals of equality and basic human rights.

One of the enduring images of Russell sees him sitting with Jim Brown and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at the 1967 Cleveland Summit, where many of the nation's best athletes came to the defense of Muhammad Ali, who had been stripped of his heavyweight title and faced charges of draft dodging for his refusal to serve in the Vietnam War. He marched with Martin Luther King Jr. He boycotted an exhibition game in Kentucky when his Black teammates were refused service in a coffee shop.

He never apologized for any of it, never tried to sand away the rough edges of being a Black man who was loved by fans during the 48 minutes he was on the court, then treated him as less than human after the final buzzer sounded.

He was routinely tailed by the FBI, who described him as "an arrogant Negro who won't sign autographs for white children." (Russell didn't sign autographs for anyone.) At one point in his career, his Reading home was broken into and vandalized, with perpetrators scrawling graffiti on the walls and defecating in his bed.

He never backed down, and you can draw a straight line from that strength to the resolve of committed athletes today, be they football's McCourty brothers, the Celtics' Jaylen Brown, or the 2020 Milwaukee Bucks, who chose not to take the court in a playoff game after police shot a Black man in Wisconsin.

"We've got to show our disapproval of this kind of treatment or else the status quo will prevail," Russell told reporters after the 1961 Kentucky boycott. "We 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. But if it happens, we won't hesitate to take the same action again."

More than 60 years later, Russell's words and actions still resonate. And that is a more enduring legacy than any statue.