We will all talk today about the winning Bill Russell did in basketball, because he is the greatest winner team sports in America has ever produced. We will talk, and rightly so, righteously so, about back-to-back NCAA championships the tall, skinny kid from McClymonds High in Oakland won at the University of San Francisco, and the gold medal he won for his country in the Olympics, and then the 11 NBA championships he won with the Celtics in 13 years, the last two as a player/coach, which means a Black coach in Boston in the 1960s.
Of course we will talk about the 10-0 record he had in the Game 7s he played in his extraordinary NBA life. We lost all that on Sunday when we learned that William Felton Russell had passed away at the age of 88. And lost as much of a giant as sports has ever known. You know who the Greatest Generation was in pro basketball? He was.
We lost more than that, though, more than the center for the Celtics who did all that winning, and did it in a time when he played a total of 143 games against Wilt Chamberlain, who was bigger and stronger than Russell because he was bigger and stronger than anybody. We lost a truly great American on Sunday, one who led a proud and eloquent and occasionally defiant American life; one who marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and who spoke out against racism and injustice when far too many athletes did not, especially in the 50s and 60s.
