Shame on us.
All of us.
Or, at least, most of us.
Shame on us for always declaring Michael Jordan to be the NBA’s G.O.A.T. — Greatest Of All Time.
Shame on us for also including LeBron James in the G.O.A.T. conversation or Magic Johnson or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Kobe Bryant.
But never Bill Russell.
The only time, it seems, Bill Russell has ever been mentioned as the G.O.A.T. is when our fathers or grandfathers joined the conversation and we just rolled our eyes and thought to ourselves, “Shut up, old man!”
“There are a lot of people, particularly young people, who have no idea of Bill Russell’s impact on and off the court,” says UCF professor and lifelong civil rights activist Dr. Richard Lapchick. “The contributions Bill Russell made in sport, and even more so in American society, are immense.”
So immense that after Russell’s death on July 31 at the age of 88, the NBA made the unprecedented move on Thursday of retiring his No. 6 jersey leaguewide — the first time in history that has ever happened.
“Bill Russell’s unparalleled success on the court and pioneering civil rights activism deserve to be honored in a unique and historic way,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement. “Permanently retiring his No. 6 across every NBA team ensures that Bill’s transcendent career will always be recognized.”
How in the world could we be such prisoners of the moment as to overlook Russell — inarguably the greatest champion in the history of American team sports and arguably the greatest social justice warrior in American sports history — as the undisputed G.O.A.T.?
Is it because he didn’t score a bunch of points like M.J. and LeBron or didn’t have the captivating smile like Magic? We’re talking about the greatest player of all time; not the greatest scorer of all time; not the most exciting player of all time; not the most charismatic player of all time. We’re talking about the greatest. And greatness should encapsulate everything, not just how many points you scored or championships you won, but the impact you had.
On the court, Russell won 11 of a possible 13 championships with the Boston Celtics, including eight in a row. He appeared in 10 Game 7s during his career and his Celtics won all 10 of them. He also won back-to-back NCAA titles at the University of San Francisco and an Olympic gold medal. He is the greatest defensive player in the history of the NBA and showed that a player could dominate the game by rebounding and playing defense.
He averaged 15.1 points and 22.5 rebounds per game, and there’s no telling how many blocks Russell would have had in his career if the NBA had tracked shot rejections during his career. How many superstars of today would be willing to sacrifice getting shots and scoring points to concentrate on blocking shots and getting rebounds?
“Practically everything we did was predicated on Bill rebounding the ball or blocking a shot and starting our fastbreak,” Celtics Hall-of-Fame point guard Bob Cousy once said.
Said Don Nelson, another former Celtics teammate and ex-NBA head coach: “There are two types of superstars. One makes himself look good at the expense of the other guys on the floor. But there’s another type who makes the players around him look better than they are, and that’s the type Russell was.”
Even more than the championships he won, Russell is the G.O.A.T. because of the trails he blazed and the stances he took. He became the NBA’s first Black head coach and the first Black coach in the four major professional sports leagues to win a championship.
And while he wasn’t the first Black player in the NBA, he is the player most responsible for league’s massive integration during the 1960s. He was the league’s first Black superstar and spoke out against racial quotas on NBA rosters. During his rookie season, Russell was the only Black player on the Celtics roster, but by 1964 the Celtics had the first all-Black starting lineup in NBA history.
When a hotel in Lexington, Kentucky, refused to serve food to two of his Black teammates — Sam Jones and Satch Sanders — in 1961, Russell organized a boycott and forced the cancellation of the NBA exhibition game the world-champion Celtics were in town to play.
At a volatile time when most Black athletes didn’t want to make waves, Russell created tsunamis. He was a staunch civil rights leader who marched on the nation’s capital with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and was front and center for King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
He put his life in jeopardy and incurred the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan by visiting the state of Mississippi just days after civil rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated there in 1963.
Russell, along with Abdul-Jabbar and Jim Brown, angered white America when they sat beside Muhammad Ali in Cleveland in 1967 when Ali announced he was refusing induction into the U.S. military to fight in the Vietnam War. “No Viet Cong ever called me a [n-word],” Ali reportedly said at the time.
Russell being at the forefront of the civil rights movement rattled racist cages throughout the country, including many of those in Boston. One summer when he was on vacation, burglars broke into Russell’s Boston-area home, destroyed his trophies, vandalized his walls by scrawling the n-word on them and even disgustingly defecated on his bed. That incident drove a lifelong wedge between Russell and the city where he won so many championships.
Russell refused to sugarcoat any of the racism he experienced when his searing, groundbreaking autobiography Go Up For Glory was first published in 1966. Unlike the feel-good sports books of the day, Russell’s story was an unfiltered look at the racist incidents he endured throughout his life and playing career in Boston.
That book inspired Joe Lapchick, the former New York Knicks coach, to also start speaking out against the racism he faced when he integrated the Knicks by signing the team’s first Black player — Nathaniel “Sweetwater” Clifton. It also helped inspire Joe Lapchick’s son, Richard, to dedicate his career to making sports more inclusive and diverse.
“If any other member of the Celtics like Sam Jones or K.C. Jones had written that book, they would have been cut from the league,” Richard Lapchick says, “but Bill Russell was simply too great a player for that to happen to. Bill Russell showed everyone that you could be an unbelievably talented player and champion but still speak out on social justice issues that are important to the country.”
This is why Bill Russell isn’t just the NBA’S G.O.A.T.; he is the NBA’s lion.
While there are certainly other great players such as Michael Jordan who belong on the league’s Mount Rushmore, there’s only one player — William Felton Russell — who stands alone on the league’s Mount Everest.
