Brave Bill Russell broke records as his team’s fans jeered from the stands

Bill Russell stood at 208cm, but it was his endless fight for human rights – he mistrusted the term civil rights – that made him a giant of our times.

Barack Obama awards the Medal of Freedom to NBA basketball hall of famer and civil rights advocate Bill Russell in 2011. Picture: AFP

OBITUARY

William Felton Russell Sportsman. Born Louisiana, February 12, 1934. Died Mercer Island, Washington, July 31, aged 88.

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The inscription on heavyweight boxer Sonny Liston’s headstone states simply “A man”. A complex character, Liston was also a world champion, an almost illiterate crook, violent extortionist and serial adulterer who probably overdosed on heroin.

Legendary American basketballer Bill Russell stated in 1966 that he wanted his tombstone to be engraved with similarly plain words: “He was a man”. The words of a longer epitaph should start with: “What a man”.

Taken as one, Russell’s sports, management and broadcast achievements are incontestable – he’s perhaps the world’s most decorated team sportsman – but his frontline fight for the rightful place of blacks in American society was unmatched in an era when racism’s cruel routines kept men and women such as him in “their place”. He dared his country to tap the potential of its soul.

It wasn’t popular, but Russell saw America as “our place”, especially on the court where he was so dominant and inventive he up-ended the playing field and rules were changed to level it.

Basketball wasn’t in the plans. He preferred track and field, particularly high jump.

Sport came after a confronting childhood of poverty. Russell’s parents, like many poor families, moved to California during the war years for mostly menial work in its great urban centres – Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco. They settled in Oakland, living in public housing as Russell’s father worked as a cleaner and drove trucks, but when his wife died he found a job at a steelworks so to be closer to the family. Bill was 12. His father became his hero.

A teenage growth spurt saw Russell pass 208cm with huge hands and a wing span of 2.24m. His potential was obvious, his determination concealed until he was recruited to the University of San Francisco on the strength of his dimensions and instinct for a game he could barely play.

His skills developed quickly and he devised tactics not then seen: until Russell, players in his position were languid hulks, but he strode into the game intercepting shots and firing back; he would tap balls from the rim of the net (a rule would outlaw this); he would score down-court from rebounds (the Russell Rule widened the free-throw lane to limit this). He kept one opposition team scoreless to halftime as San Francisco University won all but one game in 1955, and all 29 games the following year.

He had signed to Boston Celtics – but had not yet played for them – when he arrived in Melbourne to captain the 1956 US Olympic gold-medal basketball team. Jackbooted Olympics boss Avery Brundage, who had tried to stop Jesse Owens going to the Berlin Games at which Owens humiliated Hitler’s white suprematism, claiming Owens was professional (he wasn’t), stepped in to stop Russell on the same basis. But Boston hadn’t yet paid Russell. In any case, had he been banned from basketball he’d have walked over to the MCG for the high jump – he’d leapt as high as that year’s gold medallist, Charlie Dumas.

It was at Boston Celtics – Russell its sole non-white player – where he created records unlikely to be bettered: the team won the NBA championship, equivalent to the AFL premiership, in Russell’s first year. It won 11 championships in 13 years with the generous Russell creating the plays and defending the net – the ultimate team man and five times the NBA’s Most Valuable Player. He was player-coach in the last two wins, the first black NBA head coach. Sports writers voted him the best ever player as he transformed the game on and off the court.

Throughout it all, bigotry was his fiercest opponent. He wrote two years ago: “During games people yelled hateful, indecent things: ‘Go back to Africa’, ‘Baboon’, ‘Coon’, ‘Nigger’.” Even Boston fans. He bought a house north of the city. Police cars would follow him. When playing away his home was trashed, his trophies broken and racial abuse daubed on the walls with excrement. He tried to buy another house and the local community raised a petition to stop the sale. He moved in anyway.

Russell took part in the 1963 March on Washington and heard Martin Luther King utter “I have a dream”. Russell had one too. He supported Muhammad Ali’s decision to refuse national service.

In 2011, Barack Obama placed the Presidential Medal of Freedom around his neck for a lifetime’s activism.

When he bought a Liberian rubber plantation a reporter asked if Russell planned to live there and reject America: “Yeah. Maybe I will. I’ll get away from you, anyway.” Only his first four words were published.