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    Paul Silas, NBA Defensive Star and Head Coach, Dies at 79

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    Known for his rebounding, he spent 16 seasons as a player, most notably with the Celtics. He was also LeBron James’s first coach as a pro.Paul Silas, a rebounding and defensive pillar on three N.B.A. championship teams, who went on to a coaching career that included presiding over LeBron James’s professional debut with the Cleveland Cavaliers, died on Saturday at his home in Denver, N.C., outside Charlotte. He was 79.The cause was cardiac arrest, his daughter Paula Silas-Guy said.Silas was known for his tactical approach to rebounding, especially on offense. A robust 6-foot-7-inch forward, he studied the arc and spin of his teammates’ shots to compensate for his lack of vertical skills.“I used to tell him that you couldn’t slip a sheet of paper under his feet but he was still an incredible rebounder,” Lenny Wilkens, a teammate with the St. Louis Hawks when Silas entered the N.B.A. in 1964, said in an interview for this obituary earlier this year. “Once he was in position, you just couldn’t move him.”Silas played for five N.B.A. franchises, the last of which was the Seattle SuperSonics, where he was reunited with Wilkens, who coached the team, and became a valuable role player during a 1978-79 championship season.Silas shoots against the Houston Rockets in 1975. He enjoyed his most prominent role playing for the Celtics, where he formed a rugged frontcourt tandem with Dave Cowens.Dick Raphael/NBAE, via Getty ImagesBut it was with the Boston Celtics, after five years with the Hawks and three in Phoenix, that Silas enjoyed the most prominent of his 16 playing seasons. Acquired in 1972 from the Suns by the Celtics’ patriarch Red Auerbach in a trade for the negotiating rights to Charlie Scott, Silas formed a rugged frontcourt tandem with Dave Cowens, a 6-foot-9 center.Auerbach pursued Silas after he had his best overall statistical season, averaging 17.5 points and 11.9 rebounds. “The main reason that Red wanted Silas was to deal with Dave DeBusschere, who had been wearing them out,” said Bob Ryan, who covered the Celtics for The Boston Globe, referring to the rival Knicks’ star forward.Cowens and Silas quickly cultivated an on-court chemistry, with Cowens’s ability to shoot from the perimeter leaving the interior open for Silas to outmuscle opponents around the basket, where he also had a deft tiptoe push shot.“Me and Dave began to just wear teams out,” Silas told the sports digital publication Grantland in 2014. “I mean wear them out.”Coached by Tom Heinsohn, the Celtics occasionally deployed Silas as a starter and in the role made famous by his teammate John Havlicek, as the first sub off the bench, or sixth man.In the 1974 playoffs, they avenged a 1973 defeat to the Knicks in the Eastern Conference finals, then outlasted the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar-led Milwaukee Bucks in the league finals, winning the last game on the road.With a core of Cowens, Havlicek, Jo Jo White, Silas and Scott, whose rights were reacquired by Auerbach in 1975, the Celtics also won the 1976 title, defeating Phoenix in six games.Auerbach then made what The Globe’s Ryan called “his greatest blunder,” trading Silas to the Denver Nuggets after a salary dispute. Aligned with Larry Fleisher, the sport’s most powerful agent and executive director of the N.B.A. Players’ Association, Silas insisted on being paid like the Celtics’ stars — especially the team’s white stars.With Fleisher’s help and some locker room sleuthing, Silas found N.B.A. team salary lists and discovered that Black players tended to be paid less than white players of similar, and sometimes inferior, ability.In negotiations, Auerbach would tell players, “I’m giving you this, don’t you tell anyone else,” according to Don Chaney, another Black Celtic who left the team in 1975 for more money in the rival American Basketball Association.“No one ever talked until Silas arrived,” Chaney said in 1991. “He started going around asking guys, ‘What are you making?’”Silas’s departure triggered a late 1970s Celtics decline and upset Cowens enough to prompt him to take a two-month sabbatical at the start of the 1976-77 season.“We’d just won a championship in ’76, so it’s like, why screw around with a good thing?” Cowens said in the 2014 Grantland article. “I was a little bit upset at everybody. I was upset at Paul, and I was upset at the Celtics for allowing that to happen.”Silas in 1977 playing with the Denver Nuggets.Focus on Sport/Getty ImagesSilas admitted to some regret about leaving the Celtics when his playing time in Denver diminished. He welcomed the reunion with Wilkens, the star guard who in St. Louis had encouraged the young Silas to shed 30 pounds, to an eventual playing weight of 220.“I would make him play me one-on-one,” Wilkens said. “Paul liked to eat, and I’d tell him, ‘You’ll never be able to guard me unless you get on that diet,’ which he did.”Paul Theron Silas was born on July 12, 1943, in Prescott, Ark., and at age 8 moved to Oakland, Calif., with his parents, Leon and Clara, and two brothers. His father worked as a railroad porter. In Oakland, the family initially shared a home with Silas’s cousins, three of whom grew up to form the rhythm & blues group the Pointer Sisters.Silas sang with his cousins in the school choir but spent most of his free time at West Oakland’s DeFremery Park, watching and idolizing Bill Russell, the future Celtics great, dominate the competition. At McClymonds High School, where Russell had played nearly a decade earlier, Silas led the varsity to a 68-0 record over three seasons, earning a scholarship to Creighton University. His brother, William, accompanied him to Omaha, Neb., but died of cardiac arrest while Silas was in school.As a junior, Silas led the nation in rebounding, averaging 20.6 per game. He was the 12th pick, or third of the second round, by St. Louis in the 1964 N.B.A. draft.After Silas’s N.B.A. playing career — during which he averaged 9.4 points and 9.9 rebounds a game, played in two All-Star games and was twice voted first-team All-Defense — he had a long run as an assistant and head coach.Having come of age during the N.B.A.’s rough-and-tumble foundational era made him a logical choice in 2003 to mentor the 19-year-old LeBron James in Cleveland as James, from nearby Akron, Ohio, made the leap from high school prodigy to the pros.In the carnival atmosphere that greeted James, Silas became a tough-love enforcer, barring James’s vast entourage from practices and notifying official sellers of Cavs merchandise that people other than the rookie phenom played for the team.“Once LeBron sets foot out here, he’s got to come with it like everybody else,” Silas told The New York Times in 2003.In 2005, when the Cavaliers lost nine of 12 games, Silas was fired, even though he and James had seemed to form a strong bond, The Times reported.“I loved Paul Silas a lot — he gave me a chance to showcase my talent early,” James told The Times. “Coach was always upbeat, even after a loss.”Silas in 1999 while coaching the Charlotte Hornets to a 49-33 record.Sporting News, via Getty ImagesThe best of Silas’s 12 head-coaching seasons was in 1999-2000 in Charlotte, where Silas directed the Hornets to a 49-33 record. The season was marred by the death of Bobby Phills, one of the team’s best players, in a car crash that involved a teammate, David Wesley. Both were reportedly speeding in their Porsches near the team’s arena.“The guys look at me as a father figure,” Silas, then 56, said as the Hornets mourned Phills while moving forward with their season, which ended with a first-round playoff defeat.Silas, who in interviews expressed regret over not having a close relationship with his father, helped launch his son Stephen’s coaching career, adding him to his Charlotte staff in 2000. Stephen Silas became head coach of the Houston Rockets in 2020.In addition to Stephen and Paula, Silas is survived by his wife, Carolyn (Kemp) Silas, whom he married in 1966; a stepdaughter, Donna Turner, from Ms. Silas’s first marriage;three grandchildren; and two stepgrandchildren.Silas embraced the reputation that had earned him his job mentoring James: that he was a resilient, cool-tempered paternalistic figure.“You can’t play this game mad — your own game just falls apart,” Silas told The Globe’s sports columnist Leigh Montville in 1972. “I play fierce but I never play mad. There’s a difference.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      Bill Russell’s Words Were Worth the Wait

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      In wit and wisdom, Russell left an impression with his gravelly voice. “It wasn’t like he tried to impress you with big words,” said one recipient of his advice.Rare was the working person around N.B.A. arenas these past few decades who never had an encounter with the majestic Bill Russell. On occasion, mostly a special one, he was an intimidating presence walking tall and transcendent, in the manner of a man who had invented the game.In the dynastic measure by which we often relate to basketball, from Boston to Los Angeles to Chicago to Golden State, he actually did.Russell’s death at 88 on Sunday predictably evoked relished memories of meeting the most prolific instigator of championships in the history of American team sports. It is an indisputable fact that time with Russell was not generously dispensed. When it was, only the most hardheaded among us wasn’t better for it.I was a terrified young reporter for The New York Post in the late 1970s when my editor ordered me to “get Russell” for an assigned story. I found him in the media dining area at the old Spectrum arena in Philadelphia on a Sunday afternoon before a game he was working as network analyst.Bill Russell, left, with Brent Musburger during a CBS Sports broadcast in 1980.CBS, via Getty ImagesAs I hopelessly stammered through my introduction, Russell looked up from a plate of food and said nothing. Seconds felt like hours until Billy Cunningham, the 76ers coach, leaned over and came to my rescue. “He’s from Vecsey’s paper,” Cunningham told Russell, referring to Peter Vecsey, the widely known N.B.A. columnist.This apparently was a useful reference in what was a far more insular N.B.A. environment. Russell nodded and said, “Wait outside for me.” So I parked myself in the first row of seats behind the broadcast table. Ten minutes became 20, then 30, then 60 after Russell took a seat, donned his headset for microphone checks and shuffled through voluminous game notes and stats.I was literally sweating, and figuratively steaming. Finally, Russell summoned me, shook my hand and said, “Thank you for waiting and respecting my work.”Lesson learned: Patience may be the most well-cited virtue, but in the interests of professional achievement, so is preparation.Fast forward to a September 2007 afternoon in a Westchester County suburb of New York, where Russell was speaking to assembled N.B.A. rookies at the league’s transition program. I listened with fascination as Joakim Noah, a player of French, Swedish and Cameroonian descent, asked Russell if he felt underappreciated in racially polarized Boston despite winning 11 titles in 13 seasons, from 1957 through 1969.“Quite true,” Russell responded in his gravelly voiced, meditative manner. But he elaborated by relaying advice his father had given him as a youth about people who have “these little red wagons that get pulled around and that it’s got nothing to do with me” — meaning that he should not worry about how other people felt about him.Afterward, I asked Russell how that answer squared with his outspokenness and activism on matters of race and social justice, including his participation in the so-called 1967 Cleveland summit of prominent Black athletes in support of Muhammad Ali following his refusal to be drafted into the U.S. Army.He reminded me that he had been invited to address the rookie class at large, and that some of the newcomers were not African American. Some were not even American. Russell’s message had been tailored to universal temptation.“I tell all the kids — rich, poor, Black, white — that you must be your own counsel,” he told me. “We understand that we don’t always want to do the right thing, but what they have to ask themselves is, ‘Am I willing to deal with the consequences?’”Russell, right, with Joakim Noah during an N.B.A. event for rookies in September 2007. Suzy Allman for The New York TimesSuch contextual awareness sounded familiar to Len Elmore, the former pro center whom I have known since he finished his playing career with the Nets and Knicks before attending Harvard Law School. At Harvard, Elmore happened to befriend Russell’s daughter, Karen. (In 1987, Karen Russell wrote in The New York Times about the frightening, haunting harassment her father and family were subjected to in the Boston area.)“I had met him a few times in passing and I have a couple videos of my games he was calling, where he described me as ‘well traveled,’” Elmore said with a chuckle when I called him upon hearing of Russell’s passing. “He obviously had a big impact on me, as a center, always talking about blocking the shot but keeping it inbounds, things like that. And of course, off the court, too, with his activism during the civil rights era.”But it was in law school that Elmore said he actually got to talk to Russell about athlete activism, a subject Elmore has in recent years been teaching at Columbia University.“It wasn’t like he tried to impress you with big words,” Elmore said. “But what always came across was his wisdom, his ability to conceptualize, to prioritize, to understand time and place. I remember him telling me that by going to law school, I could be part of a generation that could build off what his generation had started, and effect change in a very different way.”For all the racism Russell and his Black teammates endured in Boston, and the disparities in how white and Black Celtics were paid and in some cases treated by an organization fronted by Red Auerbach, Russell was careful never to implicate the Celtics’ patriarch. For 10 years, Russell starred under Auerbach, who then made him the league’s first Black coach upon stepping away from the bench in 1966.Which leads me to my last Russell engagement, in May 2009, in a Manhattan hotel lounge while he was promoting a book, “Red and Me: My Coach, My Lifelong Friend,” published three years after Auerbach’s death.In the book, Russell wrote that he and Auerbach had seldom socialized or delved into personal or social issues. They were instead bound by basketball, by team, which also was, in effect, family. The patriarch was stubborn, set in his ways, Russell said. Russell’s own willful ways, shaped by a place in Boston and in America which Auerbach could never fully understand, formed the basis of their mutual respect.“We were so alike that way,” said Russell, who often made the point that he played for the Celtics, not Boston. But the team’s success always came first.That day in Manhattan, Russell shared some final coaching he’d gotten during his last visit with Auerbach, just as he took his leave. “Listen, Russ, this is something important,” Auerbach told him. “When you get old, don’t fall. Because that’s the start of the end. So remember: Don’t fall!”Russell, already 75, obviously knew that frailty would eventually visit him, too. Near the end of our interview, he admitted that he’d written the book because, “I also have to be mindful of my own mortality.”Those words barely spoken, he cut loose one of his trademark boisterous cackles.Athletic greatness fades. Team dynasties fold. But Bill Russell’s presence, deep into old age, didn’t so much as flicker. While the contemporary best-ever debate is laser focused on Air Jordan versus King James, Russell’s contextualization of the argument only required flashing the ring he wore that 2007 day at the rookie transition program — a gift from the N.B.A. commissioner at the time, David Stern, commemorating all 11 of Russell’s titles.That remains the truest measure of superstar affirmation within a team sport. It’s also the one all but guaranteed never to fall. More

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      Bill Russell, Celtics Center Who Transformed Pro Basketball, Dies at 88

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      A Hall of Famer who led the Celtics to 11 championships, he was “the single most devastating force in the history of the game,” his coach Red Auerbach said.Even before the opening tipoff at Boston Celtics games, Bill Russell evoked domination. Other players ran onto the court for their introductions, but he walked on, slightly stooped.“I’d look at everybody disdainfully, like a sleepy dragon who can’t be bothered to scare off another would-be hero,” he recalled. “I wanted my look to say, ‘Hey, the king’s here tonight.’ ”Russell’s awesome rebounding triggered a Celtic fast break that overwhelmed the rest of the N.B.A. His quickness and his uncanny ability to block shots transformed the center position, once a spot for slow and hulking types, and changed the face of pro basketball. Russell, who propelled the Celtics to 11 N.B.A. championships, the final two when he became the first Black head coach in a major American sports league, died on Sunday. He was 88.His death was announced by his family, who did not say where he died. When Russell was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1975, Red Auerbach, who orchestrated his arrival as a Celtic and coached him on nine championship teams, called him “the single most devastating force in the history of the game.”Russell blocking a shot in 1964 in a game against the Philadelphia 76ers in Boston. His quickness and uncanny ability to block shots transformed the center position.Dick Raphael / Getty ImagesHe was not alone in that view: In a 1980 poll of basketball writers (long before Michael Jordan and LeBron James entered the scene), Russell was voted nothing less than the greatest player in N.B.A. history.Former Senator Bill Bradley, who faced Russell with the Knicks in the 1960s, viewed him as “the smartest player ever to play the game and the epitome of a team leader.”“At his core, Russell knew that he was different from other players — that he was an innovator and that his very identity depended on dominating the game,” Bradley wrote in reviewing Russell’s remembrances of Auerbach in “Red and Me: My Coach, My Lifelong Friend” (2009) for The New York Times.In the decades that followed Russell’s retirement in 1969, when flashy moves delighted fans and team play was often an afterthought, his stature was burnished even more, remembered for his ability to enhance the talents of his teammates even as he dominated the action, and to do it without bravado: He disdained dunking or gesturing to celebrate his feats.In those later years, his signature goatee now turned white, Russell reappeared on the court at springtime, presenting the most valuable player of the N.B.A. championship series with the trophy named for him in 2009.Russell was remembered as well for his visibility on civil rights issues.Russell received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, in 2011. President Barack Obama honored him as “someone who stood up for the rights and dignity of all men.”Doug Mills/The New York TimesHe took part in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and was seated in the front row of the crowd to hear the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech. He went to Mississippi after the civil rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered and worked with Evers’s brother, Charles, to open an integrated basketball camp in Jackson. He was among a group of prominent Black athletes who supported Muhammad Ali when Ali refused induction into the armed forces during the Vietnam War.President Barack Obama awarded Russell the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, at the White House in 2011, honoring him as “someone who stood up for the rights and dignity of all men.”In September 2017, following President Donald J. Trump’s calling for N.F.L. owners to fire players who were taking a knee during the national anthem to protest racial injustice, Russell posted a photo on Twitter in which he posed taking a knee while holding the medal.“What I wanted was to let those guys know I support them,” he told ESPN.A Much-Decorated ManRussell was the ultimate winner. He led the University of San Francisco to N.C.A.A. tournament championships in 1955 and 1956. He won a gold medal with the United States Olympic basketball team in 1956. He led the Celtics to eight consecutive N.B.A. titles from 1959 to 1966, far eclipsing the Yankees’ five straight World Series victories (1949 to 1953) and the Montreal Canadiens’ five consecutive Stanley Cup championships (1956 to 1960).He was the N.B.A.’s most valuable player five times and an All-Star 12 times.A reedy, towering figure at 6 feet 10 inches and 220 pounds, Russell was cagey under the basket, able to anticipate an opponent’s shots and gain position for a rebound. And if the ball caromed off the hoop, his tremendous leaping ability almost guaranteed that he’d grab it. He finished his career as the No. 2 rebounder in N.B.A. history, behind his longtime rival Wilt Chamberlain, who had three inches on him.Russell looks at the camera during a time-out in the waning moments of a playoff game with the 76ers.Bettmann via Getty ImagesRussell pulled down 21,620 rebounds, an astonishing average of 22.5 per game, with a single-game high of 51 against the Syracuse Nationals (the forerunners of the Philadelphia 76ers) in 1960.He didn’t have much of a shooting touch, but he scored 14,522 points — many on high-percentage, short left-handed hook shots — for an average of 15.1 per game. His blocked shots — the total is unrecorded, because such records were not kept in his era — altered games.Beyond the court, Russell could appear aloof. He was bruised by the humiliations his family had faced when he was young in segregated Louisiana, and by widespread racism in Boston. When he joined the Celtics in 1956, he was their only Black player. Early in the 1960s, his home in Reading, Mass., was vandalized.Russell’s primary allegiance was always to his teammates, not to the city of Boston or to the fans. Guarding his privacy and shunning displays of adulation, he refused to sign autographs for fans or even as keepsakes for his teammates. When the Celtics retired his No. 6 in March 1972, the event, at his insistence, was a private ceremony in Boston Garden. He ignored his election to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame — situated squarely in Celtics country, in Springfield, Mass. — and refused to attend the induction.“In each case, my intention was to separate myself from the star’s idea about fans, and fans’ ideas about stars,” Russell said in “Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man (1979),” written with Taylor Branch. “I have very little faith in cheers, what they mean and how long they will last, compared with the faith I have in my own love for the game.”Racial Scars, a Mother LostWilliam Felton Russell was born on Feb. 12, 1934, in Monroe, La., where his father, Charles, worked in a paper bag factory. He remembered a warm home life but a childhood seared by racism. He recalled that a police officer once threatened to arrest his mother, Katie, because she was wearing a stylish outfit like those favored by white women. A gas-station attendant sought to humble his father, while Bill was with him, by refusing to provide service, an episode that ended with Charles Russell chasing the man while brandishing a tire iron.When Bill was 9 years old, the family moved to Oakland, Calif. His mother died when he was 12, leaving his father, who had opened a trucking business and then worked in a foundry, to bring up Bill and his brother, Charles Jr., teaching them, as Russell long remembered, to work hard and covet self-worth and self-reliance.At McClymonds High School in Oakland, Russell became a starter on the basketball team as a senior, already emphasizing defense and rebounding. A former basketball player for the University of San Francisco, Hal DeJulio, who scouted for his alma mater, recognized Russell’s potential and recommended him to the coach, Phil Woolpert.Russell was given a scholarship and became an All-American, teaming up with the guard K.C. Jones, a future Celtic teammate, in leading San Francisco to N.C.A.A. championships in his last two seasons. Following a loss to U.C.L.A. in Russell’s junior year, the team won 55 straight games. He averaged more than 20 points and 20 rebounds a game for his three varsity seasons.“No one had ever played basketball the way I played it, or as well,” Russell told Sport magazine in 1963, recalling his college career. “They had never seen anyone block shots before. Now I’ll be conceited: I like to think I originated a whole new style of play.”In the mid-1950s, the Celtics had a highly talented team featuring Bob Cousy, the league’s greatest small man, and the sharpshooting Bill Sharman at guard and Ed Macauley, a fine shooter, up front. But lacking a dominant center, they had never won a championship.Fans carry Russell, right, Tommy Heinsohn, left, and Auerbach off the court at Boston Garden in 1964 after the Celtics won their sixth consecutive N.B.A. championship, defeating the Warriors.Bettmann / Getty ImagesThe Rochester Royals owned the No. 1 selection in the 1956 N.B.A. draft, but they already had an outstanding big man, Maurice Stokes, and were unwilling to wage what their owner, Les Harrison, believed would be a bidding war for Russell with the Harlem Globetrotters, who were reportedly willing to offer him a lucrative deal. So the Royals drafted Sihugo Green, a guard from Duquesne.The St. Louis Hawks had the No. 2 draft pick, but they, too, did not think they could afford Russell. Auerbach persuaded them to trade that selection to the Celtics for Macauley, a St. Louis native, and Cliff Hagan, a promising rookie. That enabled Boston to take Russell.Russell did meet with the Globetrotters that spring but, as he stated in a January 1958 collaboration with Al Hirshberg for The Saturday Evening Post, he did not seriously consider signing with them. He found the prospect of yearlong worldwide travel unappealing and wrote how “their specialty is clowning and I had no intention of being billed as a funny guy in a basketball uniform.”Russell led the United States Olympic team to a gold medal in the 1956 Melbourne Games, then joined the Celtics in December. Playing in 48 games as a rookie, he averaged 19.6 rebounds.That Celtic team — with Russell, Cousy, Sharman, the high-scoring rookie Tom Heinsohn, the bruising Jim Loscutoff and Frank Ramsey — won the franchise’s first N.B.A. title, defeating the Hawks in the finals.Enter ChamberlainRussell captured his first M.V.P. award in his second season, but this time the Hawks beat the Celtics for the championship, pulling away after Russell injured an ankle in Game 3 of the finals. The next year, the Celtics won the title again, beginning their run of eight straight championships.In Russell’s fourth season, 1959-60, the 7-foot-1, 275-pound Chamberlain entered the N.B.A. with the Philadelphia Warriors. Chamberlain led the league in scoring as a rookie with 37.6 points per game and eclipsed Russell in rebounding, averaging 27 per game to Russell’s 24, but the Celtics were champions once more.Russell was agile, Chamberlain the epitome of strength and power. Russell was usually outscored and out-rebounded by Chamberlain in their matchups, but the Celtics won most of those games.“If I had played for the Celtics instead of Russell, I doubt they would have been as great,” Chamberlain was quoted as saying in 1996 when the N.B.A.’s 50 greatest players were selected to mark the league’s 50th season, though not ranked in any particular order.As Chamberlain put it, “Bill Russell and the Celtics were the perfect fit.”Russell, friendly with Chamberlain off the court, was complimentary in turn. “I know they talk about me winning more championships, but I don’t know how that can be held against Wilt,” he said. “We beat everybody. It wasn’t just Wilt.”The Russell-Chamberlain rivalry was fierce. “Russell intimidated him,” Cousy recalled in “Cousy on the Celtic Mystique” (1988), written with Bob Ryan. “Wilt can say what he wants, but I used to watch Wilt muscle in against everyone else, but not against Russell.”Russell’s tactic was to play close to Chamberlain, forcing him to lean away from the basket, change the angle of his fadeaway jump shots and release them farther from the basket than he liked.Russell bested Chamberlain in another way: In his prime, as he told it, his annual salary was $100,001, $1 more than Chamberlain was making.Russell was an intense competitor, and though he contended that he was not nervous in the moments before games, he engaged in an often remarked upon ritual in the locker room.“I threw up, but I was never sick,” he told The Boston Globe in 2009. “It was a way for my body to get rid of all excesses.”As described by the Celtics’ forward John Havlicek, it was “a tremendous sound, almost as loud as his laugh.”“He doesn’t do it much now, except when it’s an important game or an important challenge for him — someone like Chamberlain, or someone coming up that everyone’s touting,” Havlicek told Sports Illustrated in December 1968. “It’s a welcome sound, too, because it means he’s keyed up for the game, and around the locker room we grin and say, ‘Man, we’re going to be all right tonight.’” In his last two seasons with the Celtics, with Russell as player-coach, the team won the N.B.A. championship.Dan Goshtigian/The Boston Globe via Getty Images“Russell made shot-blocking an art,” Auerbach recalled in “Red Auerbach: An Autobiography” (1977), written with Joe Fitzgerald. “He would pop the ball straight up and grab it like a rebound, or else redirect it right into the hands of one of his teammates, and we’d be off and running on the fast break. You never saw Russell bat a ball into the third balcony the way those other guys did.”Russell was not the first Black head coach in professional sports, but he had the greatest impact as the first to be chosen, in 1966, to lead a team in one of America’s major sports leagues. Fritz Pollard, a star running back, had coached in the National Football League, but that was in the 1920s, when it was a fledgling operation. John McLendon coached the Cleveland Pipers of the American Basketball League in 1961-62, but the A.B.A. was a secondary attraction.The Celtics’ streak of eight consecutive titles was snapped in Russell’s first year as coach, but it took one of the N.B.A.’s greatest teams to do it. The 1966-67 Celtics had a 60-21 regular-season record, but they lost in the Eastern Conference playoff finals to the Philadelphia 76ers, who had gone 68-13 with a lineup that included Chamberlain, Luke Jackson, Chet Walker, Hal Greer and Billy Cunningham.A Changed View of BostonAs the Celtic players from Russell’s rookie year retired, Auerbach found superb replacements, most notably Havlicek at forward and, at guard, Sam Jones and K.C. Jones, Russell’s old college teammate.The Celtics won N.B.A. titles in Russell’s last two seasons, when he was their player-coach. He capped his career with a triumph in the 1969 N.B.A. finals over a Laker team that had obtained Chamberlain and also featured Jerry West and Elgin Baylor.Russell could not easily shake his memories of Boston during his playing days, when the fate of the city’s de facto segregated schools became a national story.“To me, Boston itself was a flea market of racism,” Russell wrote in “Second Wind.” “It had all varieties, old and new, and in their most virulent form. 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 (long before they appeared in New York).”But as time passed the city changed, and so did his perception of it.Russell helped promote Boston with a radio spot in the weeks leading up to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, which was held there. “I think there are a lot of things that are happening to make it an open city, where everybody’s included and there’s nobody that’s deemed unworthy,” he said.Boston honored Russell in 2013 with a bronze statue in City Hall Plaza.In his late years, Cousy became remorseful over his failure to speak out against the racism Russell faced when they were teammates, and in February 2016 he sent him a letter expressing regret.Russell coached the Sacramento Kings in 1987.Icon Sportswire / Getty ImagesAs related by Gary M. Pomerantz in his book “The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics, and What Matters in the End” (2018), Cousy did not hear from Russell until two and a half years had passed. Then Russell phoned him.Cousy asked Russell if he had received the letter.“Russ said he had,” Pomerantz wrote. “Nothing more was said about it. Cooz had hoped their conversation would rise to a more substantive level. Still, he had made his last pass to Russ. He felt at peace.”Russell worked as an ABC Sports commentator for N.B.A. games in the early 1970s, his high-pitched cackling laugh on the air showing viewers a side of him that only his teammates had seen. Then he returned to coaching.He became coach and general manager of the Seattle SuperSonics in 1973, taking over a team that had never been in the playoffs in its six seasons, and led them to a pair of playoff berths in his four seasons there.He became the coach of the Sacramento Kings in 1987, but was removed in March 1988 with the team mired at 17-41; he was named vice president in charge of basketball operations. He was fired from that post in December 1989.Long after his N.B.A. career had ended, Russell made himself more accessible and capitalized on commercial opportunities.In 2009, the M.V.P. award for the N.B.A. finals was renamed the Bill Russell N.B.A. Finals Most Valuable Player Award. Russell attended the news conference where the name change was announced.Matt York/Associated PressIn 1999, he agreed to a public ceremony at the Fleet Center — the successor to Boston Garden — for the 30th anniversary of his last championship team and his retirement as a player as well the second retirement of his number. The event was also a fund-raiser for the National Mentoring Partnership, whose programs he had helped develop as a board member. “There are no other people’s kids in this country,” he told the crowd. “They’re the children of the nation, and I refuse to be at war with them. I’ll always do anything I can to make life better for a kid.”He made commercials, signed autographs for serious collectors (for a fee) and delivered motivational speeches.Russell married for the fourth time, to Jeannine Fiorito, in 2016. His first marriage, to Rose Swisher, ended in divorce, as did his second marriage, to Dorothy Anstett. His third wife, Marilyn Nault, died in 2009 at 59. Russell had three children from his first marriage — William Jr., Jacob and Karen Kenyatta Russell. William Jr., known as Buddha, died in 2016 at 58. Russell’s brother, a playwright and screenwriter under the name Charlie L. Russell, died in 2013 at 81. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available. Russell was uncompromising when it came to his principles. “There are two societies in this country, and I have to recognize it, to see life for what it is and not go stark, raving mad,” he told Sport magazine in 1963, referring to the racial divide. “I don’t work for acceptance. I am what I am. If you like it, that’s nice. If not, I couldn’t care less.”He was also an immensely proud man.“If you can take something to levels that very few other people can reach,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1999, “then what you’re doing becomes art.” More

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      Bill Russell Paved the Way for Black Coaches to Defy Doubters

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      When getting hired as a Black coach seemed “far-fetched,” as one coach said, Russell showed that it could be done — and that it could lead to championships.Bill Russell and Red Auerbach came to an agreement.Auerbach, the longtime Boston Celtics coach, had confided in Russell that he planned to retire from coaching. Russell and Auerbach had created a dynasty together, with Russell dominating at center and Auerbach cementing their championship victories with plumes of celebratory cigar smoke.They would each write down their top-five preferred coaches to succeed Auerbach and consider any name who landed on both lists.They found no matches. Auerbach had already approached Russell about taking over the job and continuing on as a player, but Russell, who had witnessed the toll coaching took on Auerbach, quickly rebuffed him.Now, after the lists crisscrossed candidates, Russell reconsidered his position and figured nobody else, beyond Auerbach, could coach Bill Russell quite like Bill Russell.“When Red and I had started to discuss my becoming coach, there were some things we didn’t have to say,” Russell wrote in his book about his friendship with Auerbach, “Red and Me: My Coach, My Lifelong Friend,” in 2009. “For example, when I was finally named publicly, I didn’t know that I had just become the first African American coach in the history of major league sports.”It was 1966, and the distinction did not cross his mind until Boston news media members informed him. “When I took the job, one reporter wrote seven articles focusing on why I shouldn’t be coaching the Celtics,” Russell wrote.Russell, who died Sunday at 88, would go on to win two championships as the head coach of the Celtics, his 10th and 11th championship rings. He would also coach the Seattle SuperSonics and the Sacramento Kings and inspire a generation of Black players to try their hand at coaching, too. The skepticism that accompanied his hiring in Boston is perhaps less of an issue now, but still a factor in whether Black people are hired to coach in the N.B.A. today. Bernie Bickerstaff, who is Black, watched Russell take over as head coach of the Celtics just as he was about to enter into a life of coaching. He began as an assistant at the University of San Diego under Phil Woolpert, who had coached Russell at the University of San Francisco.Bernie Bickerstaff, who has been the head coach of five N.B.A. teams, said he was inspired by Bill Russell.Photo by Jeff Gross/Getty Images“At that time, you didn’t think about anything like that,” said Bickerstaff, who became the coach of the SuperSonics in 1985. “In fact, if you’re sitting back and you’re a young Black at that time, it seemed far-fetched.”Russell, the coach, mimicked Russell the player. He was a longtime civil rights activist who coached the Celtics during the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. “It rubbed a lot of Bostonians the wrong way,” Russell wrote in his 2009 book. “At the time, Boston was a totally segregated city — and I vehemently opposed segregation.”He demanded respect and competed fiercely during an era when he had no assistant coaches. He played and coached the Celtics for three seasons before closing out the N.B.A.’s most successful and long-lasting championship reign.“That speaks volumes in itself for who he was as a person and a humanitarian, if you understand the culture of this country, especially in certain places,” said Jim Cleamons, who is Black and became the coach of the Dallas Mavericks in 1996.Al Attles and Lenny Wilkens followed Russell as the next Black N.B.A. head coaches. They, like Russell, led teams to championships. It took a while for the rest of the professional sports world to catch up. Frank Robinson, Russell’s former high school basketball teammate, became Major League Baseball’s first Black manager, in Cleveland, in 1975. Art Shell became the N.F.L.’s first Black head coach in the modern era for the Oakland Raiders in 1989.“Bill Russell was an inspiration, period, with coaching,” Bickerstaff said. “But as a human being, during times when it wasn’t popular to be someone of our complexion, he stood up and he represented. He had no fear. He was genuine. He was a success. He was a leader on and off the court.”Russell became the fifth person inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame as a player and a coach when he earned enshrinement as a coach last year.Jim Cleamons was the head coach of the Dallas Mavericks across two seasons in the 1990s. Tim Clayton for The New York TimesBy then, something that seemed far-fetched when Bickerstaff broke into coaching seemed common. Half of the N.B.A.’s 30 coaches will be Black heading into the 2022-23 season, including J.B. Bickerstaff, Bernie’s son and the coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers.But as recently as 2020, only four Black coaches roamed N.B.A. sidelines. “There is a certain natural ebb and flow to the hiring and firing, frankly, of coaches, but the number is too low right now,” N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver said before the 2020 finals.Other sports leagues continued to lag. Nearly two decades after Russell won his first championship as a coach, Al Campanis, a Los Angeles Dodgers executive, expressed doubt about the ability of Black people to hold managerial level positions.“I don’t believe it’s prejudice,” Campanis said in an interview on ABC’s “Nightline” in 1987. “I truly believe that they may not have some of the necessities to be, let’s say, a field manager, or perhaps a general manager.”M.L.B. recently commemorated the 75th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s major league debut, yet only two of its current managers — Houston’s Dusty Baker and the Dodgers’ Dave Roberts — are Black.In the N.F.L., Brian Flores, the former coach of the Miami Dolphins, recently sued the league over discriminatory hiring practices. Flores is the son of Honduran immigrants. The N.F.L. created a diversity advisory committee and mandated that every team hire a minority offensive coach after Flores’s suit.Russell did not talk often about being the first Black coach in a major sports league. But after his hiring, he felt the stress that awaited him as the “the first Negro coach,” as he wrote in his book.The hope of his relationship with Auerbach evolving from a superficial coach-player bond into a deeper friendship comforted him.“So I started looking forward to that,” he wrote.Russell left the Celtics in 1969 but took over the SuperSonics from 1973 until 1977. He guided Seattle to the franchise’s first-ever playoffs, but the success he found in Boston eluded him.Russell coached a final season with the Sacramento Kings in 1987-88 before he was fired and moved into the front office after a 17-41 start.J.B. Bickerstaff, Bernie Bickerstaff’s son, has coached the Cleveland Cavaliers since 2020. He’s one of 15 Black coaches in the N.B.A.Photo by John Fisher/Getty Images“With a lot of truly great players, it was tough for him to understand why regular players did not have the same drive, focus and commitment to winning that he did,” Jerry Reynolds, an assistant for Russell on the Kings, said in an interview Sunday. “There’s just not very many people wired like that. That’s why they’re great. In some ways, it was hard for him to understand that. Most of the guys, they wanted to win. They didn’t have the need to win every game like him.”All along, Russell remained true to who he was while coaching.Bickerstaff recalled Russell offering a set of golf clubs to one of Woolpert’s sons instead of signing an autograph for him — an act that Russell was known to steadfastly refuse throughout his career.Cleamons said that a booster introduced his high school team to Russell shortly after it had won the Ohio state championship. Russell hardly looked up from his soup. He hated to be interrupted from a meal.Cleamons understood the mind-set after reading Russell’s autobiography.Before being thought of as a basketball player, before being looked upon as a coach, Russell wanted to be viewed as a human being.“He was a little bit like Muhammad Ali,” Reynolds said. “He was always who he was. Society and people changed. Things changed to fit more like it should have been all along.” More