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      Looking for More Frances Tiafoes

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      It is impossible to quantify how many young Black girls have signed up for tennis lessons since the late 1990s when Serena and Venus Williams burst onto the scene under the guidance of their father, Richard Williams, or how many parents of athletic Black girls living in America, tried to follow his blueprint and repeat the Williams’s success.The number is surely significant, though — enough that despite significant barriers to entry, two generations of top Black female players, including Sloane Stephens, Taylor Townsend and now Coco Gauff, already a Grand Slam finalist at 18 years old, have emerged.Black American men have not had a Grand Slam champion to look up to since Arthur Ashe in the 1970s, and have had precious few billboard-worthy top Black players to admire. Maybe one day they will have Frances Tiafoe, who is Black and played one of the most compelling matches in U.S. Open history Friday night, coming up just short in the semifinals against Carlos Alcaraz of Spain. Even in the loss, Tiafoe, who is 24 years old, announced himself, last night and all week, as a potentially transformative star.With the riches of far more accessible sports so obvious and ubiquitous, the people trying to make American men’s tennis better and more diverse have had a steep hill to climb to overcome that void that has long existed. Gauff’s younger brother, it’s worth noting, is a teenage baseball prospect.“The little Black kid will always understand which sports star looks like their skin color,” said Alexandra Stevenson, a former pro who grew up playing with the Williams sisters. “It matters.”Tiafoe’s parents are immigrants from Sierra Leone.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesTiafoe has long had a sort of magnetic appeal, especially among people of color. At the 2020 U.S. Open, when no spectators were on the grounds, he played a second-round match against John Millman of Australia on Court 11 that turned into a five-set marathon.As Tiafoe began to climb out of a two-sets-to-one deficit, perhaps 100 maintenance, food and security workers getting off their shifts at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, where people of color account for much of the staff, began to fill the empty stands. By the time Tiafoe finished off his comeback win, it was loud on Court 11, louder than any match during that eerily quiet Grand Slam.Tiafoe’s origin story is fast becoming one of the great legends of tennis.An impoverished son of immigrant parents from Sierra Leone discovers tennis and thrives because his father does maintenance at a local tennis center, putting him on the runway to the top of the sport. The story is perfectly positioned to serve as an inspiration to a generation of young Black boys. For the people who make a living searching for someone like Tiafoe, the story is both inspiring and terrifying.They know how easily it could have gone another way, as it has for so many gifted young athletes, many of them Black, many of them poor, who never held a tennis racket until it was too late, if at all. Their physical gifts and dedication had turned them into teenage sensations in basketball or football, or any of the other lucrative athletic pursuits where they have long seen people who look like them at the pinnacle of the sport.Michelle Obama, center, the former first lady of the United States, attended Tiafoe’s semifinals match on Friday.Matthew Stockman/Getty ImagesBobblehead dolls of Tiafoe were set out for a U.S. Open watch party in College Park, Md.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesIf Tiafoe’s father had worked in an office park instead of a tennis center, would the boy with all that speed and strength instead be suiting up for his N.F.L. team’s opening game Sunday? Would he be using his hands that maneuver a 10-ounce piece of carbon fiber just so to make a fuzzy yellow ball behave exactly how he wants it to?“Finding that kid who has the athleticism and is a great competitor, and also has the sound foundation you need to have the opportunity to be able to grow, it isn’t easy to get them,” said Kent Kinnear, the director of men’s tennis at the U.S. Tennis Association.Kinnear and his colleagues at the U.S.T.A. are desperate to reap the rewards of an American man of any background winning a Grand Slam singles title for the first time since Andy Roddick won the U.S. Open in 2003. Private tennis coaches look across the parks where they work each day and see the ones that got away.“John McEnroe always said, ‘Can you imagine if Michael Jordan had played tennis?’,” said Bill Adams, who runs the Bill Adams Global Tennis Academy in Miramar, Fla., and worked with a young Naomi Osaka, who is Haitian and Japanese and identifies as a Black woman, a dozen years ago. “He was right.”Sports like tennis and golf are often less accessible to Black children because of the high costs of training and equipment, and because the facilities to practice often aren’t available in the communities where Black children are most likely to live. Black families typically have less wealth than white families because of a history of racist policies related to assets like housing.The U.S.T.A. has tried to set up a system that gives tennis a better chance to attract better athletes and more of them, especially from communities of color. That requires courts and also programs with equipment and high-quality coaching.“So many of the success stories in our sport are happenstance,” said Louis Bolling, a former college player who is a community outreach manager with the U.S.T.A. “I was able to walk down the street, and someone was there to say here is a racket and T-shirt and a program where you can compete and learn.”In Bolling’s program, the color of the T-shirt signified a player’s level. They got a new color as they moved up. Hundreds of kids across Philadelphia participated, and the best traveled across the city for tournaments. Bolling, who is Black, started playing tennis when he was 10 years old because his local baseball league folded, he said. By 15 he was traveling to Morocco to train and compete.Tennis officials wants children to keep playing other sports to help develop their athleticism, but a singular focus on tennis is often required by the early teens.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesThat is the environment that Asha Rolle is trying to create in the South Bronx at the Cary Leeds Center for Tennis and Learning. Rolle, who is Black, grew up in Miami Shores, Fla., two blocks from a park with a tennis set of basketball courts where her brothers played. They told her about the tennis program behind the basketball courts and suggested she try it. Rolle received daily lessons for $20 a week. She ultimately rose to No. 82 in the world rankings. But she doesn’t just want brothers sending their sisters to her — she wants the boys to feel like they should be there, too.“That kind of program is out there, but it’s spotty,” Rolle said.The U.S.T.A. said it works with 250 nonprofit organizations that provide access to tennis for about 160,000 young players each year. The numbers suggest more children are at least giving the sport a try. The U.S.T.A. recently announced that youth participation — defined as playing the sport at least once a year — rose to 6.9 million in 2021, from 4.6 million in 2019. Participation among Black and Hispanic/Latino players grew to 5.5 million from 3.6 million during that time period.Most top players commit when they are very young. Rolle said a boy would probably have to start playing seriously, with solid coaching, by the time he is 8 years old. The U.S.T.A. wants children to keep playing other sports to help develop their athleticism, but a singular focus on the game is often required by the early teens. But coaching techniques and quality varies.Elliott Pettit, senior director of strategic development for the U.S.T.A., said the organization has tried to build a ladder that begins in elementary school by making tennis part of gym class. If a gym teacher agrees to connect with a local community tennis program, the school can receive a free package of equipment for an introductory version of the game — 30 rackets, 36 instructional balls, tape to use as the net and chalk for lines. It can be played in gyms, school hallways and cafeterias.Students at Tiafoe’s home club in Maryland reacted as he played in the U.S. Open on Wednesday.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesDuring the past five years 6,700 schools have participated. In the best case scenario, the gym teacher would point the best and most enthusiastic children to the community tennis center, which then can let the U.S.T.A. regional chapters know about any special talents so they can fund private coaching.But what will make that talented child stick with the sport in a serious way? A star like Tiafoe, if he wins, can go a long way, a burden he is happy to carry.“At the end of the day I love that because of Frances Tiafoe there is a lot of people of color playing tennis,” Tiafoe said Wednesday. “That’s why I’m out here trying pretty hard.” More

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      The Audacity of Big Foe

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      Frances Tiafoe’s rise has been the talk of the U.S. Open, but his path to the pros is difficult to follow for other young Black men hoping for a career in tennis.Frances Tiafoe has everything needed to be a difference maker in tennis.The swag. Calm and confident, Tiafoe danced off the court following his quarterfinal win on Wednesday, bathing in the roars from a packed crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium.The strokes. Propulsive forehands and backhands. Easy, 135-mile-per-hour aces. Volleys with McEnroe-esque touch.The back story. The son of parents who emigrated from Sierra Leone, he learned the sport at the nonprofit tennis center that his contractor father, Constant, helped build.Then there’s the smile. Oh, that smile. Tiafoe flashes it quickly and often. Before matches, after matches, during matches. He exudes a joy for the game he is playing that is not only uncommon in professional sports, it’s magnetic.Until this week, Big Foe, as he is known, has flashed each of these qualities in teases, while never quite fulfilling his promise. But at this U.S. Open, Tiafoe, 24, has put it together. And by moving through the singles draw to Friday’s semifinals, his star turn has pulled in a far wider audience than is typical for tennis.“CONGRATS Young King!!! You earned it” LeBron James posted on Twitter after Tiafoe sprinted to the biggest win of his career in the round of 16, a four-set demolition of Rafael Nadal.Apologies to the rest of the field, but this tournament has so far been defined primarily by the celebration of two players: Serena Williams, who jolted the grounds to life during Week 1, and Tiafoe, the American fan favorite, who has kept the heartbeat pounding.Williams’s legacy is so pervasive that her power game can be seen in players throughout the women’s singles draw — particularly in the strong number of highly ranked Black women who first got into tennis because they saw themselves in Williams and her sister Venus.But men’s professional tennis has not seen a similar surge of Black talent. Can the game find a Black male player who will energize the next generations?At least one top Black male player from every generation since Arthur Ashe’s has lived with the same question.Yannick Noah, who won the French Open in 1983.MaliVai Washington, who made it to the Wimbledon finals in 1996.James Blake, the former top-five star who beat Nadal and then nearly defeated Andre Agassi at the 2005 U.S. Open.James Blake, who beat Rafael Nadal at the 2005 U.S. Open, was once a player tennis fans wondered would energize the next generation.Robert Caplin/New York TimesNow it seems to be Tiafoe’s turn. He can certainly move the needle with a win, but how much?Well, first off, any movement at all would be a start.Other than Tiafoe, there are a scant few Black men on the ATP Tour. And other than Tiafoe, Canada’s Félix Auger-Aliassime, 22, and the 36-year-old Frenchman Gaël Monfils, none appears capable of competing for major titles any time soon.What about in the college pipeline that continues to churn out solid professional players who are white?If you’re a regular reader of my column you may know that in the late 1980s I played college tennis at California-Berkeley. Back then, I was among a rough handful of Black collegiate players ranked in the top 100. It was basically the same small number in the 1990s — the same in the early 2000s.And now?“Not much has changed,” said Bryan Shelton, the first Division I college coach to win national titles in both men’s and women’s tennis. Shelton, an African American, was a star player at Georgia Tech during my era, and went on to have a solid professional career. Coaching Florida’s men to a championship last year, his team included his son, Ben, who made it into the singles and doubles draws at this year’s U.S. Open.In men’s college tennis, “There are maybe eight to 10 Black players in the top 100 rankings now,” he said. “So that’s a tick up, but let’s face it, only a slight one.”As we spoke, I remembered how, up through my early high school years, I used to be embarrassed to be seen with my tennis rackets. Tennis wasn’t exactly hip, and for a while I thought of going back to basketball or football, sports where I could easily blend in and not feel so alone.“Frances can help make tennis cool,” Shelton said. But then he cautioned, “At the same time, the roadblocks that existed before, exist now.”In many Black American communities, it’s hard to find tennis courts and nearly impossible to find easily accessible coaching. The United States Tennis Association is making strides in building up a network of junior programs across the country, through National Junior Tennis and Learning, started by Ashe in the 1960s to bring the game to underserved communities.Programs like the N.J.T.L. are making a dent in the push to develop players. Still, the cost of playing remains the most significant barrier for many. Becoming a nationally ranked junior requires group and private lessons, intense training and travel that can cost parents $30,000 per year, on the low end. And because players tend to need several years to develop their games, the layout could last six to 10 years.Chris Evert, a former player and an ESPN analyst, signed autographs while visiting kids from six Philadelphia-area chapters of National Junior Tennis and Learning, a program Arthur Ashe started in the 1960s to bring the sport to underserved communities.Jose F. Moreno/The Philadelphia Inquirer, via Associated PressHow many parents of any color can spend that kind of money?I’ve talked to numerous parents of young Black girls over the years who said they were willing to make the financial sacrifice because there are so many college opportunities — usually nine full scholarships per team at the Division I level — available for female tennis players.For the men? Shelton said Division I teams typically have only four and a half scholarships, and those are usually split among several players. Fewer scholarships means less incentive to pay the cost in time and money required to raise a college-level male player.Tiafoe was lucky. He was a prodigy — so good, so early that he turned pro at 17.What if Frances had not had the exposure and access to tennis in grade school that led to him becoming obsessed with the game?What if Martin Blackman, then director of the Junior Tennis Champions Center in College Park, Md., had not spotted Tiafoe’s talent and helped his family handle the costs and training?“We wouldn’t be here talking about him,” said Blackman, now the head of the U.S.T.A.’s player development program. In other words, Tiafoe wouldn’t be Big Foe, a semifinalist at the U.S. Open, getting a shoutout from LeBron James. Tiafoe might not even be a tennis player at all.Full disclosure: When the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the N.J.T.L. was kind enough to give me its Arthur Ashe Award of Excellence in 2020, I interviewed Tiafoe over a videoconference for a celebratory gala.“I am the type of guy who can put two weeks together and win a Grand Slam,” he assured me, and I have to admit, at the time, with his ranking hovering around 50th in the world, I thought it a far-fetched statement.Now, I’m not so sure. More

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      At the U.S. Open, 5 Artists Get a Place in the Sun

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      Five sculptures, created by artists from underrepresented communities, will find a place in the sun at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens until Sept. 11.Sculptures by five artists went on view at the U.S.T.A. Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing, Queens, Tuesday during Fan Week, six days of festivities and qualifying tournaments. The five works, which will remain on view until Sept. 11, are in collaboration with the Armory Show and the United States Tennis Association and serve as an extension of Armory Off-Site and the tennis association’s Be Open social justice campaign, which first presented paintings in 2020 from 18 Black and Indigenous artists at Arthur Ashe Stadium.This year, some of the sculptures have obvious associations with the sport. In “Now I Won,” by Myles Nurse, a larger-than-life, Wilson-yellow metal tennis player inspired by Billie Jean King is preparing to serve. On Tuesday, when a child began using the baseboard of the sculpture as a trampoline, Nurse said it did not bother him: He was relieved, he said, at the sculpture’s durability. (The sculpture had sold for $12,000 to a buyer in Miami a few days earlier.)Myles Nurse, “Now I Won,” 2022. His sprayed-steel sculpture is inspired by the tennis player Billie Jean King.Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesNurse said he wanted viewers to visualize themselves within the stance. “You could see a champion within yourself by seeing somebody else reaching these amazing feats,” he said.Welding runs in his family. Nurse’s grandfather ran a metal fabrication business in Jamaica, which he continued after immigrating to the U.S.“It was in the blood,” Nurse said, “but I’m doing it from a different perspective.”Carolyn Salas’s work was also inspired by King. She said she remembered watching the fraught, but highly attended, match between King and Bobby Riggs in the 2017 film “Battle of The Sexes.” In her sculpture “Tippy Toes,” Salas compares the daily uncertainties and struggles a woman faces to walking on a tightrope.“There’s just a constant struggle between that idea of the masculine and the feminine as a woman right now,” Salas said.Carolyn Salas, “Tippy Toes,” 2021. Salas compared the daily uncertainties and struggles a woman faces to walking on a tightrope.Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesOther artists left more open to interpretation.Jose Dávila’s artwork incorporates both industrial and naturally occurring elements. In his “Untitled Work,” a cerulean blue boulder is sandwiched between two slabs of concrete.“Many of the boulders I work with, I choose myself while walking in the countryside,” he wrote in a statement. “I’m interested in the primitiveness of rocks, of materials that have always been there, that will always be the same, that show the patina of time.”“To Rise and Begin Again,” by Luzene Hill, depicts a series of undulating aluminum columns. Hill placed a Cherokee syllabary character above each column to spread awareness of the lyrical language. The columns also resemble the New York skyline, built in part by the Mohawk ironworkers in the early 1900s. “The underlying part of all of my work” is survival, she said.Luzene Hill, “To Rise and Begin Again,” 2022.Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesHill placed a Cherokee syllabary character above each column.Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesHill’s father is Cherokee (her mother is white), and her grandparents were sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pa., leaving her and her father unaware of their native tongue. Hill said she had become fascinated by the language’s collectivist, matrilineal perspective.“Indigenous people have survived 500 years of colonial violence on many, many levels and I’m really happy that’s my DNA,” Hill said in a video call from her home in North Carolina, located on the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians reservation.Like Hill, Gerald Chukwuma’s work has direct ties to his heritage. “Ogadiligmma” or the “Town Cryer” is a part of his Igbo Landing series, which pays tribute to the 75 West Africans in 1803 who took control of a slave ship off the Georgia coast and then walked into the water, committing mass suicide. Born in the eastern region of Nigeria, Chukwuma said the West Africans were his ancestors and that determination was an inherent trait.“When we decided not to be taken as slaves, it wasn’t something that happened by chance,” he said of his ancestors, “It was how we were created. That’s our culture. That’s who we are.”Gerald Chukwuma, “Ogadiligmma,” 2021. The sculpture pays tribute to the 75 West Africans in 1803 who took control of a slave ship off the Georgia coast.Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesAs visitors holding tennis bags posed next to Chukwuma’s sculpture, buried in sea debris he collected from the Lagos shores, the artist said he hoped that his work would help raise awareness of the neglected Igbo people.“I’m sure if you listen closely when you get there you can hear him speak,” he said of the sculpture. “I’m sure he’s going to tell stories.” More

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      Serena Williams Brought New Fans to Tennis. Are You One of Them?

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      Part of Williams’s legacy can be seen in the stands of her matches, where the spectators are among tennis’s most diverse.Tell us about your experience watching Serena Williams play in the form at the end of this column.When you watch Serena Williams play from the comfortable remove of a living room, she pops from the screen. All that willpower, athleticism and skill, even as she ages and fades.When you watch Serena Williams play live and up close, in a packed stadium during a tight match on the biggest stage — now, that is something else altogether. That’s an event, a happening, a mix of Broadway and Cannes and the Met Gala, with a whole lot of forehand winners and sometimes a soap opera mixed in.Those performances will cease now that she is “evolving” from the game, as she announced this month, to pursue a life beyond tennis and perhaps have a second child. But her legacy goes far beyond what she did between the lines: It’s clear in the stands of every tournament that Williams’s glitz and drama beckoned to fans of all kinds, including large swaths who only pay attention to sports when she plays.To be at a Serena match — among masses of attendees, particularly brown and Black spectators making their first foray to a professional match — was to feel a sense of new possibility for a sport long steeped in whiteness.Take the U.S. Open, for instance. Since her ascension to tennis’s upper reaches when she won there in 1999 at age 17, Flushing Meadows has been a special stage for Williams and her fans.In 2016, bidding for an Open-era record 23rd major singles title, the overall U.S. Open attendance figures showed nearly a quarter of fans there were Black, according to the United States Tennis Association. In 2017, with Williams’s career on hold as she sat out to give birth to her daughter, the number of Black fans at Flushing Meadows dropped by 10 percent.That is the Serena effect.“The magnetism of Serena attracts all kinds of new fans,” said Chris Widmaier, a U.S.T.A. spokesman. “But you can certainly see the outsize and indelible impact that she has had on Black Americans in their relationship with tennis.”Widmaier has been working communications at the Open for 20 years. He has seen Williams play all over the world and figures he has watched her more than any other top player.“When Serena would walk on the court and you had the ability to be courtside, you would get chills,” he said. “You just knew you were in the presence of greatness. And it didn’t matter at which point in her career. That is what I always felt.”Williams’s matches always made viewers feel. And while her career — and that of her sister Venus — has drawn onlookers of all kinds, it has had special resonance for Black fans and others traditionally at the margins of the tennis scene.Serena Williams’s Farewell to TennisThe tennis star is retiring after a long career of breaking boundaries and obliterating expectations.On Her Own Terms: Serena Williams announced her decision to retire in an article in Vogue in a way that felt unapologetically her own. A Beacon of Black Excellence: The tennis player achieved greatness without ever masking the struggles it took to win — especially as a Black woman.A Career on Top: Williams won her first Grand Slam in 1999, when she was 17 years old.  Over the next two decades, she became the sport’s most dominant force.Her Legacy: While emerging as the face of tennis, Williams, along with her older sister Venus, changed the face of the sport, carrying the load for the nation’s aspirations.If that’s you, I want to hear your story. Especially if you made the pilgrimage to see Williams play in person. Even if “up close” was the nosebleed seats at the Olympic tennis stadium in Rio. Or if you made it to one of the smaller tournaments on the WTA Tour, without the Grand Slam crowds and prices.Were you there at Indian Wells in 2001, as many in the majority-white audience booed Williams during her championship win? Were you there 14 years later, when she ended her boycott of that desert event?What moments and images from Williams’s career, good and bad and utterly astonishing, stick with you? What compelled you to see her in person?For me, when I think of Serena, of course, I also think of Venus. Watching them together was sports as beautiful alchemy. Just the right mix, even if their matches were sometimes full of nervousness and imperfection.At the U.S. Open in 2008, Serena and Venus were about to clash in a quarterfinal match on a hot, humid New York evening. Two hours before, I watched as fans gathered outside the stadium. Yes, it was still a mostly white and well-heeled crowd, but it was also Black, Latino, Asian, every hue, every class.It felt supercharged. The air surged with electric excitement and anticipation. I heard many say they would not have ventured to Flushing Meadows that evening if not for Serena. Adding Venus to the mix sealed the deal.The sisters put on a show. There were early pockmarks of sloppy play, but in the end, the evening sizzled with excellence, and Serena affirmed her superiority, winning, 7-6, 7-6.Looking back on the arc of Serena’s career, the swings of that match are a hallmark. She has always been capable of producing clumps of errors in batches — and then turning up the winners when everything counts. That’s part of the wonder.On the grounds of the most significant events, it often felt like the competition had not really stepped into high gear until Williams put on a high-pressure spectacle.A fan held a sign in support of Serena Williams during the Western & Southern Open in Ohio last week.Dylan Buell/Getty ImagesSerena brought the buzz, whether she won or not. It began from the moment she’d leave the players’ tunnel and walk before the fans. If you were there at the 2018 French Open when she entered that red-clay center court dressed in her tight black, Wakanda-inspired bodysuit, the feel in the stands, the swooning and gasping and awe, will be in your mind for good.God, I loved that moment. It gave me goose bumps.In her boldness and bearing, Williams has always reminded me of my undaunted nieces and cousins and my late paternal grandmother, Peggy Mae Streeter, a powerful Black woman born one generation from slavery. Dressed in that bodysuit — reveling in her complete self, with that trademark “I’m gonna do my thing, no matter what” kind of attitude — Williams, it seemed to me, was channeling their unbreakable spirit.I’m certainly not the only one to observe and feel that way. She spoke for herself and in doing so, spoke to us.It’s strange, but I seemed to have a knack for being in the stands when Williams was surprisingly upended. The loss to Elina Svitolina at the Rio Olympics in 2016. The time she blew a 5-1 last-set lead and succumbed to Karolina Pliskova at the 2019 Australian Open. With each loss, on the grounds of those events, you could feel energy and passion drain from fans once they realized she would no longer be around.When, in 2019, Williams worked in vain to fend off Bianca Andreescu, the talented young Canadian, I was one of the 23,000 who jammed Ashe Stadium for what may have been her last Grand Slam final.Thinking about it now, I can still hear the proud and melancholy sound of Williams’s straining breath as she served to stay in the match, facing a third match point. I can feel her gasping exhale echoing across the stands. I can remember Andreescu dialing up a forehand reply, just as I can recall Williams’s lunge as that forehand spun by for a winner.Game, set, Slam, Andreescu, 6-3, 7-5.You had to be there to feel the poignancy. A collective, mournful groan underlay the standing ovation applause for a new and deserving champion.This was the ultimate tennis champion on her last legs, coming up short, fighting to the end. I’m thankful to have been there as a witness.Has Serena Williams Impacted You? Share Your Story.The Times wants to hear stories from people who have seen Williams play at tournaments, and those particularly impacted by her career. We won’t publish any part of your submission without contacting you first. 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

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      Among Pro Athletes, Bill Russell Was a Pioneering Activist

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      Russell marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., spoke out against segregation in Boston public schools and backed Muhammad Ali in his opposition to the Vietnam War.It’s easy to remember the shots that Bill Russell blocked or the N.B.A. championships he won. After all, there were so many of each that he is considered one of the greatest basketball players in history, and in some corners, the greatest, period.But after his nearly nine decades of life, his most consequential legacy has less to do with the sport he dominated than his work off the court. From the time he was a young man to his death at age 88 on Sunday, Russell was a civil rights activist who consistently used his platform as a celebrity athlete to confront racism, no matter whom it alienated or what it did to his public popularity. And he was one of the first to do so.Now, it is common for athletes across many sports to be outspoken, no doubt inspired by Russell. The N.B.A. players’ union encourages its members to be passionate about their politics, especially around social justice. Without Russell’s risking his own livelihood and enduring the cruelties he did as a Black player in the segregated Boston of the 1950s and 1960s, athlete activism would look much different today, if it existed at all.“The blueprint was written by Russell,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said in an interview on Sunday. He continued: “It is now trendy on social media to take a stand. He did it when it was not trendy. He set the trend.”Spike Lee, the director and longtime N.B.A. fan, said in a text message, “We are losing so many greats my head is spinning.”Lee said Russell “is right up there with Jackie Robinson as changing the game in sports and activism in the United States of America, and we are all better because of these champions.”Russell, a native of West Monroe, La., was a trailblazer from the moment he set foot on an N.B.A. court.“My rookie year, in the championship series, I was the only Black player for both teams,” Russell once quipped to an audience while accepting an award in Boston. “And see what we did, we showed them diversity works.”Russell marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 in the prime of his playing career (he played for the Celtics from 1956 to 1969). He was invited to sit onstage behind King, but he declined. That same year, Russell offered his public support for demonstrations against segregation in Boston public schools, and addressed Black students taking part in a sit-in.When the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated, also in 1963, Russell contacted Evers’s older brother, Charles, in Jackson, Miss., and offered his assistance. The elder Evers suggested that Russell run an integrated basketball camp in the Deep South, something that would have been a significant safety risk for Russell. He said yes, and despite the death threats, went through with the camp.Russell, with Kenneth Guscott, left, and Marvin Gilmore, right, spoke at NAACP headquarters in 1964. Hal Sweeney/The Boston Globe via Getty ImagesFour years later, when the boxer Muhammad Ali was faced with a torrent of criticism for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War, Russell, the N.F.L. star Jim Brown and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor and still playing at U.C.L.A.) gathered in Cleveland and decided to support Ali. This was not a popular stance, not that Russell cared.Russell wrote immediately afterward that he was envious of Ali.“He has absolute and sincere faith,” Russell wrote for Sports Illustrated. “I’m not worried about Muhammad Ali. He is better equipped than anyone I know to withstand the trials in store for him. What I’m worried about is the rest of us.”Russell’s activism made an impact on generations of athletes. That included Spencer Haywood, who played for Russell as a member of the Seattle SuperSonics, whom Russell coached for four seasons. (In 1966, Russell became the first Black coach in the N.B.A.)Haywood said in an interview on Sunday that he and Russell would often dine at a Seattle restaurant called 13 Coins after road trips, and Russell would regale him with stories about the civil rights movement. During these dinners, Russell lauded the young player’s willingness to sue the N.B.A. in 1971 for not allowing players to enter the league until four years after their high school graduation — a case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court and was eventually decided in Haywood’s favor.“He was teaching me because he knew what I had stood up for with my Supreme Court ruling,” Haywood said. “And he admired that in me. And I was so overwhelmed by him knowing.”Haywood said his teammates would jokingly refer to Russell as Haywood’s “daddy” because of how close they were. Sometimes, Haywood’s late-night talks with Russell came with surprising advice about activism.“He always used to tell me about not getting too carried away because we were in the ’70s,” Haywood recalled. “He was kind of guiding me, saying: ‘Don’t go out too far right now because you are a player and you need to play the game. But you’ve made one stand and you did great in that, but don’t go too far.’ He was, like, giving me a guardrail.”Russell never feared going too far as a player activist himself. He wasn’t deterred by the racist taunts he absorbed at games, or when vandals broke into his home, spray-painted epithets on the wall and left feces on the bed after he moved his family to Reading, Mass. When he tried to move his family to a different house nearby, some residents of the mostly white neighborhood started a petition to keep him out.“I said then that I wasn’t scared of the kind of men who come in the dark of night,” Russell wrote for Slam magazine in 2020. “The fact is, I’ve never found fear to be useful.”He didn’t always have the support of his teammates. In 1961, for example, the Celtics traveled to Lexington, Ky., for an exhibition game against the St. Louis Hawks. When the restaurant at the hotel would not serve the team’s Black players, Russell led a strike of the game. His white teammates played the game. Bob Cousy, one of Russell’s white teammates, told the writer Gary M. Pomerantz decades later for the 2018 book “The Last Pass: Cousy, the Celtics and What Matters in the End” that he was “ashamed” at having taken part in the game. President Barack Obama cited the 1961 story in giving Russell the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.“For decades, Bill endured insults and vandalism, but never let it stop him from speaking up for what’s right,” Obama said in a statement Sunday. “I learned so much from the way he played, the way he coached, and the way he lived his life.”Russell addressed a fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee in Boston in 2011.Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe activism didn’t stop as Russell got older. In recent years, Russell has been a public supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement and Colin Kaepernick, the former N.F.L. quarterback who began kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality in 2016.“Bill Russell was a pioneer,” Etan Thomas, a former N.B.A. player and political activist, said in a text message Sunday. Thomas said Russell was “an athlete who used his position and platform to stand up for a bigger cause.” He added that “he was the type of athlete I wanted to be like when I grew up.”Russell’s influence in leading the 1961 strike could be felt in 2020, when the Milwaukee Bucks refused to play a playoff game as a protest of police brutality. On Twitter, Russell wrote that he was “moved by all the N.B.A. players for standing up for what is right.” In a piece for The Players’ Tribune weeks later, Russell wrote, “Black and Brown people are still fighting for justice, racists still hold the highest offices in the land.”Sharpton pointed to those actions as Russell’s legacy.“He did it before some of these guys were born,” Sharpton said. “And I think that what they need to understand is every time a basketball player or athlete puts a T-shirt on saying something about Trayvon or ‘I Am Trayvon’ or ‘Black Lives Matter’ or whatever they want to do — ‘Get your knee off my neck!’ — they may not know it, but they are doing the Bill Russell.” More