Off the top of my head, I can name more players from those old Celtic teams of the 50s and 60s than I can of the current Celtics: Bill Russell, Sam Jones, K.C. Jones, Bill Sharman, Bob Cousy, and John Havlicek.
He coached the Sonics for a short time, but he had no patience for mediocre work habits.
I think he is the greatest human being of my lifetime. He had an incredible intellect, and did not suffer fools. Both outstanding characteristics. Plus I loved watching him play, coach and do NBA games.
Russell said that when he was growing up in the segregated South and later California his parents instilled in him the calm confidence that allowed him to brush off racist taunts.
“Years later, people asked me what I had to go through,” Russell said in 2008. “Unfortunately, or fortunately, I’ve never been through anything. From my first moment of being alive was the notion that my mother and father loved me.” It was Russell’s mother who would tell him to disregard comments from those who might see him playing in the yard.
“Whatever they say, good or bad, they don’t know you,” he recalled her saying. “They’re wrestling with their own demons.”
But it was Jackie Robinson who gave Russell a road map for dealing with racism in his sport: “Jackie was a hero to us. He always conducted himself as a man. He showed me the way to be a man in professional sports.”
The feeling was mutual, Russell learned, when Robinson’s widow, Rachel, called and asked him to be a pallbearer at her husband’s funeral in 1972.“She hung the phone up and I asked myself, ‘How do you get to be a hero to Jackie Robinson?’” Russell said. “I was so flattered.”