BASKETBALL: The Number That Bill Russell Did Not Want To Withdraw
Bill Russell didn't want a big ceremony. He had decided it seeing how people reacted to the farewell of Bob Cousy, the first star of the Boston Celtics. Tears, cheers, bouquets. He looked like he was dying and not quitting basketball. He didn't want his bib stripped off and hung high up in Boston Garden, either. "The one who is withdrawing is me. My number, let him do what he wants," he said. That number 6 that he had already made eternal by winning 11 rings in 13 seasons, and that no one else will wear in the NBA again: the league announced that all franchises will retire his number in honor of the greatest winner of all time.
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"I have very little faith in the applause, what it means and how long it will last," wrote Bill Russell in Second Wind, one of the best memoirs of a basketball player, although he hardly spoke of what happened on the court. A book written with the wounds still raw (1979, a decade after his retirement), and where he reveals more reasons why, when Red Auerbach proposed to withdraw his number with the Celtics, he put one condition on it: that the ceremony outside behind closed doors.
"Boston was a flea market for racism. He had it in all its varieties, and almost all of it in its most virulent form," Russell writes, though he omits the nastiest episodes. Like the time his house was vandalized because he moved to a wealthy, majority-white area. The assailants wrote ' Nigga' (the derogatory form of 'black') on the walls and defecated on his bed, among other things. A city capable of celebrating his sporting achievements while reminding him of the place for his kind. jailed in Sacramento than being mayor of Boston," he would say years later. His sin was twofold: being black and fighting openly for civil rights. For not just playing basketball. In fact, among sportswriters they called him 'Felton X', a play on his middle name (William Felton Russell) and Malcolm X. memories.
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It would have been barbaric hypocrisy for that same city to fire him to tears and applause . A place to which he did not want to return in the first years after his retirement. Until in 1972, already working on television, he had to commentate on a Celtics home game and Auerbach ambushed him.
14,000 EMPTY SEATS
The first time the Celtics retired Bill Russell's number, the ceremony was held before nearly 14,000 empty seats. There were three hours left before the match and the pavilion was still closed. There, beyond a handful of former colleagues, there were only workers, operators and some farsighted journalist.
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In the few images that survive of the moment the banner was raised, with the number 6 sewn in a corner next to Sam Jones's 24, there are only six people. Auerbach, Russell and Tom Heinsohn, former teammate and successor on the bench, appear dressed in suits. In short, John Havlicek, Satch Sanders and Don Chaney, the only ones along with Don Nelson who were still active out of those who had coincided with him.
"I've played for the Celtics,not for Boston", he wrote of that unusual decision. In part it was because of his aversion to recognition and public events (he led a very retired life well into his old age), but also because of his relationship with the city to which brought so much glory, as he revealed in his presentation as coach of the Seattle Supersonics, just a year after the ceremony. "It was a very traumatic experience and I have some scars," he confessed."We won 11 rings and after the last there were still people in Boston who told me there were too many blacks on the team."
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Bill Russell would take decades to reconcile with Boston, and until 1999 he would not accept that the Celtics paid tribute to him with another ceremony to retire his number. This time with the public, provided that part of the profits go to organizations that help young people.
ONLY TWO PRECEDENTS
Bill Russell was one of the players who, like Wilt Chamberlain, Maurice Stokes or Elgin Baylor , marked the evolution of basketball in the mid-20th century. They conquered the air for a sport that had lived at ground level. The fact that he did so by winning 11 rings with the Boston Celtics makes him one of the greatest in history. That he also used his speaker to fight for civil rights makes it momentous.
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That is why the NBA has decided to withdraw its dorsal number 6 in all franchises. Those players who currently wear it will be able to keep it -LeBron James, for example-, but no one else will be able to use it from now on. In North American sport there are only two precedents:Jackie Robinson 's 42 in the MLB (the first black player in the major leagues) and Wayne Gretzky 's 99 in the NHL (the all-time leading scorer).
Precisely Robinson belonged to that lineage of black athletes who, like Bill Russell, used their privileged position to demand social justice in the sixties. A current that would be off for decades, in the heat of stars who understood that the confrontation made them lose money, like OJ Simpson ("I'm not black, I'm OJ," he said) or Michael Jordan, and that has regained strength in the last years.
After Robinson's death, his daughter called Bill Russell to tell him one of her last wishes: that he be one of the men to carry her coffin.
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