Bill Russell: Defense and Agency

Some time in college we had a mini-assignment to find a picture and present something about it. It probably wasn’t this exact one, but it was definitely very similar to this:

This picture is of course Bill Russell (Celtics 6) defending Wilt Chamberlain (Phila 13), and happens to be from January 27, 1965 (for more on the photo and game, I found it at the Boston Celtics History site.)

In the photo I found, Russell was the centerpiece, but you could also clearly make out all of the dots in the crowd. Overwhelmingly this crowd was male with crew cuts and/or blazers on. Every single person in the photo, except for the men actually on the court, was white.

It was the juxtaposition of the men on the court against the men in the crowd that most resonated with me.

Bill Russell, for whom there is still a fair argument that he was the greatest basketball player of them all, soaring to combat the machinations of a literal giant, his one true great adversary on the court… while a bunch of white dudes in crew cuts looked on. What did this mean, what could this ever have meant, really?

As a kid in the early ‘80s I gravitated toward the Celtics. I don’t think it was a knock against the Lakers, mind you. There was something about the ridiculous leprechaun in the center of the court, the screaming green uniforms, how the team felt like it was fully of weird scrappy dudes. But there was also this weird background nugget, that the two greatest franchises in all of sports were the Yankees and the Celtics, and there was this presentation that the Celtics of the ‘80s were a continuation of all that greatness, and all of the men associated with those ‘60s Celtics teams were still around, one of them was even the head coach (KC Jones)… there was just this tremendous grave importance to all of it, and as a kid I soaked that up, from football and from baseball and from basketball.

Bill Russell was of course the center - figuratively and literally - of all of that history, all of that grave importance. And it is critical, I think, to understand that his genius was on defense. He was going to kick your ass, but from inside your own head. As someone who would go on to significant studies in 20th Century American history, and who has always seen the interplay of sport and history, that photo, whenever exactly it was that I found it… the whole thing resonated, told me a different story about the ‘60s than any I had quite understood. For a man like Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain was the adversity immediately before him. But that crowd represented a different kind of adversity: the adversity of trying to find one’s way in a broader world that is viscerally not yours, even while you are a veritable titan, gloriously battling another veritable titan.

But it’s deeper than that. We can lose track in a discursive world where there’s such a frenzy to make claims, to pit people against people. See: the dude in the sixth row with the glasses on wasn’t the problem. He wasn’t part of the problem. He was part of the reality of the situation, and the situation was, and remains, riddled with problems.

What men like Bill Russell have shown us is that we have agency. We have agency against the immediate adversity, and we also have agency against the visceral but still more abstract adversity. And we don’t have to be an athletic genius like him to have agency. That dude in the sixth row has agency too.

That, I think, is the power of sports. Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell, their powers extended off the field, out of the ring, outside the arena.

Bill Russell’s acceptance of an award at the inaugural NBA Awards is timeless:

It would be easy to lose track of his true greatness, to say it was all from a very different era, etc. I hope we do not do that. Bill Russell isn’t Old Hoss Radbourn here. He’s Babe Ruth, and then so much more.

Don’t take my word for it though. Take Kareem’s: