On Bill Russell, the Boston Celtics, and good trouble

Basketball and an activism that became accompliceship have been two threads in my life that have tied my identity as a person together long before I knew how closely intertwined they actually were. I mention this today after hearing the news of the man who embodied both more than anyone I have ever known passed away in one William Felton Russell.

My heart, like many, is heavy. But it is also full of joy that there was a man like Russell in this life to have guided us, to show us what is possible when one fights with everything they have, regardless of the context. That such struggles don’t require one to throw oneself against the rocks but to be careful with where one spends one’s energy, to walk with others who share your principles and energy.

Like so many others, Russell’s life changed how I looked at what was possible.

Before I was a sports writer, I was an anthropologist who cut his research teeth doing field research in rural northern Louisana in the part of the world where Russell was born in and spent his early childhood.

Working for the federal government to ensure the poorest and most marginalized and often house-bound Medicaid and Medicare recipients were not being left behind, I became familiar with the backdrop that helped shape him.

At night, on the roads in small, beat-up motels and over breakfasts in smaller roadside restaurants, I would read about Russell’s life, fascinated to see his stomping grounds before he relocated to the Bay Area.

On the weekends, I’d travel back to my home base in Algiers Point, opposite (and technically part of) New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi River.

This was in 2014, when unrest in Ferguson, Missouri sparked nationwide protests, including one in New Orleans led by the cousin of Mike Brown, the man whose execution at the hands of police sparked protests across the country.

At the same time this was occuring, I became increasingly obsessed with learning more about Russell in the moments I could steal away from my graduate studies and ongoing organizing work in my (then) new home.

Russel was a man I’d become a fan of at first because of his success with the NBA team I was also a fan of by accident of birth as much as anything else.

But, I’d taken a greater interest in him after starting graduate school at the University of Florida in 2010, falling in with the Dream Defenders to organize in the wake of the shooting of Trayvon Martin soon after.

In casual conversation sitting in school board meetings to try and stop the privatization of local schools and to dismantle policies that constituted the school-to-prison pipeline, co-organizer friends were surprised how little I’d known then about the other side of Russell’s life.

Don’t get me wrong, Russell’s 11 rings are by any measure the ultimate fan icon to point to as a model of greatness. But my own ignorance of his contributions to the same fight we were in the trenches trying to accomplish a half-century later made me more than a little ashamed of my ignorance.

So, I got to work remedying that.

I’ve been at least a casual fan of the Celtics for as long as I had a concrete idea of what basketball was and how it was played, my awareness of Russell sparked by a glass in my grandfather’s kitchen with all the titles they’d won (which even then amazed me).

Russell’s excellence was the explanation I was given for all of those titles. I recall wondering aloud if the other teams and their fans of that era weren’t bored, with my grandfather replying that anyone watching wouldn’t have been.

And yet, even in the early 1980s during Larry Bird and company’s heydey, Russell’s participation in the Civil Rights movement putting his career and all his basketball potential on the line for others did not come up.

In retrospect, I might not have been so surprised. My grandfather was not by any measure a racist man, but also not one involved in politics or protests of any sort after returning from the Second World War.

Many years later, on roads Russell himself might have known in between Monroe and Shreveport, Bossier City, Chenier, and Ruston, I learned of his presence at Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech and in the March on Washington.

I learned how he refused to let his teammates be discriminated against to the point of refusing to play, how he held integrated camps in front of the Klu Klux Klan in response to the murder of Medgar Evers, and how he fought to integrate Boston-area schools, and how he’d continued his advocacy to the present.

I also learned about his life in rural Louisiana, and the structural conditions and the racism that helped shape him into who he was. To say I felt silly in front of my friends I’d been organizing with for not knowing these things is quite an understatement.

My fandom for Russell grew in the ensuing years as I left the US to finish my doctoral studies, watching from afar in what would eventually become my home of Mexico City as Russell’s influence continued to inspire new generations.

His presence can be seen in the Celtics of today via the works of Grant Williams and particularly Jaylen Brown, who have invested much time and put their own interests on the line to fight for civil rights as Russell once did.

I may never forgive Boston if they are foolish enough to trade the closest thing to Russell as we’ve had in our time in those two, but that may be equal parts sadness at Russell’s passing as it is pride in knowing his spirit is still with us.