Fifties (114 page)

In baseball, the coming of Jackie Robinson had been quickly
followed by the coming of several other magnificent black players—Willie Mays, Monte Irvin, Ernie Banks, and Henry Aaron. From the start, because Brooklyn had signed the first black players, the other National League teams had been forced to go to the same extraordinary talent pile, while the American League, holding on to the prejudices of the past, lagged far behind in its acquisition of great black players. NL, the traditional newspaper abbreviation for the National League, the black players liked to joke, now had come to stand for Negro League. Willie Mays seemed to be the model for the new supremely gifted black athlete, making plays that had never been made before, playing gracefully and aggressively, with an exuberant style all his own. As much as anything, he showed that the new-age black athlete had both power and speed: In 1955 he had hit fifty-one home runs and stolen twenty-four bases. A new kind of athlete was being showcased, a player who, in contrast to most white superstars of the past, was both powerful
and
fast. Sociologists, physiologists, and historians might soon debate the reasons for this—why black athletes seemed so much faster and athletically more gifted than white athletes of seemingly comparable size—but the changes wrought in all of America’s national sports were dramatic. And the black athletes themselves laughed about the difference, saying of a particular black player who had neither speed nor leaping ability that he had the white man’s disease, which meant that he could not jump very high or that he was not very fast.

Clearly, a social revolution wrought by great athletes was taking place, and it was in many ways outstripping the revolution engineered by the Supreme Court of the United States and by Martin Luther King, Jr., in the streets of the nation’s Southern cities. If the face of America, at its highest business, legal, and financial level, was still almost exclusively white, then the soul of America, as manifested in its music and its sports, was changing quickly. In sport after sport, blacks became the dominating figures, first in baseball, and then in professional football in 1957, when Jim Brown, the great running back, was drafted by Cleveland after playing at Syracuse. Brown, so superior an athlete that he was also considered the greatest lacrosse player of his era, had had professional offers in baseball and basketball as well as football, but it was in football that he made his reputation. As a pro player he was not unlike Mays in that he combined both speed and power. In the past, great running backs either were swift and ran to the outside or were big and powerful and ran inside, but Jim Brown was something new, he almost alone could do both.

But it was in basketball that the revolution most quickly took place and was most quickly completed. Basketball soon became the professional sport with the highest percentage of black players; yet as recently as 1947, John Gunther had written that although blacks could play college football in the Big Ten, they could not compete in basketball. “This is an indoor sport and taboos are strong (though not so strong as in the South) against any contact between half-clad, perspiring bodies, even on the floor of a gym,” he had noted.

The basketball revolution began in 1956, when Arnold (Red) Auerbach, the coach of the Boston Celtics, made a complicated deal at draft time in order to get the rights to a young man who had starred at the University of San Francisco. The young man was named William F. Russell, Jr. Russell was part of the great black migration to the North and the West; he was born in Louisiana but had gone to California as a boy. His father was a proud man who had ended up working in a small trucking business in California. (Later, in 1965, when Bill Russell, by far the most valuable player in professional basketball, signed a contract for $100,001 a year, that extra dollar being there to put him ahead of Wilt Chamberlain, his great rival, he had suggested that his father never work again. “Of course I’m going to work,” said Charlie Russell. “I’ve given that place eighteen good years out of my life. Now I’ll give them a couple of bad years.”)

Before the signing of Russell, Auerbach already had the reputation as the smartest coach in the league. Now his reputation, because of this particular trade, was going to grow considerably in the years to come. No mind that Russell had been the key player on the University of San Francisco teams that had won two national championships and had lost only one college game in which he played. Though Russell’s defensive skills were something of a given, some professional scouts worried because he was not a good shooter. Certainly, few experts thought Russell’s play would completely transform the game. He was six feet nine and a half inches which was tall (although others were taller), and he was quick, but quickness was not yet considered as important as heft and muscle, and doubts remained about his professional ability—and particularly about his strength, since he was to play regularly against men not only as tall as he, but twenty-five pounds heavier. Auerbach had been asking around the college ranks whether Russell had the guts to play in the rough and physical pro game.

At that time the Celtics, in an eight-team league, were good, but not quite good enough: They had good shooters and a supremely
gifted ball handler and passer in Bob Cousy, but they were not champions and they lacked a dominating big man. At the end of the ’55–’56 season Auerbach had promised his frustrated players that he would somehow manage to get them a big man in the draft. That he did. He drafted Russell, whose ability to dominate the college game was so complete that by the end of the 1955 season, the NCAA had put into effect what was called “the Russell rule,” which widened the foul lanes from six to twelve feet in a flawed attempt to limit his dominance as an inside scorer and rebounder.

On draft day Rochester, which had the first chance at Russell, passed and took Sihugo Green, in large part because Russell was so good that he had other options, such as playing for the all-black road-storming Harlem Globetrotters. Russell was said to want a salary of $25,000, an unheard-of sum in those days. The Globetrotters had announced that they would pay him $50,000, but in fact their offer was about a third of that. Worse, Abe Saperstein, the famed owner of the Globetrotters, had enraged Russell by meeting with Russell and his college coach and negotiating with the coach as if Russell were not there. The racial overtones of the meeting were rich, the implicit sense that Russell was a boy, indeed a colored boy, who could not make a business decision himself; when the meeting was over there was no chance of Russell playing with the Globetrotters. It had been unlikely in the first place that someone with Russell’s overwhelming pride would choose to play with a team of barnstorming black athletes who portrayed themselves as basketball buffoons, rather than to test himself against the best white professional talent in the country.

The next pick in the draft belonged to St. Louis. It was at this moment that Red Auerbach made his trade. He gave up a talented and popular player, center Ed Macauley—who averaged about twenty points a game but was spindly and was not exactly a power player and who wore down during the regular season—plus the draft rights to another potentially gifted player, Cliff Hagan, for the rights to Russell. Russell signed for $22,500. (Six thousand dollars was going to be held out because he joined the Celtics late, after leading the American team to an Olympic victory in Melbourne, but Walter Brown, the Celtics’ owner, decided that was unfair and held out only three thousand, in effect splitting the difference with Russell.)

With that trade, Auerbach went from being very smart to being a genius. He told Russell to concentrate on rebounding and not to worry about scoring. “We’ll count rebounds as baskets for you,” he told him. In Russell’s first year, the Celtics won the NBA championship,
and Russell became not merely the best player in the league, but he began his tour as the most dominating team athlete of modern American sports. His first game came on December 22, in the Boston Garden against the St. Louis Hawks, on national television. Bob Cousy remembered it vividly: Even though Russell was new, there was an immediate sense on the part of his teammates that the future had arrived and that the game had changed because of him; he not only rebounded as Auerbach had promised, but he brought a different dimension to defense. There had never been anything like him before, Cousy thought at the time—the quickness, the superb timing, a big man playing with the agility and speed of a small man.

The Celtics were suddenly a brand-new team. (In his first game Russell had played only sixteen minutes but had gotten twenty-one rebounds.) A few days later, in a game in New York that was part of a doubleheader, he held Neil Johnston of the Warriors, then the game’s third leading scorer, without a field goal for the first forty-two minutes. Russell also gathered in eighteen rebounds; the next night in another game against the Warriors, he took down
thirty-four
rebounds in twenty minutes of play, blocked a number of shots, and led the Celtic fast break. The new age had arrived. Even Auerbach, as shrewd as he was, Cousy thought, did not realize how much he was getting when he drafted Russell.

When Russell had been measured in college, the tape never indicated what a superlative athlete he was. He played a good deal taller than his height indicated. Even in college he had been surprised at the things he could do that other players could not. He had found that when he went up for a rebound, he was different from other players—not only did he seem to go higher (on one occasion in college he found he was looking down at the basket, which meant he was jumping at least forty-eight inches off the ground), but he seemed to hang in the air longer; the other players returned to the ground while he stayed in the air. In later years this would be known as hang time. Russell was both extremely agile and extremely powerful. Not only was he a superb jumper, he had exceptional timing; indeed, his hand-to-eye coordination and the timing of his jumps reflected a rare athletic skill. His intelligence matched his athletic ability; he seemed, he later noted, to be able to anticipate what the player he was guarding was going to do next. With him, playing defense in basketball became as much of an art as hitting was to a great baseball player like Ted Williams or Stan Musial. Among other things, Russell was left-handed, which meant that his more athletic hand was keyed to the shooting hand of most players he defended
against. He was supremely intelligent, a master not only at psyching teammates but intimidating his opponents, and he was one of the proudest men ever to play any sport.

He played for the Celtics, but Boston was never his home. He was acutely aware of the city’s prejudices, that the Celtics, though champions, rarely sold out at home. He responded to the schizophrenia of the white sports fan who covets autographs but, at least in Russell’s opinion, does not covet black neighbors, by refusing to sign autographs. He had once, as a collegian, been invited to a conference at the White House, but then had driven the segregated highway back to his original home in Louisiana, where on stops along the road he had been treated as “just another black boy, just so much dirt, with no rights, with no element of human courtesy or decency shown to me or mine.” He had decided before he even turned pro that he would always be polite with fans, that he would speak only when spoken to, but that he would not be a caricature of a black—a dancing, joking buffoon.

His gifted teammate Bob Cousy, who was the best passer of his era, was always intrigued by the contradictions in Russell. Russell played the game brilliantly, but he did not even particularly seem to like the game. He was a notoriously poor practice player, perhaps the most indifferent one on the team. But he played with a special fury in the real games, as though this sport was the only outlet, Cousy thought, for all the racial anger stored up within him.
This,
the intensity of his play seemed to say, was his answer to prejudice and discrimination and to existing myths about things that blacks could not do but that whites could do. He was a great big-game player, although it was said that he was so tense before a game that he inevitably had to go to the locker room and throw up just before the tipoff. In those days the Celtics’ archrivals were the St. Louis Hawks, and in St. Louis, then a Southern city, the crowd seemed to him to be the most racist in the league, the epithets the most vile; it was a place where even the coffee shops denied him service. He played particularly well in St. Louis.

In the past, the dominating big players had been white, usually strong but slow. When they blocked a shot, it was generally because the offensive player had taken a poor shot. Russell was something completely new, the forerunner of a different player in a different game, the big man who got down court faster than the other team’s small men. He blocked shots that had never been blocked before. Players on other teams not only had to correct the arc of their shots but change the very nature of their offense when they played against
him. When opponents brought the ball up the court, they always looked to see where Russell was. He averaged more than twenty rebounds a game, and his rebounding was so formidable that it unlocked the Boston offense, leading to the Celtics’ fast break and what were often easy baskets. He changed, in the most elemental sense, the very tempo of the game. In the past a team had brought the ball up rather leisurely, passed it around, and a shot was taken. When that happened, the roles of the two teams changed, the offensive team going on defense, and vice versa, but they changed comparatively slowly—the offensive team had a few extra seconds to pull itself together, get back down court, and set up on defense, while the offensive team had somewhat leisurely taken a few seconds to rearrange itself and then take the ball up the court for offense. With Russell the tempo of the game seemed to have no break; now it was continuous, offense flowing into defense instantaneously. It was now a game for the swift and the agile. In Russell’s first ten years in Boston, the Celtics won the championship nine times, including one stretch of eight championships in a row. In his thirteen seasons there, the Celtics won the title eleven times.