He was the greatest champion in modern professional sports, and he was one of our own.
Bill Russell died Sunday. He was 88 years old.
He might have been born in Louisiana, died in suburban Seattle, where he had lived for 50 years, and won his 11 NBA titles in Boston.
But Russell was a son of the Bay, most especially Oakland.
And while the legendary big man might no longer be with us, his legacy will live forever both in this region and everywhere the sport of basketball is played.
Oakland is rightfully called “the City of Champions.” Not only did all three of the city’s professional sports teams have brilliant runs of dominance, but it’s also produced brilliant champion players: Rickey Henderson, Frank Robinson, Joe Morgan, Curt Flood, Jason Kidd, Gary Payton, Paul Silas, Tony Lima, Andre Ward, and Marshawn Lynch, to name a few.
But Russell was the greatest champion of them all. He was — and will forever remain — the barometer for greatness in Oakland, the East Bay, the Bay, and the sport of basketball.
Bill Russell’s Bay Area ties
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Russell moved to Oakland when he was eight years old. It was here where he first started playing basketball — taking his prodigious athletic ability and translating it to the sport, which was in its infancy as a mainstream sport.
Any fan of the sport owes a great debt to whomever first put a basketball in Russell’s hands.
Russell’s basketball career started at Oakland’s McClymonds High, where the late-blooming, lanky center with a loose grasp of the fundamentals barely resembled the player he would later become.
In fact, Russell planned on working in the Oakland shipyards after high school, hoping to save up enough money to go to college. Instead, a late and surprising scholarship offer to play basketball at San Francisco University paved a direct path.
That path, it turned out, was lined with titles.
Russell and his USF teammate, a fellow son of the Bay, K.C. Jones, led the small Jesuit school to back-to-back NCAA national championships, winning 60 straight games over that two-year span, becoming the first undefeated championship team in Division 1 men’s basketball history in the process.
It all worked around Russell — the 1955 and 1956 UPI College Player of the Year — who was the first player in NCAA history to average 20 points and 20 rebounds per game.
Bill Russell of the University of San Francisco holds his Most Valuable Player trophies at Madison Square Garden in New York, March 31, 1956. (AP Photo/John Lent)
“We changed the game,” Russell told Sports Illustrated of his time at USF. “I think you can even say we developed a whole new philosophy of basketball. We attacked the offense and made it react to the defense.”
Russell took that new philosophy to the Boston Celtics in 1956.
His impact on the Celtics and the professional
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
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