A giant's passing

Memory serves not well at all, if you have to reach back far enough for it. And so the only time I saw Bill Russell comes back to me the way a moment in a dream comes, a wisp of a shred that dissipates with every advancing year.

All that remains is a man striding past me in the Fort Wayne airport, and me looking up at him  and thinking he was a giant out of fable.

This was -- must have been -- in the early 1960s sometime, when I was 7, 8 years old and the Boston Celtics still changed planes in odd places on their way from somewhere to somewhere else. And now Bill Russell has left us at 88, and I am still thinking he's a giant out of fable, transcending the games of children the way Jackie did and Ali and Arthur Ashe and so many others.

Russell won an Olympic gold medal and 11 NBA titles and was the first black NBA head coach. On the court, he transformed his child's game, making it less about scoring and individual athletic excellence and more about thinking, defense and what can only be called strategic shot-blocking: Getting-that-week-s***-outta-here not by swatting it out of bounds, but by tipping the ball to himself to trigger the Celtics lethal fastbreak with a lightning outlet pass.

There has never been anyone quite like him, before or since. On the court or off.

On it, he was a man of conscience playing in a town that had none. Vandals once broke into his Boston home, scrawled racist epithets on the walls and defecated in his bed. And Russell was a Boston icon.

Off the court, he used that icon’s status to answer the racists the way so many African-Americans did in the combustible '60s, the decade of MLK and James Meredith and Freedom Riders and Selma -- and of Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising gloved fists into the Mexico City sky in 1968, a protest that brought down on their heads the wrath of the Olympic authorities. 

And Bill Russell?

He was their kindred soul.

In 1961 he refused to play a game in Lexington, Ky., after he and the other black  Celtics were denied service in a restaurant. Denied service again in a Marion, In., restaurant, he marched down to the mayor’s office and returned the key to the city he’d been given earlier.

He marched with King and backed Ali when he refused induction into the armed forces, sitting at his side along with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Jim Brown and other black athletes. Inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1975, he refused to attend the ceremony or accept his HOF ring for 44 years because he felt the Hall had snubbed other black players.

There was a magnificent stubbornness to that, an adherence to principle that never flagged across the decades. Well into his 80s, the man who stood with Ali tweeted a photo of himself kneeling in solidarity with the NFL players who knelt during the national anthem to protest the gratuitous shooting of blacks in encounters with law enforcement. 

Those players were viciously attacked for that by self-styled "patriots" -- including the then-President of the United States, who called them sons of bitches and said they should all be fired. 

Sixty years ago, I suspect that president and his sad acolytes would have been saying the same things about Russell and Smith and Carlos and Ali and Kareem and Jim Brown, too. And of course MLK and the others.

A lot of those same folks, no doubt, are saying nice things about Bill Russell today, at the same time they're sneering at those who follow his example. I imagine the irony of that is lost on them, as is so much else.

All I know is this: A giant has passed, and he stands even taller than the man a small boy once saw striding through a middling Midwestern airport. And there is such a thing as serendipity.

On the day Bill Russell died, for instance, I was watching an HBO doc about Arthur Ashe. In it there was footage of a news conference Ashe conducted when he was battling South Africa over apartheid. And you know who was sitting next to him?

Sure you do.