LEADER PROFILE THREE
BILL RUSSELL
Bill Russell was named the Most Valuable Player of the NBA five times.
But that is not why he is remembered as one of the greatest players in the history of basketball.
He is remembered that way because he is the most successful athlete in the history of team sports, having won eleven world championships in twelve years as the center for the Boston Celtics. This came on the heels of winning two NCAA titles in college at the University of San Francisco and being the cornerstone of a U.S. Olympic team that won a gold medal in 1956.
Was all this winning just a coincidence?
Hardly.
It was a result of Russell’s belief in winning as the ultimate form of athletic expression and his awareness at a relatively young age that, in order to best give his team a chance to win, he had to subordinate some of his individual goals. It is this awareness that runs all through Russell’s career, his realization that being a leader meant doing the most he could do to ensure his team’s success.
It’s a realization he talks about in his memoir, Second Wind. “In order to win you have to get yourself past a lot of things that may not be vital to winning but make you feel good, like scoring points,” he writes.
It was a lesson he first learned as a sophomore at the University of San Francisco. That was his breakthrough year as a basketball player, the year, he writes, “I decided I was going to be a great basketball player.” The epiphany happened at halftime early in the season in a game in Provo, Utah, when, after challenged at halftime by his coach, he went out for the second half and “everything inside me poured itself into that decision, all the anger and wonder joined together.”
Russell became a dominant player that year.
“But I couldn’t have cared less about the coach or any of the other players. At the end of the season I looked up and saw that we made a mediocre record of 14–7 even though we had enough talent to be one of the best teams in the country.”
Russell never forget that lesson, never forgot his sophomore year at San Francisco when the team was riddled with dissension. “I was part of it. I was not strong enough to change the atmosphere for the better and the team wasn’t strong enough to change me, so we feuded.”
After that season, he vowed to never again concentrate on individual goals at the expense of the team. He had learned how important team chemistry was, a lesson he took with him throughout the rest of his career. It also colored his attitudes about individual honors in what is so clearly a team sport, a sport in which success depends upon everyone’s individual games blending together to form a more powerful whole.
That’s why Russell enjoyed playing with the Celtics so much, for they were the very definition of team. The Celtics, during the Russell years, were the epitome of team. Everyone had their roles; everyone was comfortable with their roles. More importantly, the sum of the individual roles added up to the best whole in the game.
Russell admits that when he first entered the pros he had a very limited offensive game, with little confidence in his shooting ability.
“But I did think I could help win games,” he writes, “and that’s what I tried to concentrate on. Everything else would follow.” Russell also said that the Celtics—along with their legendary coach Red Auerbach—understood what it took to win. They understood that if everyone was always trying to score they would not be as good, so they concentrated on what they did well, and it was that combination of skills that made the Celtics a great team, even though there were other teams in that era that might have had more scorers. It is Russell’s contention that the Celtics came to care more about winning than anything else, and that was rare.
“One of the first things Red told me when I joined the team,” he writes in Second Wind, “was that he was counting on me to get the ball to (Bob) Cousy or (Bill) Sharman for the fast break. This, plus defense, was to be my fundamental role on the team, and as long as I performed these functions well he would never pressure me to score more points. He also promised that he would never discuss statistics in salary negotiations.
“This one conversation accomplished as much as a whole season’s worth of tactical coaching. It showed me that Red knew what he was talking about; he was asking me to do what I did best and at the same time what the Celtics needed most. In addition, he removed a lot of the pressure I felt about scoring more. All that was to the good. If he’d said to me, ‘What we need from you is twenty-five points a game,’ I might have been able to do that, but we wouldn’t have won much.”