Rusell Talks The Legacy, LeBron And -- Of Course -- The C's (Part III)

The Lakers must not have known what to make of it. With Russell on the bench, Chamberlain was left with no one to guard. Sam Jones made the game-winning shot, and Russell eventually won his 11th championship.

"That was one of my major achievements as a coach,'' he says. "What I learned from playing for Red was: Almost everything that could happen, he anticipated, and he had a decision for it. With the guys we had, we didn't have to put in a [last-second] play.

"But I felt it was my duty to my team to try to anticipate contingencies. When I see a guy with a board and he's going like this'' -- and here Russell emulates a coach drawing wildly on a greaseboard during a timeout at the end of a tight game -- "they're screwed.''

More laughter.

"When you do that, everybody's guessing," he says. "The key to making good plays work is the timing. Is this guy going to do this or that? If you have it pre-planned, you have a much better chance at success.''

Russell acknowledges that his education was different from today's players. "My junior year [at the University of San Francisco] we had one of the best years in basketball: We were 28-1, we won the Final Four, as they call it now, and I was outstanding player of the Final Four,'' he says. "I averaged 20 points and 20 rebounds a game for the whole year. They didn't count blocked shots; they never counted blocked shots till four or five years after I retired.

"But I would confidently say that I blocked in college at least 15 shots a game. I had advantages because most of the players had never seen it. I had never seen a shot blocked when I was learning to play basketball. I didn't even know what it was. And my first day of [high school] practice in junior varsity, my coach, who did not like basketball but was a great man, brought the rule book to practice. Our very first practice there was no running, no jumping, no shooting. Just we're going to learn the rules.''

Russell, who as a 22-year-old would be ranked the No. 7 high jumper in the world, learned from the rule book that he was entitled to swat at his opponents' shots before the ball reached its apex.

"So when I get to college, our first game was against California-Berkeley, and the center was preseason All-America,'' Russell says. "And I blocked the first six shots he took. Timeout, of course. They went into the huddle and said, 'What are we going to do, what is this?' We get into our huddle and my coach says to me, 'You can't play defense like that.' That's the honest-to-God truth what he said. I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'That's not the way to play defense. A good defensive player never leaves his feet.'

"And he says, 'What I want you to do is I want you to half-man him and deny him the ball.' So I try that, and his point guard takes two dribbles to his right and drops a bounce pass, the guy catches and turns, I'm on his back out of the defense, and so he shoots three layups in a row. I said, 'This don't make sense. I do it this way and I stop him. I do it that way and he goes in for layups? And this is how he wants me to play?'

"So we fought for the next three years. Because to me it was dumbing me down. So what I do the next three years is to play it enough to just keep him from kicking me off the team, and still playing the way I thought I should play. So I had to play it with a disguise so it looked like I was playing the way he wanted me to play.''

Russell learned to steer his man into positions where he could block the shot or intercept the pass. He spent a lot of time conniving and inventing ways to play the game, but when he retired in 1969, that was it.

"I've never played a game since then,'' he says.

Has he missed playing?

"No.''

How can he do something so well for so long and then not miss it?

"Let me put it this way: What kind of high school career did you have? Did you have fun?''

Yes.

"Do you want to go back?''

No.

His ensuing laughter is what I will remember most from my afternoon with Bill Russell.

"I played enough games,'' he says. "I played the correct number of games, not one too many, not one too few. And what I call my final victory was I decided when I leave.''

More information on Russell's fantasy camp can be found at www.friendsofbillrussell.com.

source : sportsillustrated.cnn.com