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

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

He laughs his famous laugh, and for those few moments his hotel room rattles like an echo chamber. Russell lives full time in Seattle, but he has returned to Boston for this weekend in June to receive an honorary degree from Harvard.

It would be easy to promote his career at the expense of modern NBA players, to point out their deficiencies in order to emphasis his fundamental strengths. But Russell doesn't go there. On the contrary, he is protective of those who are trying to emulate him despite the pressures.

"I talk to all the rookies during their orientation week,'' he says. "I say to them, 'You're the caretakers.' It's up to the players to conduct themselves in a way that there'll always be an NBA. It's like if you watch TV and these talking heads are telling you what LeBron James should be doing. Well, they don't know what he should be doing. Like this year, I was personally offended when he went down the middle and passed the ball off, which was the exact thing he should have done.''

Russell was referring to Game 1 of last season's Eastern Conference finals when James passed up what would have been a contested shot near the basket in order to feed Donyell Marshall for a potential go-ahead three-pointer from the corner with 5.9 seconds left. Marshall missed, the Cavaliers lost to the Pistons 79-76 and James was second-guessed for not taking it all the way to the rim.

"Here's a guy who shoots that shot,'' Russell says of Marshall, a proven three-point shooter. "That's not just a uniform over there that I pass the ball to. And now all you're doing is presenting an opportunity for him to do well in what he does best. To criticize him for that, who gives a [bleep] what you think?

"Michael, I remember, he passed off to [Steve] Kerr [for a game-winning shot in the NBA Finals]. You have to know your team and who can do what. If you know there's not a good chance of this guy making it, then you go do it. But over the years you've got to know your team and which guys can perform under pressure.''

Russell tells a story from his final year as player/coach of the Celtics in 1968-69. He says he took the stats home at the end of the regular season and realized that his team had lost 17 games by three points or fewer, resulting in their No. 4 conference seed going into the playoffs.

"I go to practice the next day,'' Russell recalls, "and I say, 'Listen, guys, I think it's because we've never had a last-second-shot play. Red [Auerbach] never put one in. We've never had one. So I want you to go back to your college days, or even in high school, I don't care. Did any of your coaches ever have a play for a last-second shot?' So three guys came up with plays. And I decided to use the one from Ohio State from [Larry] Siegfried and Havlicek. So we worked the next four hours running that play. And the first time we ran it, it took 27 seconds. When we left the gym, we could run it in seven seconds.

In Game 4 of the NBA Finals against the favored Lakers, who led 2-1, the Celtics were trailing by a point when they intercepted an inbounds pass. "We call timeout, seven seconds left,'' Russell says. "So now we know the play. This is the shooting order: Sam, I think Havlicek, Siegfried, Bailey [Howell] and [Don] Nelson. I took myself out because it's going to be a 15-foot shot, and I shouldn't be out there looking for a 15-foot shot.''

continued at Part III......

source : sportsillustrated.cnn.com

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

BOSTON -- His golf cap does not quite hide his full head of hair, the typical paunch is absent from his flat belly, and a worn championship ring weighs down each hand as 73-year-old Bill Russell devours the plate of steak and scrambled eggs from the edge of the coffee table between his perched knees. He laughs as always with the decibelic force of a ghost brought back to life.

He still is who he was. He was the best and he always will be just that, no more or no less.

He realizes that people don't know what to make of him anymore.

"It's like Wilt's 50 points a game,'' Russell says of his friend Chamberlain's unimaginable 50.4 scoring average over 80 games in 1961-62. "My eight [NBA championships] in a row -- or 11 [in 13 seasons overall] -- is so far removed for most people, it's like it never happened. I get the feeling that people think that these guys from Mars came down, won eight NBA championships and went back.'' His amused smile makes clear that he isn't taking it personally.

They put on a night to honor Russell's career a few years ago in the big downtown Boston arena that has replaced the old Garden. Wilt was there, not long before his death, as was commissioner David Stern. Michael Jordan sent a video in which he tried to joke that it was harder for him to win his six championships against the 26 more teams of his era than it had been for Russell, who was competing against 13 teams when he retired in 1969. Stern, to his credit, argued the other side: When it was his turn to speak, he pointed out that Russell's achievements were more striking because the NBA's talent was far more concentrated in the 1960s -- an admission that expansion has diluted the league.

"When I was a rookie," Russell says, "there were eight teams in the NBA, and 10 men to a squad. There were 80 jobs in professional basketball. My [third] year I had four guards, four forwards and two centers. All four of my guards are in the Hall of Fame now: K.C. [Jones], Sam [Jones], [Bill] Sharman and [Bob] Cousy. So when we went to the bench we didn't get hurt -- at all.''

Russell is hoping to create a similar environment with his first fantasy camp this fall. It will be held Oct. 17-20 at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, and his camp "staff'' will include some of the greatest players of all time: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Charles Barkley, Clyde Drexler, Julius Erving, John Havlicek, Magic Johnson, Sam Jones, Ann Meyers Drysdale, Oscar Robertson and Jerry West. Adults can play in their company for four days at a price of $15,000, which is in the ballpark of what some NBA players were making in Russell's era.

"Basically it's a fantasy camp for me,'' Russell says. "I want to go to this fantasy camp and have all of these guys here.''

Why is it that the best performers in sports so often wind up becoming the best of friends?

"We have the same experiences with the same -- if you want to call them -- pressures,'' he says. "And most of that pressure is internal. You're going to go play, and you can't tell anybody else in the room about it, but you know if you're not going to play well, we're going to get our ass kicked.''

continued at part II......

source : sportsillustrated.cnn.com