Bill Russell is back.
The legend never left (although some are just now realizing that), but as the Black Lives Matter movement forces a national reckoning with international reverberations, many the world over are (re)discovering Bill Russell.
The activist and Basketball Hall of Famer won the NBA Championship 11 times with my hometown Boston Celtics and has numerous accolades on and off-court. Yet, Russell has taken on new relevancy in retirement. It started a few years ago when he joined Twitter, and as I reported for VICE Sports in 2018, became newly discovered as twenty-first century social media-savvy NBA fans around the world tuned in. But it has crescendoed in the last few months, including an op-ed in the Boston Globe on his hopes that 2020 is finally the game changer in the country’s longstanding issues with institutional racism and discrimination, and a retrospective essay as part of SLAM’s Black Lives Matter issue last month.
Russell is rightly noted for his off-court achievements, a lifetime activist fighting against second-class citizenship. Much is made of his support of Muhammad Ali and stances as the Civil Rights Movement bore fruit. But often forgotten is how Russell’s fight for equal treatment took form earlier in his career.
I recently re-read Aram Goudsouzian’s biography of Russell, King of the Court, and his chapter “The Amateur” struck a chord. It’s a good snapshot of Russell’s early years of protest, politics and sports as Goudsouzian unpacks events that led up to an during the 1956 Olympic basketball tournament. Russell and a team of recent USF hoops graduates traveled to Latin America during the Olympic trials and, much to the U.S. Department of State’s delight, regaled crowds, dignitaries, and the media in their 30-game tour across the continent. As Goudsouzian notes, “the racially integrated USF team seemed ideal emissaries of American democracy.” (p57)
FIBA wrote a great post about Russell and the 1956 Olympics in May (here).
It is an example of sports diplomacy, the way Russell and the USF squad communicated, represented, and negotiated about U.S. culture and attitudes with/amongst Latin American publics. And it is also an example of how Russell, likely unknowingly, laid the groundwork for an international footprint that more than 60 years later, remains an emissary of U.S. democracy.