Bill Russell

William Felton Russell was born on the twelfth of February 1934 at West Monroe, Louisiana, the second of two sons of Charlie Russell — a paper-bag factory worker — and Katie Russell, a nurse. The family migrated to Oakland in 1943. He attended Hoover Junior High and McClymonds High School in Oakland, growing six feet ten inches by his sixteenth year. He received the only scholarship offered to him — a partial track-and-field scholarship from the University of San Francisco — in 1952 and converted it into a varsity basketball scholarship after his first season at USF.

He led the University of San Francisco Dons to consecutive NCAA national championships in 1955 and 1956. He was the principal centerpiece of the United States Olympic basketball team that won the gold medal at the Melbourne Olympic Games of December 1956. He was drafted second overall by the St. Louis Hawks in the 1956 NBA draft. The Hawks traded his rights to the Boston Celtics on the twenty-ninth of April 1956 — the largest single transaction in NBA franchise history at the time.

He joined the Celtics on the twenty-second of December 1956 — twelve weeks late for the season because of his Olympic commitment. The Celtics won the 1957 NBA Championship — Russell's first — at the close of his rookie season. The Celtics won the following eight NBA championships from 1959 to 1966 and the 1968 and 1969 NBA championships under Russell as player-coach. The eleven championships in thirteen seasons remain the longest dynasty in major North American team-sport history.

He was named the most valuable player of the NBA five times — 1958, 1961, 1962, 1963 and 1965. He held the career rebound record of twenty-one thousand six hundred and twenty rebounds at his retirement in 1969.

He was named player-coach of the Boston Celtics for the 1966-67 season — making him the first African American to serve as head coach of any major North American professional team. He coached the Celtics for three seasons and won championships in two of the three. He returned to head coaching with the Seattle SuperSonics from 1973 to 1977 and the Sacramento Kings from 1987 to 1988.

He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1975 — refusing to attend the induction ceremony as a protest against the Hall's then-pattern of excluding Black contributors. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2011.

He died at Mercer Island, Washington, on the thirty-first of July 2022, at eighty-eight.

He is honored here as the principal architect of the Boston Celtics dynasty.