When I think of greatness, I think of the things one had to overcome. The mountains that one had to climb, the dragons one had to slay in order to achieve one's goals. Given this as a premise ( and some may argue it's a faulty one) and the courage and determination the premise implies, Bill Russell makes le bron james look like a little boy.
My screen name is actually a misnomer. I attended my first Celts game on a Saturday in the fall of 1959 vs Wilt'sWarriors. (Honestly, I was a little kid and I dont remember much about the game except the hotdogs and the popcorn and that our Celts won and my dad screaming some bad things at Wilt.) I think that I was vain in creating my screen name and not wanting to own up to being a csfsnsince50s.
Anyway, I followed the Cs ever since, maybe going to 2-3 games a year but always listening to the "fiddling and diddling " on the radio and the sports pages and the very, very infrequent TV games.
I didn't know a lot about Bill Russell, the person, back in the 60s. His struggles against racism, his political sensitivity and attuness and consequent personal struggles, his background of almost not making his high school team and the lack of interest in his basketball by colleges.
His greatness to me doesn't come from winning 11 titles alone. It comes from all the adversity he had to overcome to get to the position were he got a chance to win titles.
His last two titles to me are the most impressive, and from a sports perspective I fully understood their greatness even then. In '68 at age 34 the Cs were down 3-1 to Wilts now ' 6ers and became at the time the first team to ever come back and win a series after being down 3-1 , led by a determined, clutch Russell in a real frantic finish. He held Wilt to 2 shots in the 2nd Half of game 7. They then went on to beat the Lakers in six.
In '69, as 4th seed and stumbling to the regular season finish, the Russell coached and inspired Cs beat favored Philly and New York and then beat the Heavily favored Wilt/Elgin /Logo original Big 3 Lakers in a 7 game Tong war. Russ had 21 rebounds in that game 7.
THATS determination....THAT's courage.... When the anointed one (sickening) who has had everything handed to him accomplishes anything remotely similar to that, get back to me.
