Bill Russell and Red Auerbach reached an agreement.
Auerbach, the longtime coach of the Boston Celtics, had confided in Russell, his star center, that he planned to retire from coaching. Russell and Auerbach had created a dynasty together, with Russell dominating the track and Auerbach cementing his championship wins with plumes of celebratory cigar smoke.
Each would list their top five favorite coaches to succeed Auerbach and consider any name that made both lists.
No matches found. Auerbach had already approached Russell about taking the job and continuing as a player, but Russell, who had seen the coach confront Auerbach, quickly turned him down.
Now, as he revisited the shortlists, Russell reconsidered his position and decided that no one else, beyond Auerbach, could coach Bill Russell like Bill Russell.
“When Red and I started talking about my becoming a coach, there were some things we didn’t have to say,” Russell wrote in his book about his friendship with Auerbach in 2009. “For example, when I finally they named me publicly, I didn’t know I had just become the first African-American manager in the history of major league sports.”
It was 1966, and the distinction didn’t occur to him until Boston reporters tipped him off. “When I took the job, a reporter wrote seven articles focusing on why I shouldn’t coach the Celtics,” Russell wrote.
Russell, who died Sunday at age 88, would go on to win two championships as the Celtics’ head coach, his 10th and 11th championship rings. He would also coach the Seattle SuperSonics and Sacramento Kings and inspire a generation of black players to try their hand at coaching. The skepticism that accompanied his hiring in Boston is perhaps less of an issue now, but it’s still a factor in whether black people are hired to coach in the NBA today.
Bernie Bickerstaff, who is black, watched Russell take over as Celtics coach just as he was about to enter a life of coaching. He started as an assistant at the University of San Diego under Phil Woolpert, who had coached Russell at the University of San Francisco.
“At the time, you didn’t think about any of that,” said Bickerstaff, who became the SuperSonics’ coach in 1985. “Actually, if you’re sitting there and you’re a young black man at the time, it seemed crazy.” .
Russell the coach imitated Russell the player. He was a longtime civil rights activist who coached the Celtics during the murders of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. “It rubbed a lot of Bostonians the wrong way,” Russell wrote in his 2009 book. “At the time, Boston was a totally segregated city, and I was vehemently opposed to segregation.”
He demanded respect and competed fiercely during a time when he had no assistant coaches. He played and coached the Celtics for three seasons before capping off the NBA’s longest and most successful championship reign.
“That speaks volumes for who he was as a person and as a humanitarian, if you understand the culture of this country, especially in certain places,” said Jim Cleamons, who is black and became the coach of the Dallas Mavericks in 1996.
Al Attles and Lenny Wilkens followed Russell as NBA head coaches of the Negroes. They, like Russell, led teams to championships. It took the rest of the professional sports world a while to catch up. Frank Robinson, a former high school basketball teammate of Russell’s, became the first black manager in Major League Baseball, in Cleveland, in 1975. Art Shell became the first black head coach of the NFL in the modern era for the Oakland Raiders in 1989.
“Bill Russell was an inspiration, period, with coaching,” Bickerstaff said. “But as a human being, in times when it was not popular to be someone of our skin, he stood up and represented. I wasn’t afraid. It was genuine. It was a success. He was a leader on and off the court.”
Russell became the fifth person inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame as a player and coach when he was enshrined as a coach last year.
Then something that seemed far-fetched when Bickerstaff came into training seemed routine. Half of the NBA’s 30 coaches will be black heading into the 2022-23 season, including JB Bickerstaff, Bernie’s son and the coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers.
But as recently as 2020, only four black coaches walked the sidelines of the NBA. “There’s some natural ebb and flow in the hiring and firing, frankly, of coaches, but the numbers are too low right now,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said before the 2020 Finals.
Other sports leagues continued to lag behind. Nearly two decades after Russell won his first championship as a manager, Al Campanis, a Los Angeles Dodgers executive, expressed doubts about the ability of blacks to hold managerial-level positions.
“I don’t think it’s a prejudice,” Campanis said in an interview on ABC’s “Nightline” in 1987. “I really think maybe they don’t have some of the requisites to be, let’s say, a field manager, or maybe a general. manager.”
MLB recently marked the 75th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s major league debut, but only two of its current managers, Dusty Baker of Houston and Dave Roberts of the Dodgers, are black.
In the NFL, Brian Flores, the former coach of the Miami Dolphins, recently sued the league for discriminatory hiring practices. Flores is the son of Honduran immigrants. The NFL created a diversity advisory committee and mandated that every team hire a minority offensive coach after Flores’ lawsuit.
Russell didn’t often talk about being the first black coach in a major sports league. But after his hiring, he felt the stress that awaited him as “the first black coach,” as he wrote in his book.
The hope that his relationship with Auerbach would evolve from a superficial coach-player bond to a deeper friendship comforted him.
“So I began to look forward to it,” he wrote.
Russell left the Celtics in 1969, but took over the SuperSonics from 1973 to 1977. He guided Seattle to the franchise’s first playoff appearance, but the success he found in Boston eluded him.
Russell coached one final season with the Sacramento Kings in 1987-88 before being fired and moved into the front office after a 17-41 start.
“With a lot of really great players, it was hard for him to understand why regular players didn’t have the same drive, focus and commitment to win that he did,” Jerry Reynolds, Russell’s assistant with the Kings, said in an interview Sunday. “Not a lot of people are wired like that. That’s why they’re great. In some ways, it was hard for him to understand that. Most guys wanted to win. They didn’t have the need to win every game like he did.”
All the while, Russell stayed true to who he was while training.
Bickerstaff recalled that Russell offered one of Woolpert’s sons a set of golf clubs instead of signing his autograph, an act Russell was known to adamantly reject throughout his career.
Cleamons said a booster introduced his high school team to Russell shortly after it won the Ohio state championship. Russell barely looked up from his soup. He hated being interrupted from a meal.
Cleamons understood the mindset after reading Russell’s autobiography.
Before he was seen as a basketball player, before he was seen as a coach, Russell wanted to be seen as a human being.
“He was kind of like Muhammad Ali,” Reynolds said. “He was always who he was. Society and people have changed. Things changed to fit more the way it should have been all along.”