by John Taylor
After the game, DeJulio went over to talk to Russell’s coach, George Powles. “I swear if we could train that kid, he’d make a great player,” DeJulio said. “Is he as good as I think he is?”
“He’s good,” Powles said.
“Is he intelligent?”
“Yes, he is.”
“Can he make Division One?”
“He’s got a long way to go.”
DeJulio then talked to Phil Woolpert, San Francisco’s basketball coach, emphasizing the fact that Russell seemed the type of player who would fit into the controlled, defensive game Woolpert favored. The university was a small school, with only three thousand students and a limited athletic budget, but it had a few scholarships available, and Woolpert told DeJulio that he was willing to give the scout’s discovery a tryout. DeJulio drove over to the Russells’ apartment in a project in largely black West Oakland. Russell answered the door.
“I’m Hal DeJulio from USF,” DeJulio said.
“What’s USF?” Russell asked.
He had never heard of the place. Nonetheless, as soon as DeJulio, somewhat irritably, described the university and the possibility of a basketball scholarship, Russell became so excited he almost started trembling. He was about to graduate, and he had not received even a letter of interest, much less an actual offer, from a single other school.
WEST MONROE, where Bill Russell was born and where he spent his early years, was across the Ouachita River from Monroe, the chief market town in northeastern Louisiana, a region of cotton, soybeans, timber, and cattle that was more similar to neighboring Mississippi than to the state’s southern Cajun country. It was a drab, featureless city of feedlots and warehouses where segregation was rigidly enforced. A policeman once threatened to jail Russell’s stylish mother, Katie, for dressing like a white woman, and one evening a group of white men, just for the fun of watching him run, took potshots at Russell’s father, Charles, when he was walking home. Like blacks throughout the South at the time, Russell’s father, who’d left school at the age of fifteen, had no choice but to work as a field hand or take a service job. He became a janitor in a factory that manufactured paper bags—what Russell would later refer to as a “Negro job.” But then in the early forties, preparations for America’s involvement in World War II created economic opportunities elsewhere in the country, and when Bill was nine, his father moved the family to Oakland, a gritty, noisy city with a thriving waterfront of cranes, docks, and shipyards.
Charles Russell became an independent trucker, hauling laborers out to the San Joaquin Valley and produce back to town. He was a stern, hard man who despised self-pity, and Russell counted on his mother for affection. But when Russell was twelve, and his mother was thirty-two, she came down with the flu and suddenly and unexpectedly died of kidney failure. The extended Russell family urged Russell’s father to move back to Louisiana or at least send his two sons to live with relatives, but he refused. Instead, insisting on raising his boys himself, he gave up his trucking business, since it required that he spend too many hours on the road, and took a job pouring molten iron in a foundry for forty dollars a week.
Bill’s brother Charlie, a promising athlete, was selected to enroll in Oakland Tech, a prestigious, predominantly white high school, but Russell was a gangly, awkward adolescent with poor grades who’d become moody and withdrawn after his mother’s death, and he had no choice but to attend McClymonds High, a nominally integrated school that was in fact predominantly black, with some Japanese and Mexicans and a handful of whites. George Powles, the white coach of the junior varsity basketball team, sensed some potential in the sullen, defeated young man, and he suggested Russell try out for it.
Russell had absolutely no idea what to do with the ball and was the worst of the sixteen players who tried out for the team, but he could clearly run and jump, Powles saw, and he had extremely large hands, measuring ten and a half inches from wrist to fingertip. Although the team normally had only fifteen players—and fifteen uniforms for them to wear—Powles made Russell the sixteenth player. He and a kid named Roland Campbell shared a uniform, playing in one game and sitting in the stands the next.
At first, even when he was suited up, Russell spent most of his time on the bench. On the occasions that he did take the court, he moved so awkwardly that he provoked derisive cheers from the spectators. But Powles still had faith in Russell and encouraged him to join the Boys Club to get in more practice—even giving him the two-dollar membership fee. Russell began going there every day after school to shoot and scrimmage. That work, together with a delayed growth spurt, paid off, and Russell became an adequate if still undistinguished basketball player.
In his junior year, Powles was made coach of the varsity team. Russell tried out again for the junior varsity but was cut by the new coach. When Powles heard this, he suggested Russell try out for the varsity team.
“What good will it do?” Russell asked. “I can’t even make the jayvees.”
“I think you’ve got the makings of a good basketball player,” Powles said, “and I want you to come out for the varsity.”
“Those guys are better than I am,” Russell said.
“Son, remember this,” Powles said, “if you think the other guy is better than you are, he will be.”
For the sixteen-year-old Russell, the coach’s words had the force of revelation, and he never forgot them. Powles gave Russell a slot on the team. All but one of the players were black, and Powles told them that because of this, the white referees would hold them to a higher standard than white teams, and white players would try to provoke them into fights, confident that the officials would take their side. “If you play like the rest of the teams, you’re going to be called roughnecks and dirty and worse,” Powles said. “If another team has a fight, it will be called a melee. If you get into a fight, it’s a riot. So we’re not going to get into any fights. We’re going to play good clean basketball.”
No white person had ever spoken so candidly to him about race, and Powles’s talk provided another lesson that Russell never forgot. He continued to develop, and to grow, so quickly in fact that he outgrew his clothes in four months and needed new ones. In his senior year, his team displayed enough talent to contend for, and eventually win, the city championship. Russell would not be there for the finals, however. He had been such a good student in Louisiana, back when his mother was alive and had supervised his homework, that he had been put half a year ahead when he moved to Oakland, which meant he graduated in January, in the middle of the basketball season. He had never scored more than ten points in a game, but then in the last match of his high school career, against Truman Bruce and Oakland High, with—though he had no way of knowing it—scout Hal DeJulio sitting in the stands, something clicked and he reeled off fourteen points in two clutch spurts.
EVERY YEAR, a man named Brick Swegle, with backing from the Oakland Jaycees, put together a team called the California High School All-Stars and took them on an exhibition tour of the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. The month-long excursion occurred in January and consisted solely of high school seniors who were known as “splitters” because they were graduating in the middle of the year. Russell was the only splitter on his team and therefore the only one eligible to join the all-stars. Since McClymonds had one of the top teams in the region, Brick Swegle wanted a player from the school on his all-stars and so he invited Russell.
The team traveled by Greyhound bus, playing a game against a local high school or college team in one small town, then hiking to the bus station and waiting for the next scheduled bus to take them to the next town on the tour. For an entire month, Russell had nothing to do except play, talk, and think basketball. For all George Powles’s encouragement, Russell’s high school coach had not been a font of technical expertise, and Russell for the first time found himself seriously analyzing the game. One of his teammates, Bill Treu, was an accomplished ball handler, and another, Eural McKelvey, stood out for his rebounding. Ru
ssell spent hours talking with them about the way they played. In his mind, he broke down their moves into component parts until he could visualize the entire sequence. Once he’d done that he found he could go on the court and imitate them.
But Russell was not a ball handler, so he stopped imitating Treu’s dribbling maneuvers and began instead to envision moves he could use to defend against the guy. The first time he tried out one of these moves he’d mapped out in his head—it was an original move, not one he’d seen another player perform—he was astounded by its success, and he realized that his best chance to distinguish himself as a player might be by concentrating on defense. He also realized that being left-handed gave him an additional defensive advantage. Since most players shot with their right hand, his left was naturally positioned to rise up and block the shot. Russell began blocking shots aggressively. It was a playground move discouraged by coaches because the man with the ball could fake, sending the shot blocker leaping into the air, and then spin around him toward the basket. Brick Swegle, however, let Russell try to block as many shots as he wanted.
Going up for blocked shots, Russell came to appreciate for the first time how high he could jump. He and a group of players would all go up for the ball at the same time, and a moment would come when Russell’s head was above everyone else’s, and when he was still rising into the air while they had begun to fall back to the ground. He began refining his jump, and by the end of the tour, he had developed such a distinctive way of playing the game that his teammates were referring to “Russell moves.”
When Russell returned from his trip through the Pacific Northwest, he went down to the San Francisco Naval Shipyard and applied for a job as an apprentice sheet-metal worker. Russell’s father had promised his mother that he would send his son to college, but Charles simply lacked the money to pay for the tuition and Bill’s grades were not good enough for an academic scholarship. Then came the visit from Hal DeJulio and the invitation to try out for the University of San Francisco basketball team.
After Russell played a scrimmage game with the team, Phil Woolpert, San Francisco’s coach, kept his feelings to himself, telling Russell only that the school would let him know if it could provide him a scholarship. In the meantime, Russell started working at the naval yard. He also played basketball in the evening and one night took part in a game between McClymonds alumni and the high school’s varsity team. It was his first chance to demonstrate before a crowd the moves he’d developed on Brick Swegle’s all-star tour. His adrenaline was pumping so strongly that at one point, standing under the backboard, he leaped up to take a jump shot and for the first time in his life he found himself, for an instant, looking down into the basket. He was so startled that he completely missed the shot. He thought it might have been a fluke, but then, in the second half, he did it again, intentionally this time. Looking down into the hoop, through the net, he saw hardwood.
Eventually, Russell received a letter from the University of San Francisco offering him a full scholarship. Unlike Wilt Chamberlain, who was to be deluged with offers, Russell received only this offer. “We didn’t think much about Russell,” recalled Bob Feerick, then the coach at the University of Santa Clara. “He was a kid over at McClymonds. He was small. He was nothing. He grew up after he got to college.”
The offer from USF, Russell would always feel, was largely a fluke. In fact, what ultimately led to Russell enrolling in San Francisco was largely a series of flukes: his father’s unconventional decision to raise his two sons himself instead of turning them over to relatives in Monroe, where Russell would probably never have learned to play basketball, or at least would never have been encouraged by a white coach and spotted by a white scout; junior varsity coach George Powles charitably allowing him to become the sixteenth man on a fifteen-man team; Hal DeJulio’s decision to scout Truman Bruce in a game in which Russell just happened to score his career high of fourteen points. Had any of those decisions turned out differently, Russell would probably have become a sheet-metal worker instead of a professional basketball player. Unlike Chamberlain, who had been considered an extraordinary athlete ever since he was in fourth grade and had come to feel entitled to acclaim, Russell understood from the outset how lucky he was to be where he was, and he knew how hard he would have to work to stay there. San Francisco was his one chance, he realized, the one chance he’d ever get, and he was determined to make the most of it.
PHIL WOOLPERT, the San Francisco basketball coach, was a lean, fine-boned man with black-frame glasses and receding hair who chewed gum and had a nervous stomach and a dry, deadpan manner. He had been at San Francisco for three years when Russell enrolled, and though San Francisco had won the National Invitational Tournament in 1949 under Pete Newell, Woolpert’s won-lost record was so discouraging that one alumnus had called him a “lousy coach” to his face and he had threatened to quit. The performance of his teams was not entirely his fault. While San Francisco, run by the Jesuits, was a small school, the budget for the athletic department was even less than might be expected. It had once been a football powerhouse, but in the late forties its coach had been forced to resign when it was discovered that twenty-two members of the football team had received illegal payments. The Jesuit administrators, concerned about the corrupting influence of sports on higher education, had discontinued the varsity football program and reduced the athletic budget.
Woolpert was unable to scout nationally or compete with bigger schools for the top players; his recruiting was restricted to the San Francisco Bay Area. His team, which had no auditorium of its own, practiced in an ancient gym with cracked windows and warped floorboards. When other teams visited, Woolpert rented the pavilion at Kezar Stadium, an aging facility run by the city, or the San Jose Auditorium or, if it was a high-profile team, the Cow Palace. The team’s official name, in tribute to the Jesuits, was the Dons, but they were known as the “Homeless Dons.” The team manager joked that on train trips he had to hide in the bathroom because the team couldn’t afford his ticket.
But Woolpert, in another one of the small acts of fortune that marked Russell’s career at this point, favored a basketball system ideally suited to his new player. Woolpert scorned a high-speed offensive game as “jackrabbit basketball.” “To me, run-and-shoot, jackrabbit basketball is only half a game,” he explained to an acquaintance. “It’s like the Yankees taking batting practice and calling it a baseball game.” Instead, Woolpert emphasized defense. He drilled his team to slow down their opponents, to crowd them, to cut off their patterns, to break up their drives, and to steal their balls. He believed that if his teams could do this they could destroy the confidence of their opponents, and that was a more sure route to victory than trying to keep pace basket for basket.
The university had offered Russell tuition, room and board, and a part-time job in the cafeteria. Regarding his athletic scholarship as little more than an unexpected opportunity to acquire a college education, he majored in accounting, then, because he’d been fascinated by the trains of the Southern Railways that had thundered through Monroe, switched to transportation. Basketball, he thought, was just an extracurricular activity. Even so, he was determined and eager to improve, and he had much to improve upon. When he first arrived, his basketball skills were so limited that he did not even have a hook shot. He spent hours a day working one-on-one with freshman coach Ross Guidice, who introduced him to basketball strategy, teaching him how to set screens, time passes, and toss in a hook shot. He often stayed in the gym until midnight or later, taking five hundred left-handed hook shots and another five hundred right-handed hook shots.
Russell was assigned to room with K. C. Jones, a sophomore who also had a basketball scholarship. Jones was a painfully shy, monosyllabic young man who had gone to San Francisco’s Commerce High School, but the interest he and Russell shared in basketball soon made the two of them inseparable. They broke down basketball into its geometrical components: points, lines, arcs, and angles. They decided that the ho
rizontal aspects of the game, the lines up the court and down the court, were more important than the vertical aspects, the lines from the court to the baskets—that timing and speed trumped height. They talked about the mechanics of jumping, dribbling, rebounding, and shooting. They analyzed other players and their weaknesses and discussed how to exploit them. They invented plays. Russell felt as if they were creating a large database, each discovery building on the one before, improvising an extended formula for success on the court. He also read every newspaper and magazine article he could find on basketball, studied the photographs of players in action, pondered the remarks they made to reporters, and absorbed the details of their routines and styles, filling his room in the process with stacks of Sport and The Sporting News.
To everyone’s surprise, Russell continued to grow at a phenomenal rate. When he arrived at San Francisco, he had stood a tall but not startling six feet five and had weighed 158 pounds. “A real mass of muscles,” he liked to joke. By the start of his sophomore year in college, when he first played on the varsity team, he had shot up to six feet nine, which meant—though Woolpert had no way of knowing this would turn out to be the case when he had offered him the scholarship—that he was now one of the tallest players in San Francisco’s conference. “When Bill Russell registered for his first basketball practice,” Woolpert said later, “I gave him only one instruction: ‘Grow to seven feet and you’ll be unbeatable.’ He did and he was. I’m a coaching genius.”