Bill Russell stopped for a red light in his shiny Lincoln.
Russell had recently delivered a third championship to the city of Boston. It was the dawn of a new decade, the 1960s, and Russell was basketball’s premier player and the first Black superstar in the NBA.
As he sat at the red light, a white man walked up to him and began shouting.
“Hey, n****r, how many crap games did it take for you to win that car?” Russell, in his 1966 autobiography, Go Up For Glory, recalled the man yelling.
Inside of Boston Garden, where Russell was flanked by mostly white teammates, the atmosphere was always full of energy. Fans cheered loudly for Russell to bring ever more glory to the Celtics.
Outside the arena, they screamed just as loudly at him, albeit mostly shouts to get out of their neighborhoods, wait his turn in their stores, tell him he can’t eat at their restaurants.
“Many of the same people who cheered me at Boston Garden reacted in horror when I tried to purchase a home in the all-white suburb of Reading,” Russell wrote. “My wife, Rose, came home in tears as she watched residents sign a petition against the sale.”
Russell and his family returned from vacation to that same home and found it ransacked and the N-word painted on the walls in human feces.
The rage he felt was indescribable and insatiable. Russell later said he felt like the only way he could combat the idea he was less valid as a human being due to the color of his skin was to win championships.
Russell wanted to win titles so his achievements would be an undeniable historical fact, and could not be erased by racist pundits.
By the time the guy shouted Russell down in his Lincoln, he’d already won two NCAA championships, an Olympic Gold Medal, and three NBA championships.
Russell won eight more NBA championships after that incident, and became the first Black coach of a professional sports team and an icon in the Civil Rights movement.
Russell’s status as a champion made him impossible to ignore. Where others could be told to know their place and be silent, Russell’s place on top of the mountain shielded him from such marginalization.
He was not alone. When Muhummad Ali declined to serve in the United States’ armed services in Vietnam he did so on the strength of two things: One was general principal (“No Viet Cong ever called me Ni***r”, he said) and the other was what he carried around his waist, the heavyweight championship of the world. The championship belt allowed him to stand on principles when others could not.
Russell, UCLA student Lew Alcindor (later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and recently retired NFL icon Jim Brown flanked Ali at a press conference when Ali faced imprisonment for his war refusal.
Each of the players were current or recent champions in their sports and all of them used their championship status as a shield against the racism and segregation they faced.
“Ring Culture” back then wasn’t some ESPN talk show segment. It has its roots in racism and the Civil Rights movement.
At its origin, it was not meant to deride the star player who loses all the time; it most certainly was not any part of any then-nonexistent GOAT debate.
It was simply this: Being a champion was something that Black players could do that white people could never erase.
By the time Russell was finished he had won 11 championships in 13 years, traumatized a generation of greats like Jerry West and Elgin Baylor who were unable to dethrone him, and the Boston Celtics became synonymous with winning.
In 1979, the Celtics’ top rookie Larry Bird took the floor for the first time. Out west, the Lakers rookie guard Magic Johnson did as well.
The two were on a perennial collision course dating back to their last year in college. Neither was willing to cede ground to the other. For Magic and Bird, winning the championship didn’t even count unless it was at the direct expense of the other.
No NBA Finals were played in the 1980s that did not feature either Magic Johnson or Larry Bird. If you were a would-be NBA superstar and you wanted validation in life, you had to crash that party. You could have the flashiest moves on the playground like Isiah Thomas or the most breathtaking athleticism like Michael Jordan. It didn’t matter. Magic and Bird were at the top and you were not, unless you did something about your championship resume.
That last point leads us to where we are today. Recently, LeBron James and Steve Nash took to a podcast where Nash nodded along as LeBron lamented the unfairness of “ring culture.”
LeBron said it is only in the NBA where this is true, and it is just so appalling.
The trickle down effect of all that winning meant that a generation viewed validation as only accompanying a championship parade.
LeBron, who set in motion a firestorm of ring culture debate (and even more boorish GOAT debate), certainly knows better than to act like he didn’t bask in his own championship glory. He reached for his first trophy like a newborn child in 2012 and remarked that his 2016 championship made him the greatest of all time.
Why, then, is he suddenly out on ring culture? Because he simply realized he can’t overtake the great Michael Jordan in championship wins and, therefore, can’t ever be the true GOAT.
That’s how far things have fallen since Russell needed to win just so that people viewed him as an equal human being.
