Bill Russell

Bill Russell was born to Charles Russell and Katie King in Monroe, Louisiana in 1934. Racism was pervasive in Louisiana at the time, and a dangerous confrontation with a white man led Russell's father—who was known as Mr. Charlie—to move his family to the North. After a brief stop in Detroit, Michigan, Russell, his parents and his older brother Charlie, settled in Oakland, California's black ghetto. Mr. Charlie set up his own trucking company, and Russell and his brother entered Oakland's public schools. When he was twelve, tragedy struck. Russell's mother passed away after a brief illness. Mr. Charlie gave up his company to be with his children while Russell retreated into the solace of books at the public library. A book about the life of Henri Christophe, a slave who led an insurrection and became emperor of Haiti, made an impression that remained with him throughout his life.

Bill Russell

Russell first played basketball on Oakland's playgrounds. As a child and teen, he gave the impression of being a uniquely untalented athlete. His brother was making himself a star player at Oakland Tech, a mostly white high school; in grade school Bill, however, could not make the basketball team, the football team or even the cheerleading squad. When his studies faltered after the death of his mother, Bill was unable to gain admission to Oakland Tech, and had to enroll instead in a neighborhood school, McClymonds High. Although he washed out of the junior varsity basketball team a freshman, attending McClymonds was a stroke of good fortune for Bill Russell. Despite his apparent ineptitude, the junior varsity basketball coach, George Powles, saw something in Russell and kept him as the 16th man of a 15-man-squad. In his book Go Up For Glory Russell described the importance of that gesture. "I believe that man saved me from becoming a juvenile delinquent. If I hadn't had basketball, all my energies and frustrations would surely have been carried in some other direction." Powles also encouraged Russell to work on his game at the local Boys' Club. Even as a senior member of Mc-Clymonds team he wasn't turning heads. However, he turned in a very strong performance at a game being watched by a scout from the University of San Francisco (USF). The scout was so impressed that he offered Russell a scholarship instead of the player he had come to observe. It was the only scholarship offer Russell received and he accepted it gratefully.

After his graduation, Russell was asked to join the California High School All-Stars—he was invited to join only because the team was desperate for graduates and he had finished high school in January. The team played exhibition games throughout the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. While on the tour, Russell became obsessed with basketball, discussing it whenever he could. When he wasn't talking the game, he was analyzing in his head other players' plays as well as his own which he'd made or failed to make. Envisioning each play on the inside of his eyeballs, he imagined what he should have done, or something new he wanted to try out. "If I had a play in my mind but muffed it on the court, I'd go over it repeatedly in my head, searching for details I'd missed," he wrote in Second Wind. "It was like working a phony jigsaw puzzle, one piece in the completed picture was slightly imperfect, and I had to find out which one it was." Without grasping what he was on to, Russell had discovered on his own the visualization techniques that would become standard practice in professional sports in and after the 1980s.