News - Bill Russell, basketball legend with record 11 NBA titles, dies at 88

Fighting for something from an early age

To understand this man and superlative athlete, it helps to remember a parent's lesson.

One day when Bill Russell was 9, he was outside his apartment in the projects in Oakland, Calif. Five boys ran by and one slapped him in the face. He and his mother went looking for the group, and when they found them, young Bill expected mom justice. Instead, Katie Russell said: Fight them, one at a time. He won two, lost three. In a 2013 interview for the Civil Rights History Project, Russell said his mother's message to her teary son changed his life.

"And she says, 'Don't cry,' " Russell said. " 'You did what you're supposed to do. [It] doesn't matter whether you won or lost. [What matters is] you stood up for yourself. And that's what you must always do.' "

Russell certainly did on the basketball court — where he blossomed late but ended up revolutionizing the game.

Elevating and taking the game with him

"Krebs from the corner. His outside shot blocked by Russell. And now Russell has made three big plays in the last three minutes of the game. Barnett goes in and Russell blocks it."

By 1963, in this NBA Finals game, Russell was a shot-blocking menace, which represented a sea change in the game.

The adage always had been: No good defensive player leaves his feet. In the 1950s, his coach at the University of San Francisco believed that. But Russell didn't. He was also a track and field high jumper, and it seemed perfectly reasonable to try to elevate in basketball as well.

"My first varsity game [at USF], we played at [University of] Cal Berkeley," Russell said in the 2013 interview. "Their center was a preseason All-American. The game starts and the first five shots he took, I blocked. And nobody in the building had seen anything like that. So they called timeout to discuss what I was doing. We get in our huddle, and my coach says, 'You can't play defense like that.' He showed me on the sidelines how he wanted me to play defense. I go back out and I try it, and the guy [scores on] layups three times in a row. And I said, this does not make sense. So I went back to playing the way I knew how."