Red and Me by Bill Russell

Author:Bill Russell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-12-26T05:00:00+00:00

As my coach, Red Auerbach won nine championships, including a still unmatched eight straight. He won seven more titles with Celtics teams he built later as general manager. We were together for nearly all of his championships, so I had the pleasure of watching him work, with an advanced understanding of what he was doing and why. I saw how much went into making him so successful and making the Celtics the world’s most successful team. He was a brilliant psychologist, strategist, innovator, and motivator, and the best coach you could play for.

Red was decisive, and I admired this quality in him. It was another little thread that we wove into a friendship. One early decision he made went a long way toward convincing me he was becoming a friend, and not just my coach. My rookie year, since I influenced our game so heavily on both offense and defense, Red played me the whole forty-eight minutes—nobody else played more than forty. But I went so hard every single game that, after a while, I lost my edge. I fought it off, so it wasn’t obvious. If I wasn’t hitting my shots, I intensified my rebounding and screening and defense, and I didn’t think anyone noticed the difference. But someone did.

During practice one day at the Garden, I was sitting on the scorer’s table, a little drained, and up strolled Red, looking concerned. He said, “Jesus Christ, Russ. You look like a piece of shit.” Lovely greeting, but direct: he spoke his mind, so you always knew where he stood, and where you stood, too. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“I’m tired.”

“You’re tired?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” he said. “Don’t scrimmage today.” Then he went back to the practice. From then on, once I got in shape, I’d come to practice and run through our plays with everyone else because that was something we needed to do together. But when it came time to scrimmage, I went up in the stands with a cup of tea and watched. That was great for me because I hated practice—I thought, “I already know exactly what I’m doing. Practice is only a drain on my energy.” I found it remarkable that, in our short time together, Red not only perceived this about me—without my mentioning it—but found a solution to the problem.

Eventually, tea in the stands became my new routine, and I almost never scrimmaged again. Later, I heard from players whose coaches knew about this, and they all thought that Red was kissing my ass. With that narrow frame of reference—which was, essentially, a preconceived notion—they couldn’t fathom it because they weren’t capable of handling a situation like that with such clarity and wisdom. Some coaches today, when their team is going bad, call a midnight practice and work their players harder. That’s counterproductive, like a punishment detail that only breeds resentment. Red’s perspective on this was unique. He understood that it was tough enough to play NBA basketball, and that fatigue was a major factor.

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