San Antonio – On a Sunday morning as peaceful as the sound of church bells, Bill Russell strolls alone through downtown. At age 71, his gait is stiff. He seems too frail to be an NBA legend. But the greatest defensive player who ever lived still casts a long shadow.
Russell ambles toward me. We are the only two people on the block. I want to say hello. But the words catch in my throat. Just as a son forever remains a little boy in his mother’s house, nothing can reduce a grown man to awestruck fan like the sight of a childhood hero.
Russell walks on, quiet as a ghost and almost as invisible in a city that’s host to the NBA Finals.
Can it be America has forgotten when defense was the highest form of basketball art?
“There is a great need in our society to criticize everything. Nothing is ever good enough in America. We’re all ticked off,” Russell tells me hours later, after I finally summon the nerve to shake the hand of the king of a Boston Celtics dynasty that ruled the league with 11 championships from 1956-69.
He sat in the SBC Center, where the Spurs would stifle every Detroit move, causing the defending champs to lose their poise, the frustration resulting from San Antonio intensity that does Russell’s legacy proud.
Throughout a lopsided 97-76 victory, the arena walls shake with incessant chants of “DEE-fence, DEE-fence.”
But America does not want to hear it. The biggest noise being made by this series is the sound of televisions clicking off across the country.
Why does defense no longer resonate with people who profess to like hoops? What Russell made sublime is now regarded as boring stuff. Go figure.
“The way I played defense was alien to most players of my era. Most nights, I could shut down the entire front court of the other team,” Russell says. “People think the NBA is not as good as it used to be, because we like to find fault. We don’t believe anything is as good as it used to be, even that new ‘Star Wars’ movie.”
This lack of respect seems to irk the Spurs, whose only flaw is insecurity indigenous to any place teased as a cowtown for too many years.
“If people think a certain way about our team and it’s like we’re not sexy or exciting, I just assume that person doesn’t know much about basketball,” Spurs coach Gregg Popovich has complained.
Sometimes, San Antonio can get too defensive.
Russell, however, has never been cursed with losing sleep over what strangers think.
San Antonio’s Bruce Bowen slaps handcuffs on jump shots. Manu Ginobili knocks a Detroit pass from the air. Tim Duncan clamps a vise grip on a rebound.
Russell sees the same defensive beauty in each of the Spurs, big and small. “The first thing you have to realize is there is no single body type of a great defensive player,” he says.
“But there is one attitude.”
What all relentless defenders exhibit is commitment and passion ignored by critics who see only today’s tattoos and fat contracts in the NBA. That’s bunk, insists Russell. As sure as he recalls honing his skills five hours every day as a child, Russell rejects the notion African-American players coast on natural ability, accusations he hints are born from blind prejudice.
“When LeBron James was in high school, people were all upset at him, because his mom bought him a Hummer. People said no teenager needs a $50,000 car,” says Russell, who lives in an affluent Seattle suburb. “Come down to the high school in my neighborhood, and on any given day, there will be $3 million of automobiles in the parking lot. BMWs. Mercedes. What should we do about that? Call a PTA meeting?”
Nobody makes a stronger case for the defense than Russell, brought in three years ago by New England of the NFL as a guest lecturer.
“I saw linebacker Tedy Bruschi recently, when I went back to Boston to throw out the first pitch at a Red Sox game. He told me there was one thing I told New England’s football team that he will remember for the rest of his life. Know what that was? I told the Patriots the No. 1 thing they need to do is be kind to each other. When I line up next to you in the defensive line, you must have both the ability and the desire to help me,” Russell says. “All acts of strength are acts of kindness.”
Now you know the secret.
Defense is love.
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-820-5438 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
