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• "Russell Celebrates His Bond With Auerbach"
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NBA Hall of Famer tells a story of segregation and friendship back at the start of his career. (4:32)
 

Full interview. (24:51)
 

Tavis: Always pleased to welcome Bill Russell to this program. The NBA Hall of Famer is basketball's true all-time great with a career in Boston that earned the Celtics - where he earned, I should say, eleven championships with the Celtics. Eleven championships in thirteen seasons, to be exact.

His new book focuses on his relationship with legendary coach, Red Auerbach. The book is called "Red and Me: My Coach, My Lifelong Friend." Bill Russell, always good to see you, sir.

Bill Russell: How you doing, man?

Tavis: I'm doing well. You all right?

Russell: I'll be all right in a little while.

Tavis: (Laughter) I want to go right to this book. There's a quote on the back of the book that is actually from the prologue and it got my attention rather immediately. You talk about how your friendship with Red Auerbach evolved. You write, "Basketball set the stage for our relationship to evolve from caution to admiration to trust and respect to a friendship that lasted a lifetime." That friendship went through a lot -

Russell: - Yeah.

Tavis: - to become that.

Russell: Yes.

Tavis: You start with caution -

Russell: - Yes.

Tavis: - and it built. Tell me about the evolution of the friendship.

Russell: Well, I did not go one day getting along with my college coach, okay? Then the same relationship with my Olympic coach. So I expected an adversarial relationship with my professional coach because that's the way it had been. So I found this unique approach, but I never worried about acceptance. The only time I worried about acceptance was I accepted the people I read it to, not the other way around, okay?

So when I got there, I didn't care anything about him. All I was gonna do is that I was convinced that I was the best player on the planet. I was convinced of that before I got there and I didn't have to prove that to anybody. All I wanted to do was go ahead and do it. Be the best player on the planet.

I tell a couple stories about how we started and then, at the end of my rookie year, he says, "Would you come to the game early? I want to talk to you." That started a process. The way he coached me from then on was always one to one. So he says to me, "Do you know how good you are?" I said, "Yeah, I know (laughter)." He says, "You're the best player playing basketball." I said, "I know that."

He says, "Well, I want you to know that I know it, but I have to confess I don't know what you're doing, so I can't help you. But I like your results and I'm not gonna mess with it, so I just wanted you to know that. What I'm gonna do is, as I figure out what you're doing, I'll take that and incorporate it into our system and make that part of the system."

One result is that, for the next twelve years, I was second on the team in assists. Well, now, most of my best passes would never be assists because they would trigger our fast break. So like hockey, you only get when you lead the record to a basket.

Could I have been first league on a team in assists? Probably not, but if I could've, I wouldn't have held because when I played, when I considered me playing my very best, there was room for all of my teammates to play their best. They didn't have to subjugate themselves to let me be on stage all the time.

When I was at my best, I played without the ball. I perfected that. He and I, I should say, perfected that because I have to say that I just think he was the greatest coach in any sport.

Tavis: What kind of character does a coach have to have to come to a player, to say to you, "You are the greatest player. I don't really know what you're doing, but when I figure it out, I'm gonna build our system around it."?

I don't know that coaches have the humility, the humanity, whatever it is, the character, to say that to players these days and that players could even handle that.

Russell: Well, how many coaches won nine championships (laughter) with one team? I emphasize in the book the reason it's so significant to me is, as you do this show more and more, things will settle into a routine, so certain things will go wrong all the time and you sometimes almost have to raise your voice.

Well, after a while, when those things happen and you start to raise your voice, the folks can't hear you (laughter). You've always said that a hundred times. So the remarkable thing about him was that he coached me for ten years and I could still listen to him, you know.

I'll never forget one time - the hardest time to play is between the All Star game and the start of the playoffs because halfway there you're pretty much established where you're gonna be in terms of the playoffs, you know, bracketing, et cetera. The coach got to get you to play and play hard in meaningless games against teams that you know are not very good.

So one night, he was struggling going through this trying to get us ready for this game. It didn't mean anything. It was a lousy team. He starts going and I could see he's struggling. I said, "Hey, Red, Red, Red." "What?" I said, "Three years ago, 47th game of the season, you said the same damn things you said tonight (laughter). You got to come up with something new."

Tavis: (Laughter) And what was his reaction to that?

Russell: He just said, "Let's go." What I was trying to do was - of course, I understood him fairly much and I could see what he was doing. One of the things about really good teammates is to help your teammates. So I just get him out of that and let's go play. We're gonna do the way we're gonna do, you know. He used to do things like that for me all the time.

Tavis: Did you call him "Red" or did you call him "Coach?"

Russell: I called him Red.

Tavis: You called him Red, and he was cool with that?

Russell: Yeah. It was like when he died. Two hours after he died, his daughter called me and said, "We just lost Daddy." She didn't say Red died or anything. She said, "We just lost Daddy" because that's the way our families were.

Like he had a camp that I used to go to all the time. He only asked me one time, okay? He never asked again. If I wanted to come, I'd come. He'd make sure I knew when it was on.

Because the relationship we had was you and I are friends and you ask me to do something and I'd say no. Well, friends, every yes or no question, either answer is acceptable without question.

Because if it goes any other way, I ask you to do something and you say no, well, if I go to try to convince you to do it anyway, basically what I'm saying to you is, "My reason for you doing that is more important than your reason for not doing it."

Tavis: Oh, come on. Now you're getting deep. I love this.

Russell: (Laughter)

Tavis: I was just in this dialog with a friend of mine the other day about the same thing. The problem is that there are too many people in friendships, if I can use that word, who think that you're casting aspersion on them.

Russell: Yes.

Tavis: That you're rejecting them if you have the temerity to tell them no. "I thought I was your boy, I thought we were partners, I thought I was your friend. How you gonna tell me no?" Talk to me about how people - I don't get why people take it that way.

Russell: Well, because first of all, none of us are gonna qualify for sainthood, okay? So when you accept a friend, trust this person. Now you don't know exactly all the input that went into making him sit in that seat today. You might say something that triggers something that's very negative to him that happened a hundred years ago. You understand me? But they don't want to visit that place again.

So if I respect myself and I respect you, I think the first thing I got to do is respect myself, okay? Because that's the only way I have a frame of reference. So if I ask you to do something and you say no, well, if I'm a friend of yours, I'll consider that you probably have a valid reason for not doing that that probably has nothing to do with me, see.

It's what my dad used to call "the little red wagons." Everybody's running around pulling little red wagons with everything in that wagon, see? So when your friend says, "I thought I was your boy," that's got nothing to do with it. This particular thing, I do not want to do and, if you have any respect for me, you'll know I must have a valid reason for not wanting to do that.

Tavis: That's wisdom speaking. I appreciate you sharing that. Tell me how - I think this question is really important, given that we live now, as you well know, in the most multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic America ever.

Everybody's celebrating the first Black president, yet where our personal relationships are, where are friendships are concerned with people in our own universe who we don't attempt to establish relationships with, even though we can celebrate a Black guy in the White House, we won't move out of our own comfort zones in the worlds that we live to establish friendships.

Tell me then, that said, how you end up being friends with a guy who, on paper, you should never have been friends with. On paper. You know what I mean by this.

Russell: Yes.

Tavis: You're from Louisiana, from the Projects. This is a Jewish kid. How did you end up being - yeah?

Russell: Well, the way I say in the books was we came from two different tribes. The things that I arrived in Boston with were the things that I got from my tribe. That'd be my mother, my father, my grandfather and my community and I embraced that, okay? Red came to the dance with the same set of things that he got from his community and he embraced that.

So neither one of us - if I say I embraced that, that don't mean that I think I'm better because my mother used to always say living in Louisiana, "Contrary to popular belief, you're as good as anybody on this planet, but, conversely, you're no better than anybody on this planet."

When I met Red, he was a man secure, as they say, in his own skin, so he didn't have to say, "Well, I'm the coach and I know everything." That's the first thing he stated. "I don't know everything."

I think one of his most great assets was that he knew how to listen and take the information and know what to do with it. Like he never would tell us what to do. He'd say, "I think this'll work. What do you guys think?" He'd say, "It makes sense that, if this program's gonna work, you guys who have to implement it have to have ownership."

Let's say that we all have racial biases, but if you let the racial biases determine your mode of action - and that's a feel rather than a thought process - then it determines your way of acting. Like when Red would look at a player, first of all, he'd see a silhouette. "Can he play this position?"

Tavis: Oh, Bill, come on now. When you say to me that when you break down this distinction between making decisions about feelings - back to the race question - versus about thoughts, versus thinking through this, my grandmother would say, "It's too much like right."

It makes perfect sense, but you and I both know that is the whole foundation of racism and slavery and prejudice and discrimination, that people act on feelings about nonsensical stuff rather than the thought process of respecting people as human beings reveling in their humanity. That's what the whole country's been built on.

Russell: Well, listen. The day I accepted the job as the coach of the Celtics, the third question I was asked when one of the reporters asked me was, "Can you coach the white players without being prejudiced?" I'd never heard a coach being asked that.

Tavis: (Laughter) They didn't ask Red that question about you.

Russell: No, never did. So I said, "Yeah and go on." He said, "Well, why you say that?" Well, first of all, the coaches I'd run into, folks had heard about that with racism and all that, they were not going to be my role models. My role model would have to be someone I respect.

I'll tell you, that, I think, was the basis of the thought process of Nelson Mandela. When he took over, he didn't let the former apartheid government set the standards.

Tavis: That's right.

Russell: You see, now this is the kind of stuff I brought from my tribe.

Tavis: But that's a rare way of leading in the world, though.

Russell: As I say in the book, I have a finite number of friends because, if you have too many, you can't be a real friend.

Tavis: Explain that.

Russell: Well, to be a real friend, I have to occupy a space in your psyche. To occupy that space, I must endeavor that that space being occupied by me improves your quality of life. Now see, we don't have to give each other the same thing. What I should offer to you as a friend is what you need.

Like for example, I said in the book, we very seldom ask each other questions because each of us has a place inside that nobody's allowed and our close friends get a glimpse every now and then. I should not start querying you about that place.

If we're friends, you'll tell me what you want me to know and you'll tell me the way you want to tell it and not because I pulled it out of you. To try to pull it out of you, I may take you to places you don't want to go, you know. And I would not make a judgment on the fact that you don't want to go there.

Tavis: You built this fifty-year friendship over, one could argue, one of the most tumultuous periods of race in America. How did you navigate that? I'm asking that because you said you all never asked the other questions. Did you all not talk about this during the period when you were - how did you navigate that?

Russell: Always when it was important in what was going on. For example, two instances I wrote in the book, one was about we played in Charlotte, North Carolina and we were sitting in the hotel. So I called Red and I said, "Red, this will never happen again." Just like that. Nothing, no rancor, no anger, no nothing. I just said, "This won't happen again."

He said, "Well, I'm a Jew and they don't particularly like Jews here either." So I said, "Red, what hotel you staying at?" We never discussed that again, okay? Then we came to this game in Lexington and they wouldn't serve the guys in the cafeteria.

Now one thing my father told me while living in Louisiana was, "Black men had to understand white men to survive," but white men never had to understand Black men. That was never part of the equation. So if they start discussing a Black guy and their motivation, they never have a clue (laughter). You understand?

The reason I say that is that Red said, "Well, let me see what's going on." He called back and said, "Everything's okay." "Okay, Red, what do you call okay?" He says, "The owner of the hotel is also general manager and he says he's sorry that happened and he wants to invite you guys up to have dinner with him in his private suite."

My reaction was, "Who the hell is he? I don't want to have dinner with him. I don't know him." Now I know he was trying to be nice, but it was insulting. You understand me? Because I know that he had no way of knowing anything about race relations from the other side of the tracks, if you want to call it that.

So Red says okay. He called back a few minutes later and says, "What he said was that you guys could go down there and eat now and we'll never segregate again. Now that should satisfy you, right?" I said, "Red, I'm gonna say this slowly one time. There's nothing that's gonna be said or done today here in Lexington that will stop me from getting on that plane at 7:00."

But I also told him I wanted the white guys to play because, to me, it was far more important for folks to know that these Black guys are taking care of themselves. I thought that, if the whole team didn't play, it would diffuse the message.

Tavis: But you were out of there, though.

Russell: Oh, yeah (laughter).

Tavis: I'm gone.

Russell: But here's the deal, though. After I told Red, "Red, I'm going," he says, "Okay." He gets in the cab with us and we go to the airport and he's taking all the tickets and luggage and everything and making sure everything's all right because that is his team, you know. There's no way it would make any sense for him to go off on us.

Tavis: It wasn't gonna help the situation.

Russell: Well, if you got a coach in the exhibition season going off on you, what chance does he got of coaching you -

Tavis: - (Laughter) That's a long season. That makes for a long season.

Russell: Especially after you have - my father used to call me brick-headed (laughter).

Tavis: I get it. My time with Bill Russell is up and I hate this. He is the greatest player in the game and yet, every time he comes here, we spend an entire show talking. I feel like I've just not done a service to the book, scratched the surface of what he wants to share with us. He's a philosopher. That's what you are. You are a philosopher, man.

Russell: Well, you know, the reason - I want to close with this. The reason I wrote this book, I wanted to honor the friendship. As I've stated in other cases, I got as much out of that friendship with Red as I did of the championships because that really improved my quality of life, the friendship did.

Tavis: I think that's the lesson for today. If your friendships are not improving your quality of life, you need some new friendships. I've also learned that you don't need to have too many friends (laughter) because, if you're not honoring the friendship, you got too many friends. I'm gonna start firing some folk tonight. Just teasing.

The new book from Bill Russell is called "Red and Me: My Coach, My Lifelong Friend." In all seriousness, Bill, we should all be so lucky to have the kind of friendship that you had with Red Auerbach, and I'm always honored to have you on the program.

Russell: Thank you.

Tavis: Good to see you, man.