Bill Russell: Three Stories

Bill Russell is now in his early seventies. One of his claims to fame is that during his basketball career, his teams won two NCAA championships, a gold medal in Melbourne, and in his long career with the Boston Celtics, his teams won 11 championships. He was a superlative athlete. If you take the time to read his books, you’ll find that he is a great storyteller.

In the early part of his career, America, south of the Mason-Dixon line was almost entirely Jim Crow. He once drove his family from Boston to Monroe, Louisiana to visit his grandfather. Once they got south of Washington D.C., he and his children had to sleep in the car. On one occasion, a hotel worker informed Russell that he could stay in the hotel with his teammates, but he wanted one favor. When Russell asked what that was, the worker told the 6’10” black man, “Try to be inconspicuous.”

In 1966, Bill Russell because the first black head coach in the NBA and the Celtics played in an exhibition game close to his hometown. Russell’s grandfather Charlie Russell (Mr. Charlie) attended the game with Bill’s father. Mr. Charlie Russell’s parents had been slaves. Before the game, Bill Russell’s father tried at some length to Mr. Charlie how the game worked and asked if he had any questions. Mr. Charlie was silent for a moment, then asked, “Do them white boys really have to do what William tells them?” Later that evening, Russell’s father and grandfather visited the Celtic locker room. Suddenly, Mr. Charlie started to cry. He’d been standing by the shower and noticed that two of ill’s teammates, Sam Jones (a black man) and John Havlicek (a white man) had been showering together like it was nothing. Mr. Charlie said, “I never thought I’d see the day when water would flow off a black man onto a white man and off a white man onto a black man.”

At the end of his career, Russell decided he wanted to open a restaurant in Boston. The first problem he encountered was that the Boston police let it be known that they expected free meals in return for not ticketing his patrons’ cars. This proposition offended Russell’s sense of integrity and he refused. His patrons received lots of tickets, but he stayed in business. Shortly thereafter, Russell discovered that, although he had plenty of patrons, he was not making any money because his employees were robbing him blind. One day, one of Boston’s wise guys (WG) approached him with a proposal to solve his employee theft problem. The secret was to wait until they caught an employee in flagrante delicto, grab the culprit, take him for a ride and beat him close to death. The proper technique was not just to break the thieves’ legs and arms, but to beat him so severely that he would have a number of months in the hospital to worry about whether he’d ever be able to work again. At that point, the wise guy explained, the secret was to approach the severely injured malfeaser and explain that his luck had changed. He would now have a job for the rest of his life explaining to new employees the consequences of stealing from the restaurant. Disgusted, Russell refused the offer and regretfully, shut down his restaurant.

One of my favorite Bill Russell stories is addressed especially to non-Americans who think they know everything about racial conditions in the United States. In 1965, a team of collegiate basketball players took a tour behind the Iron Curtain and did so poorly that Radio Moscow crowed that this was one more indication of America’s decadence. Someone in the State Department who had President Johnson’s ear decided that we should teach those Russkies a lesson. The NBA put together a team of the league’s finest players (including Russell, Jerry Lucas, Oscar Robinson, Jerry West and several other notables) and sent them on a tour that was not so much for goodwill, but the basketball equivalent of an all-out nuclear strike.

While strolling through downtown Warsaw, Bill Russell was a conspicuous sight. He was approached by a group of Bulgarian students who asked if he was American. They quizzed him on racial conditions in the United States. Bill Russell spent about half an hour giving them very straightforward answers, as is his nature. He had a hard time keeping from chuckling, however, as those enlightened Bulgarians reassured him that he would not received that kind of treatment in the People’s Republic of Bulgaria. Finally, their professor told him, “That was very interesting Mr. Russell. Now, would you please sing a song or do a dance for us? How about “Go Down, Moses?”” I’m happy to say that Bill Russell has an excellent sense of humor.

Military Mathematics

During World War II, the population of the United States was around 150 million and 13.5 Americans served in the military: one out of every eleven Americans. Today, we have 300 million people, and the total military establishment comes to a bit less than 1.5 million: one out of every 200 Americans are serving. Anyone who argues we have a military-industrial complex should keep those figures in perspective.

At the Palace of Friendship

When I visited Moscow in the Spring of 1986, with a group of American law students, we retreated to an evening at “The Palace of Friendship,” a place for foreign visitors to mingle with Russian students who get the benefit of sharpening their language skills. They also promulgate the official party line, of course.

A couple of things are vivid in my memory, over twenty years later. First, it was *abundantly* clear to me that Russian students have *dramatically* different standards for personal hygiene than do Westerners. If I ever go back, I will carry a suitcase full of soap and bubble batgh. The other thing I’ll never forget is listening to a young Russian lad inform me that, in America, we have a military-industrial complex. I politely managed to not laugh out loud. I did, however, point out to him that, since January of 1973, every member of the United States Armed Forces is a volunteer. We haven’t had a draft in America since 1971. In Russia, on the other hand, any eighteen-year-old boy who doesn’t have serious Communist Party connections can count on spending two years in Siberia in the Soviet Army.

There was *dead* *silence* for a moment. Then the young fellow managed to say, “We have different institutions in different countries.” Freaking-A skippy!

Two Observations from Wilt Chamberlain

Wilt Chamberlain lived into his sixties and saw a great many changes in his life. One of them was certainly the changing role of black people in America. He once pointed out that, as a youngster, he was referred to as a “colored boy.” Then the term “Negro” became fashionable. Then “black.” Then “Afro-American” or “African-American.” Or, sometimes, “a man of color.” Said Wilt:”I started out as a colored man, and ended up a man of color.”

For non-sports fans, Wilt Chamberlain was a gigantic man, seven-foot-one, who was 280 pounds of muscle. He was possessed of athletic ability that, at times, seemed to be not of this earth. He averaged over fifty points in a season and scored over 100 points in a single game, and these record have not even been approached.

In the recent remake of the film Bedazzled, Brendan Fraser appears in a variation on the Faust legend. He sells his soul to (The Devil) Elizabeth Hurley in exchange for seven wishes. In one of these scenarios, he plays an invincible athlete who, as the announcer describes, topped the single-game scoring record set in Hershey, Pennsylvania. As a true sports aficionado, that seemed appropriate. If anyone in the NBA ever exceeds that record, I would think that the only possible explanation would be that the guy who did it must have had a pact with Satan.

Once when a sportswriter commiserated with Chamberlain, it emerged that, though the man had accomplished amazing athletic feats, he was not popular save for in his hometown. Said Chamberlain with a shrug, “No one roots for Goliath.”

When Americans lament that their country is unpopular in the rest of the world, perhaps they should remember this as a partial reason why.

Thoughts on Humor

Two things are funny: exaggeration and reversal.

For instance, if I ask you for $1.25, is that funny? No. One time, Mark Twain wrote a letter to Andrew Carnegie, the richest man in the world at that time. The letter said, “Dear Mr. Carnegie, You seem to have achieved prosperity. Could you please send me $1.25 to buy a prayer book. God will bless you. I feel it. I know it. So will I. P.S. Don’t send the prayer book, send the $1.25; I want to make the selection myself.” (If I should ever happen to meet the employee in charge of handling Bill Gates’s correspondence, I would like to ask him how many requests they’ve received for prayer book funding.)

Have you ever purchased some merchandise, found it unsatisfactory and tried to return it? That’s not funny. However, if a man walks into a pet store and tries to return the parrot he bought an hour earlier because the aforementioned parrot is dead, and the clerk tries to persuade him that the Norwegian parrot is merely asleep, pining for the fjords, you have the makings of a comic masterpiece. Further, the parrot is not merely dead, it is deceased. It is no more. It has joined the choir invisible. If you hadn’t nailed it to that perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. That is an ex-parrot.”

They make jokes about Pam Anderson. A generation ago, about Raquel Welch. A generation before that, Mae West. I once told a female friend that, while I thought her breasts were excellent, they weren’t very funny. Fortunately, she did get the joke.

I’m friends with a fellow who is quite large, someone would say Brobdinagian. A few years ago, when he was laid up with knee surgery, I was tempted to inquire if he had suffered an injury as a result of falling off of a beanstalk.

Some humor combines both exaggeration and reversal. Several years ago, Leona Helmsley went to jail for income tax evasion. She will always be remembered for her comment, “Only little people pay taxes.” If the writers at Saturday Night Live, they would have arranged for an outraged editorial reply from Shaquille O’Neal and he pays millions of dollars in taxes.

In Back to School, Rodney Dangerfield portrayed the owner of a chain of big and tall stores. In a commercial he asked, “Are you big? Are you tall? When you jog, do you leave potholes? When you make love, do you need directions? (And my personal favorite) When you go to the zoo, do the elephants throw you peanuts?”

I’m not particularly fond of Joan Rivers’s brand of comedy, as she often comes across as mean-spirited. In real life, however, she had an experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone. As a teenager, she was fixed up on a blind date. When the gentleman arrived, he took one look and bolted. Many years later, she saw the man, who had no memory of the incident. He was quite taken with her. After all, she was now the famous Joan Rivera. He had no idea that she was contemplating harming him in serious ways. Ironically, Laugh-In did a sketch about a similar situation that turned out to be quite hilarious. (Yes, I remember this bit forty years later.) The setting for the sketch was that in a parallel universe, everyone wears glasses, has freckles and bizarrely askew hair. Dick Martin plays an obnoxious young man who, upon arriving to meet his blind date, announces that he is not going to go out with, “a dog.”

Ordinarily, that would be a horribly cruel thing to say. However, in the sketch, the woman being so cruelly insulted is Raquel Welch, the audience was howling. They even managed to come up with an excellent ending for that sketch. Raquel pretends to fight back tears and finally says, “Don’t you think I wish I could be beautiful?” She frizzes her hair, crosses her eyes and blows a raspberry. At which point, Dick Martin falls head over heels for her. Moral of the story, if you’re Raquel Welch, you always come out on top.

Elle McPherson's Primary Occupation

Is there anything funnier than a story that you think is going to be raunchy, but turns out clean? Here’s one I heard from my dear old mom while I was still in middle school. The story goes that a businessman took a trip to New York City and took along his middle school-aged daughter. He took her to dinner at a nightclub where he discovered, to his enormous chagrin, that one of the featured acts was a stripper. The story goes that when the featured entertainer had gotten down to three strategically placed, multicolored ribbons, the businessman’s daughter nudged him and said, “Hey, Dad. Look! Our school colors!”

I was reminded of Mom’s story recently while watching a commercial that featured a father trying to placate a crying baby boy. Dad gets on the Internet and brings up a photo of Elle McPherson modeling swimwear, as is her specialty. As I watched, I could well imagine howls of outrage from feminists appalled at the idea of exposing a very young boy to such a sight.

The commercial’s plot twist came at the end when Elle McPherson appears, picks the kidster up, smooches him and announces that he’s such a good boy.

To everyone else, Elle McPherson might be a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue superstar, but to that kid, he was Mom.

A Clean Polish Joke

I attended law school at Notre Dame Law School, located in an area with an overwhelming Polish population. The story goes that a fellow in South Bend, Indiana went to see an optometrist who asked him to read the bottom line on an eye chart. “Shoot,” the man said. “Those are my two next-door neighbors!”