A player and a man to whom basketball owes everything: the Netflix documentary about Bill Russell is a must watch.
– If Lebron James has indelibly engraved his name in history with the 6 on his shoulders, he has to thank the NBA, which grants him the right to still wear that number. From 2022, in fact, no new player will be able to choose him. It happens that individual franchises decide to withdraw some tank tops, so that no one can only think of reaching the level of those who wore it in the past. Never, until last year, had the league intervened: the NBA had never vetoed it, leaving maximum freedom to the various teams. At least until when Bill Russell, aged 88, died alongside his wife in Mercer Island hospital. 11 days later and the National Basketball Association has ordered the withdrawal of number 6. The umpteenth time, even in eternal life, in which Russell is the first, the forerunner, the creator of new routes and visions. “Bill Russell: NBA legend“, produced for Netflix by Larry Gordon, Ross Greenburg and Mike Richardson, pays worthy honor to one of the greatest in history. Not the history of basketball: history, with a capital S, which concerns humanity and society as a whole;
– Expect something other than directed by Sam Pollard is misleading: the director of MLK/FBI e Citizen Ashe and executive producer of, among others, of Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela, balances the account of Russell’s figure on and off the playing field. One may not appreciate the division into clear-cut blocks between the succession of basketball successes and the activism in the Massachusetts of the Sixties, between the 11 rings on his finger and racial claims. What results, however, is a equilibrium dutiful. Emphasizing more the purely sporting aspect of the greatest winner that US basketball has known so far would have diminished Bill’s integrity and moral statuesque. Excessive focus on struggles for equal treatment of American Negroes he would have made us forget, even for a moment, that we were talking about one of (if not the) strongest and most influential defenders in the history of the Game. Bill Russell is Eternal for what he did on the parquet also thanks to what he knew how to be and communicate before and after the games. And viceversa;
– The risk of two episodes (1h33min the first, 1h46min the second) released on February 8 also in Italy is that they flow into hagiography. Dealing with the biography of someone who hasn’t lived on this earth for just seven months is dangerous: if you sweeten the demand for a dollar more salary than your rival Wilt Chamberlain or the belief that you are playing for the Celtics and not for racist Boston, you grants the right of reply to the person concerned, eternally staining it and obscuring aspects that are apparently too rigid. Pollard, however, returns the Bill Russell straight man: to convey an eternal message into eternity, compromises are not admissible, therefore one has to deal with and paint even the most angular and obtuse characters of one’s soul. But Bill Russell was the first to be like this: in love with basketball so much that he realizes he has no respect for it the moment he “thinking of sportingly having to kill opponents on the field seemed ridiculous to me“, the 6 of the Celtics marked an era without adding the slightest rhetoric beyond the bare essentials. Unsympathetic? Maybe, but with sympathy you don’t earn immortality;
– “If I’m here, if I’m like this, it’s thanks to him”. Magic Johnson says it, Stephen Curry says it, Chris Paul, Jayson Tatum, Jalen Rose and several other mammasantissima interviewed during the documentary say it. In subsequent generations, the awareness has matured that Russell’s ethical and behavioral legacy is so great that, paradoxically, it is not celebrated enough. If still today African-American athletes fight by supporting BLM, redeeming the image of an often troubled childhood, they do so because of the leader by example Bill Russell. A quote makes the idea particularly clear: “I don’t care about being the first or the last to do something, the important thing is the number of people who will feel able to do it after me“. He doesn’t consider it so striking to be part of the first completely African-American quintet in NBA history (Celtics 1958-1959), he wouldn’t even symbolically accept being part of the Hall of Fame if the selection criteria wink almost exclusively at whites, he wouldn’t like Garden full to celebrate retirement to enjoy the facade celebrations of an America that, too many times, had turned its back on him;
– What is the purpose of “Bill Russell: NBA legend”? Add more detail to Russell’s mastery of rebounding, blocks and outlet passes? Further celebrating 7-game undefeated and wins in clashes with the Philadelphia and Los Angeles Lakers? Emphasize the iron will not to stand as an empty icon or sacrificial victim in the stars and stripes debates regarding civil rights? No. The bibliography on Russell is already very rich, and videos of the time are impossible to recover unless you create new ones. Sam Pollard got it right: the documentary is about a man, an athlete, a politico with universal values, valid in its time as well as in 2023. It would be enough to let Bill’s interviews, diaries and letters speak for themselves. So does the director, entrusting to the voice of Jeffrey Wright (Casino Royale, Hunger Games, The Ides of March, The Batman) thoughts and statements from Russell’s life, contained in newspapers and epistolary collections. A leaderand winner. Beyond the result. Long live Bill Russell.