Bill Russell hated autographs. I saw no interest in them. If he was at a restaurant and was approached by someone asking for his signature, Russell’s usual response was to instead ask the person to join him at the table to have a conversation about life.

Autograph requesters almost always refused.

Oh, the stories they missed.

Russell, the greatest winner in team sports history, died Sunday at age 88. The legacy of basketball is well known: 11 championships in 13 years with the Boston Celtics, the first black coach in the NBA, the first black coach to win an NBA. title, Hall of Fame player, Hall of Fame coach, Olympic champion, NCAA champion, member of the league’s 75th anniversary team and namesake of the NBA Finals MVP award who, had he existed when he played, he would have won at least half a dozen times.

But if those memory dogs had invited Russell to sit down with him for a meal, they might have heard about his obsession with golf. Or the mating habits of bees, something he once wrote in a column. Or expensive cars with bloated sound systems so he could blast out the music of Laura Nyro, Janis Ian or Crosby, Stills and Nash – some of his favourites.

“His mind was bigger than basketball,” author Taylor Branch, who lived with Russell for about a year near Seattle in the 1970s while working with him on a book, said Sunday. “And his personality was too, as great as he was in basketball.”

Take away all the accomplishments on the pitch and Russell still lived a life.

He stood side by side with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement. He was in the audience when King gave the “I Have A Dream” speech in Washington in 1963. He marched in Mississippi after the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers. He supported Muhammad Ali when the fighter refused to go to Vietnam. He helped start the National Association of Basketball Players. President Barack Obama – at around 6ft 2in, a taller than average individual – had to stretch a bit when he draped the Presidential Medal of Freedom around Russell’s neck in 2011, even after Russell hunkered down to fit the moment.

“He endured insults and vandalism, but he continued to focus on making teammates he loved better players, and made possible the success of so many who would follow,” Obama said that day. . “And I hope that one day, on the streets of Boston, children will look up at a statue built not just for Bill Russell the player, but Bill Russell the man.”

Russell once asked a question about being a black star in Boston, a city with a complicated racing history. The premise was that it must have been difficult for Russell to live in such a place, to play for fans in such a city.

“What I intended to do, and I did it quite well, was that whenever I found myself in a conflict situation, I decided to take control of it so that if a guy would come up to me and try to give me a bad day, I’m sure he’s the one who left with the bad day,” Russell said. “And so, to do that, it took thought, planning, discretion and intelligence. That’s how I’ve lived my life.”

Example: The apparent invasion of raccoons in Reading, Massachusetts, circa 1958.

During his second season with the Celtics, Russell bought a house in Reading. He went on a road trip and his trash cans were turned over. The same thing happened on the second road trip of the season. Russell went to the police, who assumed the raccoons must be the culprit. Russell applied for a firearms license.

“The raccoons have heard about it,” Russell said. “I never returned the bins again.

The weapon was never purchased either.

It would be a disservice – an insult, really – to consider Russell only as a basketball player, even as one of the greatest of all time. He’s still second on the NBA’s all-time rebounding list, behind only Wilt Chamberlain, and will likely be there forever since no one has come close to him in the last 50 years. He has won five MVP awards, tied for second with Michael Jordan, one behind Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s league record.

“That’s what I did,” Russell said in 2009. “That wasn’t who I was.”

This is the lesson. He didn’t shut up and didn’t dribble. He stood up for what he believed in, supported those he believed in. Being fearless on the basketball court was easy. Being fearless in the real world — even when it came to issues of race in some of the nation’s darkest times on this subject — was somehow even easier.

“He had such a curiosity for human nature, for psychology,” Branch said. “It was a treasure for me to be with Bill and see how he saw the world in all its dimensions.”

The world has a lot of them. Russell too. And on Sunday, the world lost an absolute legend.

Oh, we will miss the stories.

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Tim Reynolds is a national basketball writer for The Associated Press. Write to him at treynolds(at)ap.org

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