Bill Russell

 Bill Russell has died. He was certainly the most successful basketball player of all time, winning two NCAA championships, an olympic gold medal, and eleven NBA titles (and probably would have had twelve if he had not been injured one year during the finals). By the criterion used by those who call Tom Brady the greatest football player ever, that of being the key player on the most championship teams, he was also the best basketball player of all time. People using other criteria besides winning might select someone else, and that might not have bothered him. Winning was his criterion. I have read that when some outfit selected him as the athlete of the 1960s and the 1969 Mets as the team of the decade, he was displeased – pointing out correctly that the only two real candidates for the team of the decade were the Packers and his Celtics and saying he could not take his individual award seriously coming from people who did not realize that. He was also the head coach of the Celtics in the last years of his playing career and an amusing, insightful, and interesting television commentator after he retired.

I think people will miss him. I know I will, and not just because he was one of the great stars of my boyhood, though that’s part of it.