QUOTE
The reflective rookie posed a direct question for the straight-shooting legend.
Joakim Noah raised his hand and asked Bill Russell if he felt underappreciated while accomplishing all that he did in racially polarized Boston - 11 NBA championships in 13 remarkable years - at the dawn of and during the civil rights era.
Noah, the mixed-race progeny of French, Swedish and Cameroonian descent, son of the tennis champion Yannick, brought to Russell's famously whiskered face a contented smile reflecting an appreciation for the depth of curiosity, for the opportunity to be engaged.
"Quite true," Russell said. "But you know what? It was really irrelevant. My father always told me that the most important thing is what you think of yourself. He had an expression about there being all these little red wagons that get pulled around and that it's got nothing to do with me."
...
Upon asking his question, Noah said he was surprised that Russell had not given specific examples of racism. "Not so much around the league," he said, "but right in his own city, where he was a player, a coach, being a seven-foot black man."
Actually, Russell dominated at 6-foot-9 - two inches shorter than Noah, in a distant, very different era, but not so long ago that Russell has seen a team, other than the 1980s Lakers of Magic and Kareem, that he believes his Celtics could not have beaten.
Some might have heard hubris in such conviction, but not Noah. He comes to the Chicago Bulls as a two-time NCAA champion at Florida, a player most willing to do windows, who said he already knew that Russell's talk would be the overriding lesson of the four-day program that attempts to educate the rookies on topics ranging from gambling to felony situations to professionalism and etiquette.
Noah also came to understand why Russell doesn't recount past cruelties - why give credence to them when he long ago rose to a higher existential plane, allowing only Russell to define Russell?
"When he was answering my question, I found it so applicable to my life, so real to me, especially the way I allowed some negative things that were being said last year - not in a racial sense, but about me as a player and my family - to get to me," Noah said. "I could've listened to him speak for another hour and asked him so many more questions."
When the session ended, when the others filed out for lunch, Joakim Noah headed straight for the man he called "the greatest winner of all time," and squeezed in a few.
Joakim Noah raised his hand and asked Bill Russell if he felt underappreciated while accomplishing all that he did in racially polarized Boston - 11 NBA championships in 13 remarkable years - at the dawn of and during the civil rights era.
Noah, the mixed-race progeny of French, Swedish and Cameroonian descent, son of the tennis champion Yannick, brought to Russell's famously whiskered face a contented smile reflecting an appreciation for the depth of curiosity, for the opportunity to be engaged.
"Quite true," Russell said. "But you know what? It was really irrelevant. My father always told me that the most important thing is what you think of yourself. He had an expression about there being all these little red wagons that get pulled around and that it's got nothing to do with me."
...
Upon asking his question, Noah said he was surprised that Russell had not given specific examples of racism. "Not so much around the league," he said, "but right in his own city, where he was a player, a coach, being a seven-foot black man."
Actually, Russell dominated at 6-foot-9 - two inches shorter than Noah, in a distant, very different era, but not so long ago that Russell has seen a team, other than the 1980s Lakers of Magic and Kareem, that he believes his Celtics could not have beaten.
Some might have heard hubris in such conviction, but not Noah. He comes to the Chicago Bulls as a two-time NCAA champion at Florida, a player most willing to do windows, who said he already knew that Russell's talk would be the overriding lesson of the four-day program that attempts to educate the rookies on topics ranging from gambling to felony situations to professionalism and etiquette.
Noah also came to understand why Russell doesn't recount past cruelties - why give credence to them when he long ago rose to a higher existential plane, allowing only Russell to define Russell?
"When he was answering my question, I found it so applicable to my life, so real to me, especially the way I allowed some negative things that were being said last year - not in a racial sense, but about me as a player and my family - to get to me," Noah said. "I could've listened to him speak for another hour and asked him so many more questions."
When the session ended, when the others filed out for lunch, Joakim Noah headed straight for the man he called "the greatest winner of all time," and squeezed in a few.