Less than three weeks after David Blatt was born in a Boston hospital in May 1959, the city's basketball team, the Celtics, won their second NBA championship in three years.
These were the first steps of the greatest basketball dynasty of all time - the Greens won 11 championships from 1957 to 1969. The common denominator of all these championships?
Bill Russell, the legendary center, who passed away this week and is 88 years old.
For the young Blatt, who spent his childhood in the nearby town of Framingham, Russell was a superstar.
role model.
"I grew up on the Celtics and Bill Russell," says Blatt, who returned to Maccabi Tel Aviv this summer in the role of chairman of the professional committee and advisor to the club, "he was the idol for me as a child.
Both because of the fact that he was a basketball player on the leading NBA team of all time, and also because of his character and leadership ability.
He was a tremendous leader and that spoke to me as a child.
I sensed it, but I didn't quite realize how admirable he was.
But I personally saw him as a role model."
Blatt goes on to say how significant Russell's figure was in his life as a boy in the suburbs of Boston: "At those times I would sit in my room with a small transistor radio. I would stick it to my ear and listen to the Celtics games and all the antics of Bill Russell and all the other guys. I just really, really connected with him. The first essay I wrote in my life was about Bill Russell in my fourth year at school. I always followed him."
secretly.
Saying goodbye to the NBA symbol, photo: Alan Shiver
Beyond Russell's professional achievements, he was a symbol and model for equal rights and social justice.
The center, a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, was the first black coach in the NBA in particular and in professional sports in the US in general, when he was appointed coach/player of the Celtics in 1966. He took an active part in the struggle of blacks in the US for equal rights, even at the cost of confrontations With some of the fans in Boston.
And for his work in the field, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 - the most important award given by the President of the United States.
"He was one of the first athletes who publicly and in his actions made sure to bring to light and recognition the importance of the war movement to improve human rights, especially in terms of blacks in the United States, but not only," notes Blatt.
"He wasn't afraid to stand up and say what he thought, and lead you in all kinds of ways that there would be equality between people and laws. He was really a leader with a few other guys in his time, long before it was popular and the right thing to do."
"Athletes sometimes get a platform far beyond what they deserve. But Bill Russell got a platform and used it in the best way possible, every word he said and every action he did was for the benefit of the people and he deserved the right to do it as an athlete and as a person," concludes Blatt .
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