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William Felton Russell was an American professional basketball player who played as a center for the Boston Celtics of the National Basketball Association (NBA) from 1956 to 1969. A five-time NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP) and a 12-time NBA All-Star, he was the centerpiece of the Celtics dynasty that won 11 NBA championships during his 13-year career. Russell and Henri Richard of the National Hockey League are tied for the record of the most championships won by an athlete in a North American sports league. Russell is widely considered to be one of the greatest basketball players of all time. He led the San Francisco Dons to two consecutive NCAA championships in 1955 and 1956, and he captained the gold-medal winning U.S. national basketball team at the 1956 Summer Olympics.
The center (C), or the centre, also known as the five, is one of the five positions in a regulation basketball game. The center is normally the tallest player on the team, and often has a great deal of strength and body mass as well. In the NBA, the center is typically close to 7 feet (2.13 m) tall. They traditionally play close to the basket in the low post.
Donald Lee Haskins, nicknamed "The Bear", was an American basketball player and coach. He played college basketball for three years under coach Henry Iba at Oklahoma A&M. He was the head coach at the University of Texas at El Paso from 1961 to 1999. In 1966 his team won the NCAA Tournament over the Wildcats of the University of Kentucky, coached by Adolph Rupp. The watershed game initiated the end of racial segregation in college basketball.
The color line, also known as the color barrier, in American baseball excluded players of black African descent from Major League Baseball and its affiliated Minor Leagues until 1947. Racial segregation in professional baseball was sometimes called a gentlemen's agreement, meaning a tacit understanding, as there was no written policy at the highest level of organized baseball, the major leagues. A high minor league's vote in 1887 against allowing new contracts with black players within its league sent a powerful signal that eventually led to the disappearance of blacks from the sport's other minor leagues later that century, including the low minors.
Adolph Frederick Rupp was an American college basketball coach. He is ranked seventh in total victories by a men's NCAA Division I college coach, winning 876 games in 41 years of coaching at the University of Kentucky. Rupp is also second among all men's college coaches in all-time winning percentage (.822), trailing only Mark Few. Rupp was enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame on April 13, 1969. He played college basketball at the University of Kansas under coach Phog Allen.
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Blacks have been participating in American college basketball for over a century.
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William Henry Lewis was an African-American pioneer in athletics, law and politics. Born in Virginia to freedmen, he graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he had been one of the first African-American college football players. After going to Harvard Law School and continuing to play football, Lewis was the first African American in the sport to be selected as an All-American.
The 1965–66 Texas Western Miners basketball team represented Texas Western College, now the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), led by Hall of Fame head coach Don Haskins. The team won the national championship in 1966, becoming the first team with an all-black starting lineup to do so. The Miners only lost one game, a road loss to Seattle by two points. They won their games by an average of 15.2 points.
Joseph Johnny Lillard Jr. was an American football, baseball, and basketball player. From 1932 to 1933, he was a running back for the National Football League's (NFL) Chicago Cardinals. Lillard was the last African-American, along with Ray Kemp, to play in the NFL until 1946, when Kenny Washington and Woody Strode joined the Los Angeles Rams. Lillard received the nickname "The Midnight Express" by the media. In 1933, he was responsible for almost half of the Cardinals' points.
The 1966 NCAA University Division Basketball Championship Game was the final of the 1966 NCAA University Division Basketball Tournament and determined the national champion in the 1965–66 NCAA University Division men's basketball season. The game was held on March 19, 1966 at Cole Field House in College Park, Maryland. The Kentucky Wildcats, the number one ranked team in men's college basketball, faced the Texas Western Miners, who were ranked third in the nation. Texas Western's starting lineup of five African Americans was the first all-black lineup in an NCAA title game; their opponents, by contrast, fielded an all-white squad. The Miners won 72–65, claiming the school's first national championship in men's college basketball. Their victory challenged assumptions widely held about black players at the time, and major college programs intensified their recruiting efforts towards African-American players in the years following the game.
On August 26, 2020, some professional athletes in the United States began to go on strike for their respective sports contests in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. After the video of Blake's shooting in which he was seriously injured went viral, protests and riots broke out in the city of Kenosha and elsewhere. As a result of the shooting of Blake and the protests which followed, on August 26, professional athletes refused to play in their scheduled sports events, beginning with the Milwaukee Bucks of the National Basketball Association (NBA).
The 1965–66 NCAA University Division men's basketball season began in December 1965, progressed through the regular season and conference tournaments, and concluded with the 1966 NCAA University Division Basketball Tournament Championship Game on March 19, 1966, at Cole Field House in College Park, Maryland. The Texas Western Miners won their first NCAA national championship with a 72–65 victory over the Kentucky Wildcats.
References
- ↑ Sheridan, Chris. "NBA Players' Boycott Is Unprecedented, But 1961 And 1964 Offered Previews". Forbes.
- ↑ Pedersen, P.M.; Miloch, K.S.; Laucella, P.C. (2007). Strategic Sport Communication. Strategic Sport Communication. Human Kinetics. p. 318. ISBN 978-0-7360-6524-5 . Retrieved 2020-09-09.
- ↑ "Sixty years ago, the Boston Celtics staged their own walkout over racial injustice". www.yahoo.com. Retrieved 2022-08-01.
- ↑ "Brown sizzles at Celtic slur". Boston Globe . 18 October 1961. p. 41. Retrieved 1 August 2022– via Newspapers.com.
- ↑ "NBA stars bolt game". The San Francisco Examiner . 18 October 1961. p. 57. Retrieved 1 August 2022– via Newspapers.com.
- ↑ Goudsouzian, A.; Edwards, H. (2011). King of the Court: Bill Russell and the Basketball Revolution. George Gund foundation imprint in African American Studies. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-26979-8 . Retrieved 2020-09-09.
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