Go Up For Glory

"Red, baby. You got yours. I get mine. Either I'm worth a buck more than Chamberlain or I'm not." I was.

Bill Russell is many things. A giant, a basketball legend, a man. A great man. I think while reading this book that was the overarching message. Whether he was talking about growing up in Louisiana during the ‘30s and early ‘40s, his time in college or while describing his fight for equality in a league that had, in his words, a quota of how many black players could be on one team at a time. The tone was always the same. I was reading the words of a great man.

For myself, I think it can be said—or, at least, I have the guts to say it—I think I may not be now, but in my past nine years I was the best player in the NBA. Not the first few months when i started, but certainly after my first season.

But that’s my “humble” opinion.

Go Up For Glory is written how I like to write and how I prefer to read. The way someone would speak. Have you ever noticed some books feel like they were written in a way that made them intentionally hard to comprehend? It is one of my biggest pet peeves. One of, if not, my favorite books is Kitchen Confidential and one of the reasons I like it so much is because it is written the same way I would expect Anthony Bourdain to speak. Bill Russell did that, too. It is one of my favorite things about this book but it is also one of my least favorite things about it.

This is, technically, a book review of some sort so I have to review the book and not the man who wrote it.

At times the writing feels a little all over the place. Scattered. The chapters run long in some places because we are jumping back and forth between subjects that not only aren’t connected but that we have already read about or will soon read about much more. It doesn’t feel like foreshadowing or some other literary tool, no, it is scatterbrain. Like how someone would talk. In a conversation there wouldn’t be an issue with going back and forth and even in writing there isn’t necessarily an issue but it can get a little draining hearing about the same thing every other chapter. I wish I could give an example but it happens almost so frequently, over multiple subjects, you wouldn’t get a good enough picture and it would come across as nit picking. I like the writing style but I also like structure, this had structure in the sense it had chapters but the chapters don’t feel like they mean anything if the subjects written about in those chapters are all over the place. The natural structure kind of fell apart because of that.

I don’t want my complaints to overshadow the book, it is a good book.

If you want to get paid, baby, you better play to win

Bill Russell was a man who was vocal about what he thought was right. As one of the biggest stars of the NBA during its infancy, a time when NBA games were looked at as less-than compared to even Harlem Globetrotter games, Bill Russell was a star. He was also a man. A man who was forced to sleep at different hotels than his white teammates. A man that got treated like a second class citizen after winning Gold in Australia for his country, by the same officials who got drunk every night from his country.

This isn’t just a book about how cool it was to play basketball or how much fun he had in the locker room with Bob Cousy and Tommy Heinsohn. This is the story of a child returning with his father and brother to Louisiana and watching a white man he thought was his fathers friend talk down to him for being black. This is the story of a man who went to Mississippi to support Medgar Evers’ family after he was assassinated, even with his wife begging him not to go, knowing there was a very real possibility he would be killed once he got there.

This book was published in 1968 and is a great time capsule of what America looked like back then. Comparing it to today, it is nice to see how far we have come in some ways. In other ways, it is terribly sad to see how little things have changed.

Show me a man, any man, he is my brother.

Show me a bigot, any bigot, he is my enemy.

I have a hard time giving this book a rating. At times I thoroughly enjoyed it, other times I was hoping the chapters end would come sooner. I’m an NBA fan, a Boston Celtics fan and a Bill Russell fan so I’m bias and even then sometimes it was just too much.

Several times in this book Bill Russell criticized athletes for not telling the whole truth when sharing their story or in their memoirs. He went into this with the desire to tell his truth and I think he’s done that. I think we should all try and do that.

With that in mind, as I wrap this up, I have to be honest about this book. It’s a fine book. Not a great one. I wouldn’t tell you to rush to the nearest Barnes and Nobles but if you see it out shopping or online you should pick it up. It isn’t very long, about 200 pages. For my not so big on reading folks I know that may sound intimidating and even look it but I promise it’s not. For the most part, even with my critiques, it is an easy read. If you like Bill Russell, the Celtics, basketball or just American history, you should read this book.

And if you do, let me know your thoughts. Whether you liked it, loved it or hated it. Whether you disagreed with my opinion or view of the book. It would be very cool to have a discussion with someone who read a book because of my recommendation on here.

I guess I do at the end of the day have to give a rating because that is kind of what we do here. I think 3.8/5 is a fair grade.

Some house keeping for next time. I will most likely (maybe?) be talking about The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It is only about 20 pages so we’ll see if I write about it. I am also now reading Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin so keep an eye out for that review as well.

My first official book review is, well, in the books as they say. Thanks for reading and sharing this with your friends. This newsletter has been doing better than expected and, until now, I hadn’t even put out a review yet.

I am officially done rambling, thanks and see you next time.