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PORTSIDE CULTURE

YOU DON’T NEED TO BE A CELTICS (OR SPORTS) FAN TO BE STIRRED BY
CELTICS CITY  
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Tim Lowery
March 22, 2025
AV Club
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_ “I don’t play for Boston. I play for the Celtics,” Bill
Russell famously said, a sentiment that succinctly summed up the star
player’s frustrations with the racism in his adopted city, where he
had an unbelievably successful run in the ’50s and ’60s _

Tom "Satch" Sanders , (Photo: HBO)

 

“I don’t play for Boston. I play for the Celtics,” Bill Russell
famously said, a sentiment that succinctly summed up the star
player’s frustrations with the racism in his adopted city, where he
had an unbelievably successful run in the ’50s and ’60s, leading
the team to win 11 NBA championships in the 13 years he wore the
uniform (two of which he pulled double duty as coach). But the quote
also pinpoints the contrast at the heart of _Celtics City _thus
far—three of the HBO docuseries’ nine episodes have aired, with
the next arriving March 24—in that for as much it covers the highs
of Celtics’ dynasties, including, quite often, the organization’s
2024 championship, the lows of everything happening in real life,
outside of the walls of Garden, feel like the real meat of the
project.  

Directed by Lauren Stowell and executive produced by, among others,
Bill Simmons and Connor Schell (the two co-created ESPN’s _30 For
30_ series, and Simmons and his father reminisce onscreen about
seeing the team in the early ’70s here), _Celtics City _introduces
a wide cast of characters: There’s the colorful, ever-cigar-chomping
coach Red Auerbach, who would go onto become the organization’s
president and talked in a non-nonsense way you that just don’t hear
NBA higher-ups talk like anymore. There’s fan favorite and Holy
Cross alum Bob Cousy, a point guard who dazzled on the court,
providing the series with one of its many goosebumps-inducing moments
of play as well as some charming recollections today in his 90s. And
there are a whole lot of other sweaty dudes with crew cuts, leaning on
benches in a locker room that didn’t have lockers but hooks, with
one veteran reporter noting that covering the Celtics on their home
turf felt like writing about a high-school team.

But the real lead in the series’ first act is Russell, and _Celtics
City_ shows a lot of the racial tensions flaring up in the
country—the Birmingham riot, Medgar Evers’ assassination in
Jackson—through his eyes, as he details, say, the fear of driving
his children through Louisiana. Those fears were at his doorstep, too.
“I don’t think we ever fully felt safe,” reflects Karen Kenyatta
Russell, his daughter. “One night we came home and found that we had
been robbed. The house was in shambles. Someone had destroyed all of
his trophies, and when my parents were going to bed, they pulled back
the sheets and someone had defecated in their bed.” 

The show also underlines the idea that the Celtics were never fully
embraced by Boston during this era because of the team’s racial
makeup, comparing its crowd sizes with those of the city’s hockey
team, the Bruins, at not just home games during winning seasons but
championship rallies as well. When the Celtics had an all-Black
starting lineup in 1964, an NBA first, the author Nelson George
wondered, “Are we gonna play the best players we have?” with the
implication being that the squad needed to have a “white quota” to
be accepted by fans. And when Russell is announced to be the next
coach, a reporter pointedly asked, “Can you do the job impartially
without any racial prejudice in reverse?” That he—someone
who _just won the Celtics a bunch of titles_—even answered this
question let alone with such composure speaks volumes to his
restraint. 

“I live here and so I could not stand by in comfort and
relaxation,” Russell said of his activism, with _Celtics
City _showing him marching alongside the likes of Martin Luther King
Jr. “When I see people doing things to other citizens, I am
offended. I was like, ‘This could be a place where we do things for
each other, not things to each other.’” And longtime teammate,
power forward Tom “Satch” Sanders, puts it this way: “A lot of
guys were playing basketball for a living, for money, for a lot of
reasons. Russell had a cause. And, as Russell had said, ‘Basketball
is a stage on which I can let people know how I feel.’”   

In its third episode, the show moves into the 1970s as the team
flounders without Russell. And while it gives enough minutes to the
Celtics’ rebuild, the through line remains the racial animosity
happening around the stadium, with the series zeroing in on two major
clashes: the Boston desegregation busing crisis that started in 1974,
when some Black students were integrated into schools in predominantly
white neighborhoods, and the attack of Black lawyer Ted Landsmark in
broad daylight outside City Hall two years later, when the riots over
that busing order were still at a fever pitch. The raw footage—and
one particularly impactful photograph
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Landsmark, with a broken nose, being assaulted with a flagpole with
the American Flag—is tough to shake, as white kids throw rocks at
incoming students and their parents scream at cops enforcing the order
and cars are set ablaze. (Both of these incidents are also explored,
to great narrative effect, in the 2023 HBO docuseries _Murder In
Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning_
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which was helmed by _The Last Dance_’s Jason Hehir.)

But the show doesn’t ever let the team stay on  the back burner for
too long, and the archival footage of the actual play on that famed
parquet floor can be stirring in its own way, too, especially the
clips of of the team’s game five-win of the 1976 NBA Finals that
stretched to three overtimes and went past midnight. It’s hard not
to get a buzz watching point guard Jo Jo White slumping in exhaustion
or small forward John Havlicek making that clutch shot, with crowd
storming the floor thinking the team had won (not knowing there was
still time on the clock) in one of those chaotic,
stranger-than-fiction scenes that can make sports so exciting. 

Episode three closes out with the signing of Larry Bird (set to
Talking Heads’ “Thank You For Sending Me An Angel”), so we’re
about to embark on a whole new chapter of the Celtics. But for now,
while the docuseries isn’t flawless (the constant returns to the
2024 win can feel a bit heavy-handed—that said, shooting guard
Jaylen Brown does offer fascinating, open-hearted insights—as can
some of the stylistic choices to drive home that we’re watching old
footage), it is, in this current climate, necessary—and a pretty
potent reminder that it’s never just a game.

* boston Celtics
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* Racism
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* Boston
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