The Sam Jones Interview
By:
Michael D. McClellan
|
Thursday, October 11th,
2007
Please tell me about the great Bill Russell – your relationship with him on
the basketball court, and your friendship with him away from it.
Well,
we still have that friendship, and that’s one of the reasons that I’m going
to his fantasy camp in Las Vegas. Bill and I stay
in contact with each
other – we’ve always done that since Day 1, and I mean since we retired
together following that last championship in 1969. Bill Russell was a fella
determined to be the best that he could be – I hate to say that because it
sounds like the Marines, but that is the absolute truth. He was determined
to be the best. He had that will to win. Whatever cliché you want to pick,
it just isn’t a cliché when you’re talking about Bill Russell. He was so
competitive and so committed to excellence that he tried to win every play,
every possession. To me, what makes a player great is the ability to make
the other players around him play better. Bill Russell did that. He was
just an incredibly special basketball player, and nowhere was that more
apparent than on defense. From the moment Bill Russell joined the Boston
Celtics and on up until today, he remains the greatest defensive player to
ever play the game. And trust me, I do follow basketball – and I have not
seen anyone that could block shots with the great timing that he had. It
was unbelievable. And it was just a joy to play with him knowing that
nobody you played was going into the lane and make a layup. Not as long as
Bill Russell was the protector of that basket. He carried that level of
play with him for thirteen years in the NBA, and I thank God that I had the
opportunity to play basketball with him for twelve of those thirteen years.
Between the two of us, we hold the record for championships. He won eleven
and I won ten. There are only two players in NBA history to ever win more
than ten championships, and that’s Russell and I. You can talk about great
players – you can talk about Michael Jordan all you want because he was a
great player. But again, what makes a truly great player is a man who makes
his teammates around him better. Nobody did that better than Bill Russell.
You would be hard-pressed to find a classier gentleman than KC Jones.
Please tell me a little about KC, and how the starting Hall of Fame
backcourt of Sam and KC Jones differed from that of Bob Cousy and Bill
Sharman.
You
couldn’t have a better situation than I did, playing with guys like that.
They were all so special - KC Jones, Bob Cousy, Bill Sharman, Jim
Loscutoff, Tom Heinsohn, and John Havlicek. It was unbelievable the way we
played as a team, and I was really mad – yes, I’m going to put it that way,
I was really mad when they started picking entire teams for inclusion into
the Hall of Fame. When I was inducted, one of my statements was that team
sports were not about the individual, that sometimes forgotten are the
players who may not make it to the Hall of Fame – which is the case with
some of the players that I played with during my career with the Boston
Celtics. So the day that I was inducted I said that my [Hall of Fame] ring
was in honor of those players that I participated with who may never find
themselves standing at that podium in Springfield. I also said that it was
my wish that we could go in as a team. At that time the Hall of Fame had
never inducted a team – but just a few years ago the first team to be
included was the Harlem Globetrotters. And then, in 2007, Texas Western was
inducted. If you saw the movie Glory Road, you know that they won
the 1966 NCAA National Championship and did so by becoming the first
Division I school to start five African-American players. Not to take
anything away from that, but I’ve always thought that we should have went
into the Hall of Fame as a team. I went to eleven NBA Finals in my twelve
years in the league, and we won ten championships. You’ll never see that
again – that will never happen, unless God gets his own team [laughs].
In Bill Russell and Sam Jones, the Boston Celtics had the perfect blend of
defensive and offensive prowess. How long did it take for you to realize
that you were in a very special situation?
I
wasn’t even thinking about that at the time, but it truly was special. The
whole time I was there we never signed a no-cut contract. We just played
because we loved the game. And we even loved it better because we had Bill
Russell and we had Bob Cousy, who was way ahead of his time. When you
looked at John Stockton, you would think that John Stockton was a clone of
Bob Cousy. Having those guys around was a luxury that very few teams could
ever claim. Cousy was a magician with the basketball, and Russell was the
greatest defensive player - and the greatest winner – the NBA has ever seen.
I remember my third year with the Celtics, and Coach Auerbach bringing me in and saying that I had a green light to shoot the basketball. I’d heard about the green light to shoot, and it was only granted if Auerbach had the trust in a player’s scoring ability. You could shoot it anytime you wanted to. I said, ‘Coach, what did you say?’ He said, ‘You’ve got the green light, and that gives you a lot of responsibility.’ So I felt kind of special then [laughs].
In those days, the Celtics made frequent preseason barnstorming tours
throughout New England. What memories stand out from those tours, and did
you ever experience Red’s driving firsthand?
Don’t
even talk about that – I rode with him once and I got straight out of the
car [laughs]. No, no, no, no [laughs]. You know how the rookies were
supposed to ride with certain people – well, I wanted to ride with Bill
Russell. He was safe. You know Red – there was no telling where Red was
going, or if he was going to make it there in one piece [laughs]. From then
on I never volunteered to ride with Red. Besides, when I joined the team
Russell was the only black player on the roster. The joke during my rookie
season was that I made the team because Russell needed somebody to talk to
[laughs]. I didn’t room with Russell that much, I roomed with Frank Ramsey
and sometimes with Tommy Heinsohn. Those barnstorming tours were something
else – you’d play the same team every night, maybe the Minneapolis Lakers,
and by the end of the thing you were ready to kill each other [laughs].
