You don't need to be a Celtics (or sports) fan to be stirred by Celtics City
“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 of 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, 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.