The real enemy Bill Russell had all his life was Racism. He shared that much with Wilt the Stilt. In a scene Russell never forgot, he was refused hotel rooms while traveling with his NBA teammate -- first in Dallas, where Russell spat on the hotel proprietor after the snub, and then in segregated North Carolina. As John Taylor puts it in The Rivalry: Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, and the Golden Age of Basketball (2005): "It enraged Russell to think that he was living in a society that simultaneously celebrated his athletic accomplishments and considered him inferior because of race, to realize that not only did a large portion of the population hate him for his skin color but that this hatred inescapably seeped into his own view of himself."
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