All Ball Sports: Bill Walton’s long, Strange Trip and “basketball’s greatest ambassador”
by Paul Teetor
A bunch of hoopers at Live Oak Park were talking about the late, great Bill Walton last Friday afternoon when a kid shooting baskets nearby chimed in.
“What was so great about Bill Walton? Wasn’t he a crazy old hippie on TV who talked about everything except the game he was supposed to be covering?”
The kid looked to be somewhere between 18 and 25. Definitely a high school graduate and quite possibly a college graduate.
How could he be so ignorant?
How could he not know that Bill Walton was the greatest college basketball player of all time and one of the greatest NBA ballers before a string of foot and back injuries derailed his career.
And even then he managed to make a lasting impression on hoops history as the sixth man on one of the greatest NBA teams of all time, the 1985-86 Boston Celtics.
After his playing career was over, he became a broadcast star and the greatest ambassador basketball has ever known. There was no autograph he wouldn’t gladly sign, no question he wouldn’t gladly answer, no little kid he wouldn’t listen to.
As he said many, many times, he regarded himself as the luckiest man in the world and he worked hard to spread a little sunshine into other people’s lives.
So I took the time to give the kid a little history lesson on the legendary life of William Theodore Walton III, who died last week at age 71 from colon cancer.
There was no advance warning of his passing. Thus, the widespread feeling of shock and sadness in equal measure when the news broke Monday afternoon.
Usually, although not always with sports figures as consequential as Walton, there’s some public hint that the end is coming, some movement to honor his greatness while he’s still alive, before it’s too late, and he has a chance to savor the public’s love and appreciation one last time.
With Walton, there was nothing public, no advance warning of any kind.
In fact, one of the guys in the group said that he had seen Walton just a month before in a live-streamed Grateful Dead discussion group.
“He looked and sounded fine,” my friend said. “Nothing appeared to be wrong with him. Same old, goofy lovable Bill Walton. The world’s biggest Deadhead.”
It struck me at that point that it wasn’t fair to Walton’s memory to have the last impression – him wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and reciting Grateful Dead lyrics, or talking crazy stuff about the “conference of champions” on PAC-12 basketball games – be all that the millennials and the Gen Z-ers and people like this kid remembered about Walton.
I wanted the kid to understand the gravity of the loss we all suffered last week.
A loss not just to the basketball world.
But to the entire world.
He was one of a kind.
Sui generis.
Bill Walton at UCLA in 1974, where he led the Bruins to an 88-game winning streak, and two National Championships. Photo courtesy of Associated Students, UCLA/Wikimedia Commons
The legend of Bill Walton started early in his high school career at Helix High in San Diego. In 1970 he led his team to an undefeated 33-0 season and a CIF title in his senior season.
As a freshman at Helix he was a skinny 6-foot-1 guard learning to play like a guard – look for the smart pass, make your teammates better and always put the team’s goals ahead of individual goals.
By his senior year he was a skinny 6-foot-11 center. But he retained the skills and the mindset of a point guard, which made him the top recruit in the country.
UCLA coach John Wooden assigned his top assistant, Denny Crum, to recruit Walton, but he needn’t have bothered. Walton grew up a huge Bruin fan and always wanted to play for them, so it was a no-brainer when it came time for him to pick a college.
Back then NCAA rules forbade freshman from playing varsity ball — what a stupid rule — so he didn’t play in games that counted until his sophomore year. The Bruins immediately went on an 88-game winning streak, during which he averaged more than 20 points, 10 rebounds and five assists.
They also won two national championships. In the NCAA championship game in 1973, he played the greatest college hoops game anyone ever played: he hit 21 out of 22 shots, pulled down 13 boards, handed out 10 assists and blocked a couple of shots.
This was before dunking was allowed – again, a stupid rule – so we’re talking real shot making. Hook shots, bank shots, jump shots, scoop shots – he connected on all kinds of shots in leading UCLA to a NCAA title win over Memphis State, led by future pros Larry Kenon and Larry Finch.
As proud as Wooden was of Walton on the court, he had plenty of trouble with him off the court. Walton was a child of the ‘60s: he wore his hair long, protested against the Vietnam War and was a rebel with plenty of causes. He was a free spirit who resisted conformity and yet always put the team ahead of himself.
At the team’s first practice Wooden told Walton to get a haircut but Bill declined to do so. Wooden told him he respected Walton’s decision as a principled act.
“But we’re going to miss you,” Wooden said.
Walton immediately got on his 10-speed bike and rode to the barbershop.
There was a more serious incident when Walton was arrested with a group of anti-war students who were staging a sit-in on the UCLA campus, and Wooden had to come bail him out of jail.
“I had no problem with him during the season,” Wooden said. “Off the floor I worried. I worried when he was thrown in jail with the group that took over the administration building, I worried when he stopped traffic on Wilshire Boulevard, and I worried when he interrupted class to give his views on the Vietnam War.”
After being named national player of the year three straight times, Walton was the top pick in the 1974 NBA draft by the Portland Trail Blazers. Coach Jack Ramsey built his team around Walton’s unselfish, find-the-open-man style, and in 1977 the Trail Blazers won their first and only NBA title. Walton was named the Finals MVP.
In 1978, they compiled a 50-10 record and were on their way to another title when Walton broke some bones in his foot – one of the worst injuries a basketball player can have. He sat out the next season and was eventually traded to the San Diego Clippers. When he came back, he was never the same player.
But he had one last shot of glory when he helped the Boston Celtics – led by Larry Bird, Robert Parish and Kevin McHale – to the 1986 NBA title.
The next year the injuries came back and he soon retired for good.
But instead of fading away, he overcame his serious stutter – a childhood affliction that endured until he was 28 – and soon became a broadcasting star.
Walton explained his evolution from an introvert who never talked to extrovert who couldn’t stop talking.
“I’m a stutterer. I never spoke to anybody. I lived most of my life by myself. But as soon as I got on the court, I was fine,” Walton said. “In life, I was so self-conscious — red hair, big nose, freckles and goofy, nerdy looking face and can’t talk at all. I was incredibly shy and never said a word. Then, when I was 28, I learned how to speak. It’s become the greatest accomplishment of my life and everybody else’s biggest nightmare.”
Walton was doing color analysis for NBC when the Kobe-Shaq Lakers reached the fourth quarter of game 7 of the 2000 Western Conference Finals trailing the Blazers by 13 points.
Diehard Lakers fans can still recall Walton’s prophetic words as the fourth quarter started and the Lakers looked dead in the water.
“You have 12 minutes to do something special in your life…. you have to just blast through all the pain to get to the other side,” Walton said.
And indeed, the Lakers pulled off the greatest fourth quarter comeback in playoff history, capped by the famous Kobe-to-Shaq alley-oop lob pass that sealed the Lakers victory and marked the start of their 2000-2002 threepeats.
Later he became the color analyst alongside Clippers play-by-play announcer Ralph Lawler, who called him the best partner he ever had.
With Lawler he perfected the wide-ranging, talk-about-anything approach that turned off some viewers but attracted a lot more. Those people got the Grateful Dead references, the mentions of art, music and current affairs mixed in with basketball observations.
So yeah, kid, sometimes Bill Walton was a crazy old hippie talking about everything but the game he was supposed to be covering. But that’s only because his life was a long strange trip and we were lucky enough to tag along with him.
Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com. ER