Bill Walton: The Glory of What Was and the Frustration of What Wasn’t
For you younger folks to understand the impact of Bill Walton on basketball a half century ago, think Caitlin Clark.
Like Clark, Bill Walton spent a couple of seasons becoming a singular standout in the college game. Playing for UCLA against Memphis in the 1973 NCAA championship game, he hit 21 of 22 shots, scoring 44 points and leading UCLA to its seventh consecutive national championship. There hasn’t been a better individual game in the NCAA finals, ever.
That doesn’t mean Walton, who died Monday at the too-young age of 71 after a battle with cancer, was the best college player ever. But watching that game was riveting in the same way that watching Clark play for Iowa was riveting. It felt like he was doing everything right — the shots, the moves, the passes, the flow. He had grace. He was charismatic. He made you want to watch basketball.
After college he would play on two NBA title-winning teams. He led the Portland Trail Blazers to the 1977 championship and finished his career as the quintessential sixth man on the dominating 1986 Boston Celtics.
Those were high points in a career that was subverted by near-constant injuries, particularly to a balky, high-arched left foot. Over 13 years he played in only 468 games, or a little under six full seasons. He averaged 13.3 points and 10.5 rebounds — nice numbers, but not numbers that by themselves would place him in the pantheon of NBA greats.
No, Bill Walton was memorable to a significant extent for his style. Like his professed idol Bill Russell, Walton at his best simply knew the game. He could rip down a rebound and hit his breaking guard with what seemed like one motion. Then, down near the basket, he assumed that guard’s fluidity. He wasn’t a brick fortress of a center like, say, Shaquille O’Neal. He had moves. He could find open space.
If he had been healthy, if he’d played more than 44 percent of the pro games for which he was eligible, he could easily be in the conversation for the greatest ever. Instead, we qualify his work with “at his best” or “when he wasn’t hurt,” a too-common caution in sports discussion.
Bill Walton also did something else well. He reinvented himself. In his first few pro years, up through his time with Portland and then the San Diego Clippers into the early 1980s, he built a reputation as being elusive and prickly off the court and not always a joy on it. After one of his injuries ended his Portland career, he sued the team, claiming negligent medical treatment. When he sat out two seasons with the Clippers after the team spent big to get him, teammates including World B. Free suggested Walton and his then-stunning million-dollar-a-year contract wasn’t trying hard enough to get back into the game.
Walton said his absence on the court was frustrating and purely medical. Off the court, he later said, he was self-conscious about a speech impediment that made him reluctant to talk with anyone, including any reporter, he didn’t know and trust.
After he addressed the speech problem, he said, he became both more open and happier — a word that would probably describe how most TV viewers saw him once he moved into TV analysis in the early 1990s. He was upbeat about pretty much everything, bordering on exuberance about basketball even as he wandered off into riffs about everything from Chewbacca to suntan lotion to the Grateful Dead.
He was a lifelong Deadhead, close enough to the band that he not only played golf with drummer Mickey Hart, but sat in on Hart’s drums during a concert. (Personal note: The one time I met him was in the press area of a 1987 concert with the Dead and Bob Dylan. He had brought along his equally tall teammate Kevin McHale.)
The Grateful Dead connection ties into another element of Walton’s life that faded into the mist as he became a mainstream TV personality. In the early 1970s, even as he was helping UCLA win the first 73 games he played in the sky blue uniform, he was active in the student anti-Vietnam war movement. In his junior year he was arrested, along with fellow activists, after joining an anti-war march that ended with an attempt to block traffic on an L.A. freeway. (Pause for joke about that being redundant.)
The arrest created headlines, since not many All-Americans were prominent in the protest movement. UCLA coach John Wooden, whose previous All-American center Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) had joined a boycott of the 1968 Olympics to protest American racism, bailed Walton out.
Walton then put out a general statement saying, “Your generation screwed up the world. My generation is trying to straighten it out.” Wooden told the press that while he found Walton to be a joy on the basketball court, he was susceptible to “fringe ideas” in other parts of his life. Walton was also outspoken in those years on racial inequality, became a vegan and mused about leaving basketball to pursue spiritual awareness.
In the end, basketball won. When Wooden told him to cut his hair, he complied, and he would later say he never had any real disagreements with Wooden, whom he called a great coach. In the wider picture, Walton became generally disinclined in later years to discuss his student radical activities in any detail.
Nor was he often pressed to do so, because his legacy on the basketball court was that dominant. Any fan who saw him at his best understood how, like a handful of other players from Bill Russell to Caitlin Clark, there was an aura to his game. That fan also understood the tragedy of the time he lost.
One of the many stories Walton later told about his basketball days concerned a night when Celtics’s center Robert Parish was out with a minor injury, meaning Walton would start in his place and presumably get a lot more scoring chances than usual. Before the game, teammate Larry Bird came over and said, basically, “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking you’re going to get Chief’s (Parish’s) shots. You’re not. Those shots are mine. Get your butt to the weak side and get some rebounds.”
That’s probably not a bad snapshot of how a lot of elite players approach the game. Walton probably approached it that way himself at times. Telling the story years later, Walton’s tone was amused.
Yesterday Bird issued a statement. “I am very sorry about my good friend, Bill Walton,” it read. “I love him as a friend and teammate. It was a thrill for me to play with my childhood idol. . . . He is one of the greatest ever to play the game.”
