The Hall of Famer’s body kept him from achieving basketball transcendence, but he found it as a broadcaster, translating the game in a way that no one else could or ever will.
Bill Walton was perhaps never luckier than in his very first organized basketball game, when he was just a fourth grader on the bench of the sixth grade team of Blessed Sacrament Parish School in San Diego, California. He sat for almost all four periods, only entering once it had become a certifiable blowout. In the final moments of the game, he saw a vision that would soon become familiar and would define his style as one of the greatest basketball centers of all time: On the perimeter, young Walton saw a wide open teammate. directly under the rim and threw a pass toward the basket. “But I misjudged the distance,” Walton wrote in his 1994 autobiography.. “And instead I threw the ball straight through the hoop, nothing but the net.”
Much of what followed: multiple growth spurts in high school, three consecutive national college player of the year awards, multiple NCAA championships with John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins and a career in the NBA that started as the No. 1 overall pick in 1974 and ended with two titles and an MVP award — it seemed to happen despite the odds. He was a natural basketball obsessive who was seemingly built to play the game, but cursed with a faulty floor plan. There may never be another great NBA player capable of enduring the sheer number of injuries Walton faced during his basketball career, starting with torn knee cartilage left foot which he suffered just before his sophomore year of high school and ending with numerous stress fractures in his right foot. the end of his NBA career in 1988. He would undergo 30 different surgeries during this period, and almost 40 during his life. According to Walton, there has only been one offseason in his 14 years in the league in which he did not have surgery. Walton had stress fractures before the American medical system could recognize them on civilian x-rays. He brought in hypnotists, as a last resort, to try to convince him that his foot problems weren’t real.
“I have lived with pain for most of my life, but pain has never been my whole life,” Walton wrote in his final autobiography, in 2016. “What to some is pain, For me, it’s really just fatigue. I love and live for this fatigue and the pain that accompanies it. Because if you’re lucky, exhaustion gives way to euphoria. And Walton would have been the first to tell you that he was the the luckiest man in the world. His body was preventing him from achieving the kind of lasting transcendence he had aspired to achieve on the court, but during his second act in the broadcast booth – where his deep commitment to basketball was no longer limited by the limits of his sick body – he got there. With his singular mind and vision, he was the benevolent spirit of basketball and accompanied us throughout his long and strange journey. Alas, we have reached the final stage. Walton, the Basketball Hall of Fame visionary – as a player and broadcaster – died Monday at the age of 71 from cancer.
Like everyone else over the last couple of generations, my introduction to Bill Walton came from NBA on NBC broadcasts where he was a color analyst alongside Steve “Snapper” Jones; like any other basketball fan born and raised in Los Angeles, I knew him as the histrionic voice of Clippers madness alongside the great play-by-play announcer Ralph Lawler (whom I profiled in 2019). Walton was a fixture on local Clippers broadcasts from 1990 to 2002, which was its own proof of Walton’s gluttony for punishment. The Clippers have racked up 615 losses during that span, the most of any team in the league. Walton may have become an icon on those national broadcasts, but I would wager that the hyperbolic lens with which he viewed the game was refined in the drudgery of having to say Nothing constructive through one of the worst stretches of basketball in league history.
Yet that dastardly era also produced my favorite basketball game of all time, and Walton was there for it: a three-part harmony between Sean Rooks, Lamar Odom and Darius Miles in the form of an alley-oop on everything field. Yet for a broadcaster known for his paeans to the filibuster, Walton almost shone with his restraint in that moment. It was Lawler’s call, and he succeeded; Walton cleared the floor for his teammate to thrive, just like Wooden taught him at Westwood all those years ago.
Of course, Walton didn’t become the legend he said he is by often holding back. My most treasured memory of Walton is a fragment, the texture and detail lost in the indignity of an early Clippers game, not fit for any archive. I remember a full-court heave to end the first half. And I remember the broad strokes of Walton’s appeal, his voice carrying a passion for the finished that only he could muster. What a shot. What an attempt! Oh, it was so close, so right! It was just to the right. The ball had landed in the row of photographers behind the basket. Mostly, what I remember is my older brother amazed with laughter at the absurdity of what Walton had just tried to pass off as reality. The play didn’t matter and Walton knew it. But it still gave us something to remember. I’d like to think that every basketball fan has their own Misty Waltonism as a personal memory: a ridiculous, bombastic phrase uttered once upon a time that has a permanent space in memory thanks to the strength of Walton’s conviction as a ‘speaker. Walton exuded the relentless positivity of basketball as it could be, in language that was both indecipherable and easily accessible. felt by anyone who would listen. I still find myself shouting “What a pass!” » when badly missed shots lead to easy second chance points around the basket:
As a communicator, whatever medium he chose, Walton was unique. His vision of basketball is a miracle of expression, which honors the sense of imagination that he developed from an early age. He lived a life of powerful metaphor. He had to do it. I think about where this comes from and come to a story Walton tells about his childhood in his 2016 memoir. He is 12, sitting in the front seat of his family’s beat-up car next to his father, a basketball firmly in hand. He looks at his father who fervently changes the radio in search of Chopin, Tchaikovsky. His father, a music teacher and social worker who served as district chief of the San Diego Department of Welfare, thought his children would all become musicians; they all became athletes. In a burst of emotion, the 12-year-old thanked his father for everything he had done to help make a preteen’s hoops dreams come true; he vowed to make it to the NBA, win the MVP and give his father the car that came with the prize. His father looked at him blankly. He had no idea what the NBA was.
Walton would spend the rest of his life finding new ways to translate his passion, to bridge the gap that might exist between basketball and other forms of expression. There will always be a gap between art and appreciation, a linguistic chasm that cannot be fully translated. Basketball is no exception, although many intelligent minds are trying to remedy this situation. JJ Redick has dedicated his media career to seeking a new standard in basketball culture at the tactical level. Walton, as brilliant a basketball mind as he was, never really cared about the X’s and O’s during his broadcasting career. It’s the difference between seeing the game as everything and seeing the game in everything. Both valid, both conveying a certain cleverness that comes from being fully grounded in an art form.
Maybe it’s the fact that, personally and professionally, I use hyperbole and metaphor as ways to connect to this game, but Walton’s vision of basketball has always seemed like an ideal. This is the world I want to live in, the language I want to master more and more, so that I can conjure up images of this beautiful game that are more inviting, more expansive, and totally absorbing. Walton’s epiphany came with the Grateful Dead, the legendary jam band that Walton saw more than 850 times, the group that would become a vital part of Walton’s reason for being. “I began to have a recurring dream where everything would come together,” Walton wrote in 1994. “Music and basketball were exactly the same thing.” Jerry Garcia was his Prometheus; Walton is mine.
Hours after the news broke Monday, a friend of mine texted a grainy six-second video he took in 2022 of Walton walking on the USC campus before a Pac-12 game. Walton wore a chair custom-made for his back – a back that, for years, had been a source of pain that even Walton struggled to deal with. His gait was labored, the result of each leg compensating for the other throughout his adult life. And yet, in the golden glow of the hour, he had the disposition of a student eagerly heading to class, backpack in tow. For decades, he destroyed his own body for the game he loved; for decades he refracted the euphoria of being alive and being able to watch him grow. But the kid in him – from all those years ago, in the old family car, daydreaming with a basketball in his hand – never left. The music never stopped.