Bill Walton was young and hard to read, and it was my job to tell his story
It was late 1974. Bill Walton was a young guy, and so was I.
He was 22, the first pick in the 1974 NBA draft, taken by the Portland Trail Blazers out of UCLA where he’d been a two-time NCAA champion under legendary coach John Wooden. I was 25, almost 26, in my infancy as a contributor to Sports Illustrated.
Walton was the generational center who could change a pro franchise from an also-ran to a champion, back before tall men in the middle were cheapened by a 3-point shot that turned basketball into the long-distance shoot-a-thon it is today.
Me? I was a nobody, eager to make it as a professional writer, not as an office guy, but as somebody who could be out there writing profiles, traveling to distant cities, seeking adventure, learning things, trying to make sense of the world.
When Walton died last May at 71 of cancer, he left a legacy of a man who strode his own path and simply did things, well, differently. He would become a two-time NBA champion with the Trail Blazers and then the Celtics, but our trails crossed that half-century ago when neither of us had any real certainty about what the future held.
Walton wasn’t playing due to bone spurs in his feet (injuries that were "in his head," critics liked to say). He was frighteningly skinny from a grains-and-nuts diet, had a beard, and wore his red hair in a ponytail. Back then, that look was unusual, trust me. He hated the gray and rainy Oregon winters, despised the selfishness he saw in the pro ranks, and even said he was thinking about quitting the NBA entirely and going back to California where the sun always shined.
He had a stutter, which could make him seem difficult, even surly, when one tried to communicate with him. And being 7 feet tall — which he was, though he always said he was 6-foot-11, because, as teammate Sidney Wicks told me, "He feels 7 feet is where being a freak starts’’ — made everything difficult. Still, we hit it off at the start. He told me about the music he liked (he’d been to his first Grateful Dead show in college) and made it clear he was against Richard Nixon, foreign wars and imperialism.
We sat next to each other on an airplane ride from Los Angeles to Portland — this was 50 years ago, and at the time NBA teams flew on commercial jets. A lady behind Walton complained that his seat was too far reclined, apparently unaware that his knees were already up near his head. He said something rude to her and got up and found another seat. For the rest of my assignment, I felt he pouted, or stayed angry.
To me, he seemed near some kind of breakdown, and it was hard not to side with those basketball people who said he was spoiled and immature and didn’t know how to play through adversity. There hadn’t been much adversity at UCLA where he was named national college player of the year three times, and his varsity teams had gone 86-4, including 73 wins in a row.
I had been flown to the Sports Illustrated offices in New York City before the assignment, so editors could talk to me. I was, I think, the youngest writer on the masthead, and I remember editor Jerry Tax saying the magazine was hopeful I, the young dude who had played a sport in college, would be able to get through to Walton, who very much didn’t like the press.
We did get along at first. He showed me a magazine article by Isaac Asimov on solar energy in which the author discussed America’s arrogance in non-use of the largest, free energy source on the planet. This proved, Walton explained to me, that the government was more interested in profit than people’s welfare. Walton was vehemently against the war in Vietnam, racism and "the establishment," and he told me the two philosophers most in line with his thinking were Bob Dylan and singer Joe McDonald of Country Joe & the Fish.
But his teammates didn’t like him too much. He was a newcomer, an idealist, a rigid one who believed things should be done the proper way. Right now. An 82-game schedule with cross-country travel and exhaustion built in was something he’d never experienced. The physical reality of the NBA would take its toll. Idealism might get sanded off fast. Walton, at this point, had no idea about any of that. He wanted things, it seemed to me, he didn’t deserve yet, things he needed to earn. Like teamwork, respect, a leadership role. I don’t know, maybe he just needed to grow up. That was a funny thought coming from a twentysomething like me.
I was a pickup basketball-playing nut, a gym ball rat, and I would have loved to have traded places with him, to get a sniff of the magical NBA, to get showered with cash like him, to simply play a wonderful game. Maybe, in some silly way, I was jealous of him. For the first time I pondered deeply what it must be like to go through life never blending in. If you weren’t a red-haired giant with a speech impediment and damaged feet, making tons of money, yet depressed and aloof, how could anybody really understand you? I only wrote about Walton again because of his death. I hadn’t written about him in the 50 years since that 1974 visit to Portland. I’m still pretty sure I didn't understand him. I’m not sure I totally understand myself.
I tried to write a nice eulogy in my Sun-Times column last spring for the man who was a transcendent but wounded athlete. He had his flaws when I met him, but I certainly had my own. And if I was harsh in my appraisal of him back then, I apologize. I was almost 26, he was 22, and both of us were trying to make sense of the world.