Bill Walton’s Long, Strange Trip to Basketball Immortality

The Hall of Famer’s body prevented him from reaching basketball transcendence, but he found it as a broadcaster, translating the game in a way no one else could or ever will

• By
  
  Danny Chau
  
• on May 28, 2024 11:37 am

Bill Walton was perhaps never so lucky as he was in his very first game of organized basketball, when he was but a fourth grader riding the bench on the sixth-grade squad at the Blessed Sacrament Parish School in San Diego, California. He sat for nearly all four periods, entering only once it had become a certifiable blowout. In the final moments of the game, he caught a soon-to-be-familiar vision that would come to define his style as one of basketball’s all-time great centers: out on the perimeter, the young Walton saw a wide-open teammate directly under the rim and rocketed a pass toward the basket. “But I misjudged the distance,” Walton wrote in his 1994 autobiography. “And instead heaved the ball directly through the hoop, nothing but net.”

Much of what came after that—the multiple growth spurts in high school, the three consecutive national college player of the year awards, the multiple NCAA championships with John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins, and an NBA career that started as the first overall pick in 1974 and ended with two titles and an MVP award—seemed to come in spite of luck. 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 NBA great to endure the sheer amount of injuries that Walton faced in his basketball career, starting with the torn left knee cartilage he suffered just before his sophomore year of high school and concluding with numerous stress fractures in his right foot by the end of his NBA journey in 1988. He would have 30 different surgeries over that span—and nearly 40 in his lifetime. According to Walton, there was only one offseason in his 14 years in the league wherein he didn’t undergo an operation. Walton had stress fractures before the American medical system could even recognize them on civilian X-ray readings. He had hypnotists come in, as a last resort, to try to convince him his foot issues weren’t real.

“I’ve lived with pain for most of my life, but pain has never been my entire life,” Walton wrote in his final autobiography, in 2016. “What to some is pain, to me is really just fatigue. I love and live for that fatigue and the soreness that comes with it.” Because if you’re lucky, exhaustion gives way to euphoria. And Walton would have been the first to tell you he was the luckiest guy in the world. His body prevented him from the kind of sustained transcendence he’d longed to achieve on the court, but in his second act in the broadcast booth—where his deep commitment to basketball was no longer confined by the limits of his ailing body—he got there. Through his singular mind and vision, he served as basketball’s benevolent spirit and brought us all along on his long, strange trip. Alas, we’ve reached the final stop. Walton, the hall-of-fame basketball visionary—as a player and broadcaster—died on Monday at the age of 71, due to cancer.

Like everyone else of the past two 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 delirium next to 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 amassed a staggering 615 losses over that period, the most of any team in the league. Walton may have become an icon on those national broadcasts, but I’d venture to bet that the hyperbolic lens with which he saw the game was refined in the drudgery of having to say anything constructive through one of the worst stretches of basketball in league history.

Yet that ignoble era also happened to produce my favorite basketball play ever, and Walton was on hand for it: a three-part harmony between Sean Rooks, Lamar Odom, and Darius Miles in the form of a full-court alley-oop. Yet, for a broadcaster known for his filibustering paeans, Walton was almost conspicuous in his restraint in that moment. It was Lawler’s call, and he nailed it; Walton cleared the runway for his teammate to thrive, just as Wooden taught him at Westwood all those years ago.

Of course, Walton didn’t become the announcing legend he is by restraining himself often. My most treasured memory of Walton is a fragment, the texture and detail lost in the indignity of a Clippers game from the early aughts, 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 call, his voice carrying a passion for the finite that only he could muster. What a shot. What an attempt! Oh, it was so close, so on target! It was juuust off to the right. The ball had sailed into the row of photographers behind the basket. Mostly, what I remember is my older brother bowled over in laughter at the absurdity of what Walton had just tried to pass off as reality. The play didn’t matter and Walton knew that. But he gave us something to remember, anyway. I’d like to think that every basketball fan has their own hazy Waltonism as a personal keepsake: some ridiculous, grandiloquent line uttered once upon a time that has a permanent space in one’s memory through the sheer force of Walton’s conviction as an orator. Walton emanated the relentless positivity of basketball as it could be, in a language at once indecipherable and readily felt by anyone who cared to 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, across all his chosen mediums, Walton was a one-of-one. His vision of basketball is a miracle of expression, a credit to the sense of imagination he honed from an early age. He lived a life of powerful metaphor. He’s had to. I think about where that comes from, and I land on a story that Walton tells of his childhood in his 2016 memoir. He is 12, sitting in the front of his family’s rundown car next to his dad, basketball firmly in hand. He looks over to his father, who is fervently changing radio stations in search of Chopin, of Tchaikovsky. His dad—a music teacher and social worker who served as district chief for the San Diego Department of Public Welfare—thought his children would all become musicians; they all became athletes instead. In an emotional rush, the 12-year-old thanked his dad for all that he’d done to help support a preteen’s hoop dreams; he vowed to make it to the NBA, to win MVP, and to gift his father the car that comes with the award. His dad looked back at him blankly. He had no idea what the NBA was.

Walton would spend the rest of his life finding new ways of translating his passion—to bridge whatever divide there might be between basketball and other forms of expression. There is always going to be a gap between art and appreciation, a chasm of language that cannot be fully translated. Basketball is no exception, though there are plenty of smart minds in the sport trying to rectify that—JJ Redick has staked his media career on the pursuit of a new standard in basketball literacy on a tactical level. Walton, as brilliant a basketball mind as he had, never really fussed over X’s and O’s in 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 astuteness that comes with being fully embedded in an art form.

Maybe it’s the fact that I personally and professionally traffic in hyperbole and metaphor as ways of connecting to this game, but Walton’s vision of basketball has always felt like an ideal. It’s the world I want to live in, the language I want to grow more and more fluent with—to be able to conjure images of this beautiful game that are more inviting, more expansive, and wholly absorbing. Walton’s epiphany arrived with the Grateful Dead, the legendary jam band that Walton saw upward of 850 times, the band that would become a core part of Walton’s reason for being. “I began having a recurring dream where all of it would come together,” Walton wrote in 1994. “The music and the basketball were the exact same thing.” Jerry Garcia was his Prometheus; Walton is mine.

A few hours after the news broke Monday, a friend of mine texted a grainy six-second video he’d taken in 2022 of Walton walking on the USC campus before a Pac-12 game. Walton was carrying a custom-fit chair for his back—a back that, for years, had been a source of pain that even Walton struggled to cope with. His gait was labored, the result of each leg compensating for the other in the entirety of his adult life. And yet, under the golden-hour glow, he had the disposition of a student eagerly strolling 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 able to watch it grow. But the kid in him—from all those years ago, in the old family car, daydreaming with basketball in hand—never left. The music never stopped.