Bill Walton died of cancer Monday at 71, and it seems a gust of fresh air just left the room.
Walton was a different dude. He was an ageless, gentle hippie, torn from the start by his love of basketball and by his desire to be free of the artificiality and constraints of modern life.
By his own account, he had attended more than 1,000 Grateful Dead concerts. The community Deadheads create in the midst of the jam — always with the memory of deceased leader Jerry Garcia afloat — is something that binds them together in a brotherhood of ecstasy.
Walton reveled in that brotherhood. He had been in pain physically and psychologically for much of his life, and Dead shows were his balm. It bothered him that he always stood out, that he couldn’t disappear. With the Dead, however, he was just another joyful pilgrim in a tie-dyed shirt.
A friend of mine, media-entertainment executive Matt Luke, is also a Deadhead. He has been to more than 100 shows and saw Walton at most of them. ‘‘Soldier Field, Madison Square Garden, Boulder, Citi Field, Memphis, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Tampa, Orlando,’’ Luke says. ‘‘It was like ‘Where’s Waldo?’ Only it was, ‘Where’s Walton?’ You’d find him, this 7-foot-tall redhead, waving his hands in the air, smiling, talking to everybody who came by.’’
I spent a week with Walton when he was a rookie with the Trail Blazers and his world was caving in. The story I wrote was for the Jan. 27, 1975, issue of Sports Illustrated, with Cheryl Tiegs on the cover.
Walton, the first pick of the 1974 NBA Draft, was not playing because of foot injuries, including a bone spur that some thought existed only in his head. He was disoriented, depressed, overwhelmed by media and team expectations, by a lack of friends, by Portland’s gray and rainy winter — he said he needed the sun for energy — and by a pro game he saw as selfish and joyless.
I spoke with his college coach, John Wooden, after a UCLA practice at Pauley Pavilion, and Wooden said he had feared this sort of disillusionment for his former star center.
‘‘I tried to tell him it would be the emotional and not the physical part of the game that would be difficult, that in the pros it’s basically not a team game,’’ Wooden said. ‘‘I also felt that he would need discipline. When he was here, we had our disagreements, but I always governed his appearance on court. Now he can grow his beard, anything. There’s no one to tell him, ‘No.’ ’’
Walton was looking for impossible purity and freedom, like a romantic poet from another century, not a guy who had made 21 of 22 shots in an NCAA championship game. Not a guy who had a ponytail, ate no meat or fish and always carried a bag of berries and nuts with him, who was so pale and thin that teammate Sidney Wicks said, ‘‘His legs are so skinny they’re turning blue.’’
Injuries — which turned out to be real ones, not ‘‘brain spurs’’ — kept Walton from becoming the great force he could have been in the NBA. Still, he won two NCAA championships in college and was named MVP of the 1977 NBA Finals after leading the Blazers to the lone title in team history.
As a pro and later, Walton had surgery after surgery on his feet, ankles, knees and, finally, his spine, leaving him in such pain he felt suicide was his only way out. Fortunately, one last back operation slowly freed him from pain, and his work as a basketball analyst and spouter of mixed nonsense and genius flourished. By the end, he always referred to himself as ‘‘the luckiest guy in the world.’’
When I spent time with him so long ago, just a kid myself, he had a debilitating stutter, something that earned him ridicule and often caused him to be silent. He gradually overcame that impediment, too, joyfully declaring that ‘‘learning to speak is my greatest accomplishment in life. And your worst nightmare.’’
That was the happy, mischievous Walton, the one who, at Dead shows on New Year’s Eve, would dress in full regalia as Father Time. The one who said whatever entered his mind during college telecasts.
‘‘Bill loves the game,’’ Wooden told me. ‘‘But only as a team game.’’
Walton loved the world the same way. And citizen teammates around the globe now mourn his passing.
