The luckiest guy in the world

He was a genius who loved to play the fool. He was a card-carrying member of the counterculture, yet one of his closest friends was born before World War I and was as establishment as they come. He took over campus buildings to protest the Vietnam War while adhering to the UCLA basketball code for dress and decorum. He lived a life that was simultaneously full of joy and full of pain.

He was shaped by those around him, so much so that one of his favorite lines was, “Thank you for my life,” but he shaped the lives of those around him as well. He seemed to have almost as many best friends as he had friends.

Bill Walton was a man of contradictions, so much so that perhaps his greatest accomplishment — even greater than going 21 of 22 in an NCAA championship game when he was just 20 years old — was that he found a way to combine those contradictions into a whole individual, rather than being torn apart by them.

Those contradictions showed up early, as early as Bill’s arrival on the UCLA campus.

“I was playing for the first coach I got to choose,” he would later say about John Wooden. Bill, the unapologetic and unreconstructed hippie had chosen to play for a World War II vet. The clashes were frequent, and because both Bill and John were wonderful raconteurs, widely circulated.

In one of the best-known tales, Bill shows up with a ten-day growth of stubble, and Wooden asks him if he’s forgotten something. Bill says that he feels he has a right to grow a beard. Wooden says, “I have a great respect for individuals who stand up for those things in which they believe. I really do. And the team is going to miss you.”

So, Walton goes into the locker room and shaves.

But that’s not the end of the story, not by a long shot. Because Wooden was not a harsh taskmaster more concerned with rules than the people the rules were for, and because Walton was not a cynical rebel, convinced that everyone who disagreed with him was beneath his consideration, the two were able to spin Bill’s thwarted facial fungus into an after-dinner speech staple.

When Walton’s protests of the Vietnam War led to an arrest, Wooden came and bailed him out. When he did so, he told Walton that he didn’t agree with the war either, but that getting arrested might be more about bringing attention to himself than the cause he believed in.

It took a while for Walton to see Wooden’s perspective on his youthful rebellion, but when he did, “I spent the rest of my life,” he said, “trying to make it up to him.”

Wooden, for his part, knew that Walton was a good kid who was still trying to find his way. Later on, he gave Walton a plaque that he kept on his desk for the rest of his life. It said, “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”

Walton, like a great many young adults, had mastered the small world around him, the world of high school activities and being a teenager. But unlike a great many kids who hit life convinced that they’ve already learned everything they need to know, Walton responded to Wooden’s gentle nudging, eventually, by opening his heart and his mind to everything that he’d never known before.

Bill’s lifelong friendship with Wooden seems, at first glance, incongruous. Walton never stopped being a hippie and Wooden, despite winning twelve championships at UCLA, never stopped being an English teacher who had strong feelings about the correct way to wear socks and tie shoes. Wooden was a conservative man who wrote a love letter to his wife on the 21st of the month, every month, after she died; Walton once ate a lit candle on national TV.

Superficially, it’s difficult to imagine more of a difference between the two, but there was something behind the contradictions that drew them together; they never lost sight of their shared humanity. It’s a lesson that Walton took with him everywhere, and it’s a lesson that he learned from more than just Wooden. “All those messages,” Walton once said about the early influences on his life, gave him “hope, optimism, joy, celebration.”

Like Wooden, Bill believed that basketball was a “grand celebration of life,” and he continued to believe this, even as the sport gradually broke down his body.

It started during his senior year at UCLA, when he was undercut by a Washington State player, resulting in a fall that broke two vertebrae. The issues caused by these breaks weren’t addressed until 2009, when he had a spinal fusion operation which was, by his reckoning, the 36th orthopedic operation he’d undergone.

During his professional career, Walton injured just about every bone or joint it is possible to injure in basketball. In his first two years at Portland, which drafted him with the number one pick in 1974, Walton broke his left wrist twice, dislocated two toes and two fingers, broke a toe, and badly sprained an ankle. It was his feet, though, that laid him out most frequently.

In thirteen years of professional basketball, Walton missed three full seasons and another 352 games due to injuries, yet he kept at it. Basketball was still a “celebration of life” to him, even as it knocked him down with one injury after another.

Photo by Dick Raphael/NBAE via Getty Images

The reward for persisting was, indeed, a celebration. In 1986, Walton played in 80 games for the Boston Celtics, the most in his career by far, and he was a key component, the sixth man, on what was arguably the greatest team in NBA history. This was a team with five Hall-of-Famers in its rotation, a team that went 40-1 at home, and it was Bill’s opportunity to play for the same team, in the same building, and in the same uniform as his idol, Bill Russell.

When Auerbach asked Walton, then laid out in a hospital bed after yet another operation on his poor, abused, overworked ankles, if he wanted to play for the Celtics, Walton replied, “more than anything in the world.”

Even though Walton, later in life, acknowledged that the joy he found in life came from his earliest influences, finding that joy was a journey.

In his first years in the NBA, he was extremely difficult to coach. He once responded to Hall-of-Famer Jack Ramsay’s “Great job” with a sarcastic, “Great job yourself.” He was also difficult to talk to, speaking only to his favorite reporters. After earning the MVP award in the 1978 season, Walton demanded a trade and then sat out the entire 78-79 season. He blamed the Blazers for mismanaging the treatment of his injuries and eventually sued the team.

Walton’s year off changed him. Among other things, he found himself in Egypt, playing drums for the Grateful Dead during a show at the Pyramids. When he came back, he said, “I’m a different person now.”

Photo by Rocky Widner/NBAE via Getty Images

Walton managed to knit together the contradictions in basketball, a game he loved, but a game that he could not stay healthy playing. It’s where Bill learned to combine two often contradictory approaches to life, “Let’s play” and “Let’s get to work.” Walton loved to play, but despite being accused of malingering by his Clippers teammates, he worked at his job. He refused to listen to doctors who told him he’d never play again.

He also worked at overcoming a stutter. When he was 28 years old, he met Marty Glickman, an NBA broadcaster who had also dealt with a stuttering problem as a young man. Glickman gave him some tips and Walton went to work.

If Walton hadn’t spent his early years in the NBA building a reputation for petulance, as an enfant terrible, if he hadn’t spent his adult life dealing with pain (“I peaked at twelve” is how he once described his athletic ability), if he hadn’t had to work to overcome obstacles all along the way, if things only came easy to him, we could write him off as just one of those fortune favored few, admirable, sure, but most definitely not like us, and therefore, with nothing much to teach us.

But that’s not who Bill was. He was a guy who actually believed it when he told you he was “the luckiest guy in the world.”

He changed, he grew, he chose to have contradictions in his life. Here was a guy with a speech impediment who would not stop talking. “Bill calls me twice a week,” John Wooden once remarked. “And I love talking to him. Though it’s true, I don’t do much of the talking.”

As a broadcaster, his play-by-play man would frequently have to interrupt him just to keep the audience abreast of what was going on in the game. Bill thought in paragraphs, and paragraphs don’t fit well into the pace of a basketball broadcast.

During a two year stretch in the 80s when he couldn’t play, he attended law school at Stanford, although it is almost impossible to imagine Walton as a courtroom figure.

He also lived with pain to an extent that most of us can’t imagine.

Playing professional sports is more glamorous than digging ditches, but I’d be hard pressed to say which career is harder on your body.

Back in Gateway’s good old “Computers from South Dakota?!?!?!!” days, I worked for their tech support team, and I took a call from a guy who’d been shipped a replacement hard drive and needed to install it. The name he gave me was Darryl Talley. Of course, I immediately wondered if he was the Darryl Talley, but I didn’t ask because, first of all, we were evaluated on our call handle times and secondly, if he wasn’t that would be embarrassing for both of us.

Anyway, we get the computer taken apart and Talley is fumbling with the tiny screws that hold the hard drive in place. Now these screws are an annoyance for everyone, but Darryl feels like he’s holding up the program. So about the third or fourth time Talley’s dropped a screw, he apologizes and says, “playing pro football messes up your fingers.”

I got to thinking about that. Here’s a linebacker who spent the best part of two decades banging his fingers into pads and helmets while trying to tackle players his size or larger who really did not want to be tackled. That’s got to take a toll.

Kevin McHale still walks with a limp from a foot injury he suffered 37 years ago.

The halls of power in the NBA are filled with ex-players in orthopedic shoes.

But Walton’s pain was on a whole other level. He had never had his back properly addressed, and by 2009 he could no longer stand up straight. He had reached a point where he had to eat lying on the floor, flat on his stomach. He was in so much pain that he thought about committing suicide.

Instead, surgeons installed four bolts, each of them four inches long, as well as two titanium rods and a mesh cage, and gave him a new lease on life.

Sort of.

Bill Walton came to Sioux Falls in 2019. Now South Dakota is, very quietly, a huge basketball state, and there’s a sort of temple to basketball in the city with murals of famous players and coaches along the ramps leading to a central retro-style court complete with an old-fashioned analog timing clock.

Walton was here as part of a celebrity clinic for kids and a fundraiser for adults, and the organizer’s PR rep wanted to get a picture of him under his section of the mural.

While there, the rep, Terry Vandrovec, started chatting with him about basketball and life, and before long, Bill asked if they could move, saying, “It’s hard for me to stand on an uneven surface.”

But once he was seated on the facility’s bleachers, he was again his familiar expansive self, eventually declaring, “I’m the luckiest guy in the world.”

The luckiest guy in the world, despite being in pain while performing common everyday activities like standing on a slope.

This was no persona. This was not an act crafted to hide his true self from the public. Walton’s life was not Pagliacci, he was not a clown with a secret sorrow. The joy was not a mask for the pain. He was both the joy and the pain.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge once said that genius is “the power of carrying the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood,” and this was Bill Walton through and through. He was childlike but seldom childish. He never stopped learning and he never stopped growing.

In 2009, he returned to Portland, Oregon, where he was being honored with the Governor’s Gold award. On arriving, his first remarks were not about the honor he was about to receive; they were about the way he’d left more than twenty years before. “I just wish I could do a lot of things over, but I can’t. So, I’m here to apologize, to try and make amends, and to try and start over and make it better.”

At a time when people seem unwilling to change, at a time when change is often seen as a sign of weakness, Walton’s continuing growth was matched with the contradiction that he seemed to get younger as he aged. He loved to learn. Lost in the clip of him comparing Boris Diaw to Beethoven is the fact that he was entirely correct about the debut of Beethoven’s Third 201 years to the date before the game he was covering, and that it was, indeed, viewed as a watershed moment in the history of music.

When I was younger, I could identify with the kids that didn’t want to wear the sweaters their grandmothers gave them, or any of a hundred other similar situations, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that other people’s happiness is more important than your own self-image. If it makes grandma happy, then why not wear it? What’s more important to you? Your opinion of yourself or your grandmother’s happiness?

It’s a lesson Bill learned and lived. Did he once eat peanut butter while commenting on a game? He did indeed. Did he text broadcast partner Dave Pasch during games they were announcing? Yep. Did he take a job covering the Chicago White Sox despite knowing precious little about the game? Absolutely. And why? Because it made other people happy, and that made him happy. During commercial breaks, he’d take off his headset (and therefore his mic, cutting the production team out of the picture) and tell Pasch “I love you, but don’t tell anybody.”

If it came down to his dignity or your happiness, your happiness was going to win every time. Even in small things, even when the public wasn’t watching or the other person wasn’t famous, Walton was generous with his time, his possessions and his spirit.

After Walton’s death, a Twitter user named “Lois DeNominator” told a story about sending Walton a message through his website, asking him to send an email to her Dad encouraging him to have an ankle fusion operation he was dithering over. Walton called her Dad and left a five-minute message on his answering machine telling him how important that surgery was for him.

In an affecting post on his substack, Kareem Abdul Jabbar recalled his last meal at the Walton house, and how an idle remark about the plates on the dinner table led to Walton pulling Kareem into the kitchen and sending him home with a set. “I will never forget the pure joy on his face as he handed me those dishes.”

Kareem’s lead-in to his memories of Walton’s life starts out, “he wanted to be more like me on the court,” and concludes, “and I wanted to be more like him off of it.”

It’s a sentiment shared by many of us.

After all, who wouldn’t want to be more like the luckiest guy in the world?