Bill Walton picked up fans wherever he went.
He was perhaps one of the two or three best college basketball players of all time. He helped give the city of Portland its only professional sports championship. Over a decade later, he came to Boston, spent two years with the Celtics, and exuded an overabundance of joy and celebration in helping to lead them to an NBA title.
Injuries cost him much of his career, but the love of basketball that flowed out of him never ceased. As a broadcaster, he continued his effusive enthusiasm for all things hoops that it was easy to get Walton fatigue listening to him. Even if you were among his biggest fans — as I was.
It’s easy, now that it’s all over, to zero in on his years with the Celtics. After all, we are Bostonians, and we have worked arduously to define the word “provincial.” If it didn’t happen at Fenway, or Foxborough, or the “Gahhhhhhden,” it was somehow less significant than if it did.
But I think of Bill Walton — who died of cancer Monday at the age of 71 — and I think of those four years in the early 1970s when he tested the patience of the great John Wooden at UCLA. Walton flew his freak flag from the time he walked into Pauley Pavilion, and he and Wooden, the staid old coach from Indiana with a view of life to match, butted heads often. There was the time Walton showed up at preseason camp with flowing red locks and the beginnings of a beard. Wooden said those whose hair didn’t conform with his views on tonsorial correctness would not be allowed to play. Walton left and returned forthwith with the proper haircut.
Then there was the time Walton got pulled into a police wagon during an antiwar demonstration outside of the UCLA cocoon. Wooden had to pick him up. That must have been one very tense ride back to the campus.
From the outside looking in, Walton, a 6-11 center who could only be described as a “man-child” back in those days, seemed to be the one cow in the field who managed to fool the herding dog on occasion, but always came back eventually. One wonders how such a celebrated “longhaired hippie freak” allowed the likes of John Wooden to dictate his life.
There was a good reason. Bill Walton saw such purity in the game of basketball that it was sometimes embarrassing to listen to him expound on it. He loved it. Adored it, even. And his devotion to the counterculture was no match for his love of basketball.
You could go 1-2, 2-1 on where Lew Alcindor (as he was known at the time) or Walton ranked in UCLA lore. Walton’s legendary 1973 title game against Memphis (21-for-22 from the field) is, of course, iconic. There can be no dispute that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Alcindor upon graduation) and Walton were the best two players to come out of the school.
Walton had some difficulty adjusting once he left the cocoon for good. Freaky redheads with beards didn’t sit well with the NBA cognoscenti. Like most eccentric personalities, Walton was scrutinized thoroughly when he became a Trailblazer. But within a couple of years, Walton and the Blazers formed a solid team — in the best sense of the word — and overtook a Philadelphia 76ers team with Julius Erving on it to win a title.
That’s when his foot really started to act up, and he was an on-again, off-again player for many years. He got his second act with the Celtics in 1986, when he played in 80 or 82 games and won the Sixth-Man Award.
He’s famous for other things. One of them is his passionate love for the Grateful Dead — the official tie-dyed poster boys. He once led a contingent of every Celtic but one (Danny Ainge) to a concert in Worcester. The Dead treated him like one of the band.
Sports have seen some real off-beat people in their time, from Dizzy Dean to Derek Sanderson to Joe Namath — all great people when it came to drawing attention to themselves.
None of them topped Walton. He defined the word “unique.” Truly one of a kind. May his freak flag forever fly.
