Bill Walton was as magical with words as he was with basketball

I once left Bill Walton a voice message regarding a story I was working on about Larry Bird. When he telephoned back, I didn’t even have to ask him a question. I just pressed a button on my tape recorder.

He must have gone on for an hour. It was one of the great joys of my career. An hour was all you needed, if that, to fall in love with the man. By then, Walton would have given you a lesson on basketball and life.

“Larry’s story, coming from where he came from in Terre Haute,” he said in a breath as long as his 6 feet, 11 inches. “It is just a classic journey of this comet, this meteor, just searing across the universe, and bam — just so much light, so much heat, so much radiating brilliance, and it just said, ‘Larry Bird, I was there.’”

With the NBA’s announcement of Walton’s death from “a prolonged battle with cancer” at age 71 on Memorial Day, I could not say it better about his story. Nobody could. Everything he said was very Bill Walton. He was one of a kind and lived life to its fullest, even more than his résumé as one of the game’s greatest, because a career’s worth of foot injuries and back pain in retirement nearly took it all away.

He loved bike riding and the Grateful Dead. He loved life, because he almost lost it.

Bill Walton poses for a photo during a game between Syracuse and Gonzaga on November 21, 2023, in Honolulu, Hawaii. (Photo by Mitchell Layton/Getty Images)

“I have been living on the floor for most of the last two-and-a-half years, unable to move, unable to get up,” Walton wrote for his 2016 autobiography, “Back from the Dead,” of the spinal collapse that sent him into a depression in San Diego in the summer of 2009. “I’ve cut myself off from Jerry, Bob, Neil, and the rest, just as I’ve disconnected from most everybody and everything else. The only people I see, talk, or hear from are the few who refuse to leave me alone — my wife, Lori; my brother Bruce; our four sons; the most obstinate of my closest friends, like Andy Hill, Jim Gray, my guys in the Grateful Dead — and the one person I refuse to leave alone, John Wooden, now almost one hundred years old. Everybody else…

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Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-05-27 19:48:18

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