Bill Walton represented a day when college athletes were legendary, not temporary | Commentary

When basketball legend Bill Walton passed away on Memorial Day, I didn’t think about him as the former No. 1 overall draft pick, an NBA champion and a league MVP.

I didn’t think of him as a Hall of Fame broadcaster renowned for his eloquent, rambling commentary and philosophical musings in which he might be talking about how the game of basketball has evolved over the years and suddenly break into a rendition of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’ “

And I didn’t think about him as the fun-loving, colorful, counterculture hippie and Deadhead who would wear bandanas and tie-dye T-shirts and recite Zen-ful quotes such as, “The past is history, the future is a mystery, and this moment is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present.”

No, on the day Bill Walton died, I thought back to when I was kid living amid the scrub oaks and piney woods in the sticks of North Florida, where my older brother James (we called him Moochie, or Moo for short) and my younger brother Sam would play basketball on a dirt court in the front yard and shoot at a bent rim, attached to an old wooden tabletop backboard nailed to a scraggly, mossy oak tree. And the three of us would argue over who would get to be Pistol Pete Maravich or David Thompson or Artis Gilmore or Rick Mount or some other college basketball star of the day.

But mostly we all wanted to be Bill Walton.

This might seem foreign in today’s one-and-done world of college basketball, but I remember Bill Walton — The Big Redhead — as a college basketball player first and foremost. It was another day and when four-year college basketball stars were actually more popular than their NBA counterparts.

And Walton, at least in my house, was the biggest star of all. He led UCLA to two national titles and an 86-4 record in his three years (freshmen couldn’t play back then), including two 30-0 seasons. He produced what is commonly considered the greatest college basketball game of all time in the 1973 NCAA final when he…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/bill-walton-represented-day-college-230600740.html

Author : Orlando Sentinel

Publish date : 2024-05-28 23:06:00

Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.