Bill Walton’s Long, Strange Tale of N.B.A. Survival

[Ptah]

Bill Walton arrived at the San Diego Natural History Museum carrying a large black chair. I watched him walk with it, a little stiffly, past the Moreton Bay fig tree outside. The tree is one of the city’s grand natural treasures: more than 100 years old, nearly 100 feet tall, hugely spread, still standing despite a century of weather and air pollution and climbing children. It’s so large that it made even Walton, one of basketball’s dominating giants, look small.

“Why is he carrying a chair?” the woman working the museum’s front door asked me.

I had no idea. We were standing inside the building, near the skeleton of a dinosaur (Allosaurus fragilis, the sign said), watching him approach. Walton wore jeans and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. He chewed gum. His hair, formerly long, red and curly, was now a sparse white wisp. His stride was deliberate, determined; each step seemed to cost him something.

Walton is another of San Diego’s grand natural treasures: a 1970s basketball superstar, celebrated sports broadcaster, proud public hippie and — to quote the man himself — “the most-injured athlete in the history of sports.” He is now 63, at least in regular human years, but his body has always operated on some other, more severe time scale. His injuries have been relentless; his life story reads like a jock Book of Job. Walton has had 37 orthopedic operations, many of which came at the worst possible moment. The biggest difference between him and any of the other greats you’d care to name — Michael Jordan, Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain, Shaquille O’Neal, Larry Bird — is that Walton’s brilliant career barely ever happened. Instead of winning the three or four or five or six championships he seemed destined for, Walton became a legendary failure. (He did manage to win two.) His injuries caused him to miss nine and a half of his 14 N.B.A. seasons.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/magazine/bill-waltons-long-strange-tale-of-nba-survival.html

[KamaAina]

1. I never did understand why his son Luke chose Arizona

coached at the time by Lute Olson, who would actually have an FBI agent address his teams about the dangers of drugs!

[Ptah]

2. Perhaps Luke wanted to play for a winning program.

[KamaAina]

3. His dad went to UCLA, for Pete's sake.

You know, the one with the eleven banners hanging from the rafters at Pauley?

There are plenty of other winning programs where the coach doesn't try to indoctrinate and intimidate his players like that.

[Ptah]

4. Well, apparently, Lute Olson was a better recruiter.

[bluedigger]

5. A lot of sons choose not to follow directly in their father's footsteps.

His dad is still a Legend there, after all. The media exposure would have been intense. The path he chose worked out fine for him, I think.

[Ptah]

6. Well, I think it is a good article.

I spoke with the announcer Jim Gray, who has worked with Walton on TV for decades. “Bill is a brilliant man,” he said. “He has such a fertile mind. He’s probably the only person who’s ever been able to tie together, in the same sentence, Mother Teresa, Michael Jordan, climate change, the Berlin Wall and — what’s that ballerina’s name? Baryshnikov. Before you know it, you’re off to Ferdinand Magellan. I’ll say to him sometimes: What about the game? He’ll say: It doesn’t matter, the people can see the game.”