Big Red is gone: ‘No one did it like he did it’
Hall of Famer Bill Walton, the “ultimate teammate and competitor," dead at age 71 (courtesy Dennis Dimick)
Updated 5/29/2024 5:32 PM
Monday was Memorial Day, but a very different one for many who played in the NBA. Heck, for people across the country, and around the world.
Big Red is gone. Bill Walton died Monday. He was 71, the victim of cancer.
“It’s a day when we remember and give honor to all the fallen soldiers who fought for us and allowed us to keep the freedoms we enjoy in our country,” Johnny Davis told me from his home in Asheville, N.C.. “Today we lost another real soldier, a soldier of life. That’s what Bill was.”
Ironically, Walton’s death came two days after the final breath of his beloved “Conference of Champions,” with Saturday’s finals of the Pac-12 Baseball Tournament in Scottsdale, Ariz.
Walton was arguably the greatest college basketball player in history. During his three years at UCLA, the Bruins won their first 73 games — the bulk of their Division I-record 88 consecutive victories — and two national championships. His final record at UCLA: 86-4.
In the NBA, Walton led the Trail Blazers to their only NBA championship in 1977, earning Finals Most Valuable Player honors and, the next season was named MVP for the NBA’s regular season. In 1986, he was honored as Sixth Man of the Year in helping the Boston Celtics to an NBA crown. Walton was inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame in 1993 and into the College Basketball Hall of Fame in 2006.
In latter years, Walton was gregarious and outgoing, but also private when it came to health matters. Perhaps only immediate family knew he was failing. Bill’s death came as a shock even to those close to him.
“Bill is like family, but everyone is surprised,” said David Lucas, son of Maurice Lucas, Walton’s closest friend during his playing days in Portland. “Nobody knew he was battling cancer.”
“I saw him this past season when he came to Portland for an event,” said Bob Gross, the starting small forward on the 1977 championship team. “He didn’t look good, but he said he was doing fine, and I took him at his word. I thought I would be seeing him for years to come.”
“I’m in total shock,” said Wally Walker, a rookie forward during the championship season. “I had no idea he had any kind of malady. We have had intermittent communication in recent years, and I saw him at Bill Schonely’s memorial service last year. We had an email exchange not long ago and he didn’t mention it. Bill wanted to keep it private, and I respect that. But everyone is stunned.”
“I had been in touch with Bill often through the years,” said Davis, the rookie point guard for the Blazers during the 1976-77 season. “The last time we talked was six weeks ago. He never said he was battling an illness. Never said a word. (His death) is devastating news.”
The former Blazer still alive who was probably closest to Walton is guard Lionel Hollins.
“All the people I have talked to, nobody knew he was even sick,” Hollins told me from his home in Memphis. “He kept it quiet.”
Recently, though, Walton had been less communicative with Hollins.
“That set the alarm off for me,” Hollins said. “In the past, whenever he was not well or coming off surgery, he would check out until he was recovered. Then he would call me and say his typical stuff like, ‘Love you, man. You’re the greatest thing in my life.’ But he hadn’t called for a while, so I called him and got no response. I texted him; no response. I told my wife three days ago, ‘Something must be going on with Bill.’ ”
After I learned about Walton’s death in the late morning Monday, I reached out by phone to 15 people with close ties to Walton, including eight former teammates with the Blazers’ championship squad. By 9 p.m., every one of them had either answered or gotten back to me — proof of the incredible amount of respect they had for Bill as a player and a human being.
The teammates were Davis, Hollins, Gross, Dave Twardzik, Larry Steele, Lloyd Neal, Wally Walker and Corky Calhoun, all members of Portland’s 1977 champions. (The three other players from that team are deceased — Herm Gilliam in 2005, Maurice Lucas in 2010 and Robin Jones in 2018.) I also reached Danny Ainge, a starting guard and teammate of Walton’s on Boston’s 1986 champions. And broadcasters Marv Albert and Kevin Calabro, who worked with Walton. And Lucas, son of Maurice, Walton’s closest friend among his Portland teammates. Also Steve Ericksen, a center on Oregon State’s team that ended UCLA’s long Pac-8 win streak in Corvallis in 1974.
Also on Monday, I got permission to use images of Walton from three outstanding photographers, two of whom I worked with at the Oregon State Barometer — Chris Johns and Dennis Dimick. Johns and Dimick had long, distinguished careers at National Geographic. Also Dave Nishitani, who is still shooting pictures of OSU athletes a half-century later.
Johns’ photo is an iconic one in Oregon State lore, depicting Ericksen as he stuffed a Walton shot in the Beavers’ 61-57 upset of UCLA during Walton’s senior season. Johns taped a camera to the backboard to get the shot. “I wanted to get the Sports Illustrated look,” Johns told me Monday from his home in Missoula, Mont.
Steve Ericksen rejects a Bill Walton shot during Oregon State’s upset victory over No. 1-ranked UCLA in 1974 (courtesy Chris Johns)
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I never covered Walton as a player. He was a year older than me. His NBA career spanned from 1974-87, though he missed three entire seasons due to injury. I didn’t begin covering the Trail Blazers and the NBA for The Oregonian until 1989.
During the Blazers’ 1976-77 championship season, my beat at The Oregon Journal was the major junior hockey Winter Hawks, in their first year of existence. (I had never seen a hockey game before the first one I covered. “You’ll learn,” my boss, Journal sports editor George Pasero, told me.)
But during the Blazers’ run in the ’77 NBA playoffs, I was called upon to do some features and game sidebars. And during the Finals series against Philadelphia, it was all hands on deck. Most of our sports staff had assignments. For Game 6 on June 5 at Memorial Coliseum, there I was, a 23-year-old whippersnapper, writing the Journal’s early-edition game story and a sidebar featuring Hollins, who scored 20 points with eight rebounds in the finale.
In January 1990, I flew to San Diego with photographer Ross Hamilton to spend a day with Walton for a cover piece for Northwest Magazine, a Sunday supplement to The Oregonian. It was a case of serendipity. Walton was generally not cooperative with the media during his playing career, in part because of his problem with stuttering. At UCLA, John Wooden was protective and didn’t allow him to do many interviews.
“Since his college years he has been wary and untrusting of the media and what he has perceived as its prying into his personal affairs,” I wrote then. “An invitation to a reporter and photographer to come to his home for a day was a rare — if unprecedented — occurrence. (But) the interview request caught Walton in a receptive mood.”
Less than two months earlier, in a ceremony at Memorial Coliseum, the Blazers had retired Walton’s jersey No. 32. At a press conference, I asked, and he said yes. When Hamilton and I arrived at his home, Bill admitted he’d had second thoughts.
“I don’t know why I did it,” he told me. “I could have just said no. (But) I like to be cooperative.”
Walton couldn’t have been nicer as I spent the day with him and his four sons, then aged nine through 14. I watched them play touch football and basketball games, had plenty of time to chat with Bill and was able to survey the seven-bedroom, seven-bathroom split-level ranch style house he and wife Susan purchased for $695,000 when he left Portland in 1979.
The headline was “Life After Basketball: Bill Walton’s Mid-Life Crisis.” Bill was 37, 2 1/2 years removed from his final NBA game and separated and on his way to divorce from Susan. They were together for 18 years, married for 11.
Eggers’ Northwest Magazine cover story on Walton during a “mid-life crisis” period following his playing days
“Some of the best times — and some of the worst times — of my life have been spent with Bill,” Susan told me for the story. “I couldn’t relate to him being married and having a girlfriend on the side. She has been around for a couple of years. I gave him several chances to go counseling and therapy, but he wouldn’t do it.”
I don’t believe the girlfriend was his second wife, Lori. In his 2015 autobiography, “Back From the Dead,” Walton wrote that he met Lori in 1990. They wed in 1991 and were married for 33 years.
The story came at a time when Walton’s right foot was bothering him so that he was limping badly and having trouble getting around. “He walks like a man twice his age,” I wrote. Said Bill: “I can’t move around on the foot. I go from chair to chair.”
Fortunately, his ambulatory status got better, though getting around was never easy for him. He went through later-life crisis with all his back and leg ailments in the 2000s. In “Back From the Dead,” he wrote he contemplated suicide. In 2009, a spinal fusion helped his body and gave him a new lease on life.
Walton renewed his love affair with cycling. Five years ago, he sought out Rob Closs, a former Oregon basketball player whom he met when Closs was serving as TV analyst for Duck games. He knew Closs was a cyclist.
Walton loved to ride the bicycle, as he did with Lake Oswego’s Rob Closs during a week-long caravan through Oregon in 2019 (courtesy Rob Closs)
“Bill loved everything about Oregon and its history, and he loved biking,” Closs said. “He wanted to do a ride through the state and wanted to start in the town Bill Bowerman was born in.”
Closs picked up Bill and Lori at Portland International Airport. Bill had an entourage.
“There must have been 15 people with him,” Closs said. “One was a Paralympian. Another guy was trying to be. One of them had no legs.”
It was a seven-day trek that started in Fossil. The contingent biked through eastern Oregon, then drove to Bend and did the southern part of the state, including a visit to Crater Lake.
“Bill was amazing on the long climbs in the middle of nowhere,” Closs said. “His ability to process oxygen going up hills — we are talking 10 percent grades at some points — was incredible.”
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Walton scores on a put-back against Oregon State’s Neal Jurgenson during a game in Corvallis in 1973 (courtesy Dave Nishitani)
Walton was always a star. He was a prep All-American at Helix High in San Diego. At UCLA, he was a two-time National Player of the Year and twice Outstanding Player of the Final Four. As a junior, he had the greatest individual performance in NCAA championship game history, sinking 21 of 22 shots from the field while collecting 44 points, 13 rebounds and seven blocked shots in an 87-66 dismantling of Memphis State.
“He was a great player in high school, a great player in college, a great player in the NBA,” said Calhoun, now living in Clayton, N.C. “There was always greatness associated with Bill Walton.”
Oregon State’s victory over UCLA during Bill’s senior year came out of nowhere. The Bruins, led by Walton, Keith (later Jamaal) Wilkes and Dave Meyers, were favorites to claim a third straight NCAA title. OSU Coach Ralph Miller was starting three freshmen — Lonnie Shelton, George Tucker and Don Smith. Against the Bruins, they joined with juniors Doug Oxsen and Charlie Neal in the starting lineup. The Beavers were 9-10 heading into that game. The 6-10 Oxsen and 6-11 Ericksen combined to keep Walton under control, the big fella scoring only 15 points. Sophomore forward Paul Miller came off the bench to lead them with 16 points and Tucker made four straight free throws in the last 25 seconds to clinch the win.
It was UCLA’s first Pac-8 defeat in four years, ending a 59-game conference win streak. North Carolina State, led by David Thompson, beat UCLA 80-77 in two overtimes in the semifinals of the NCAA tournament that year. The Wolfpack would go on to defeat Marquette 76-64 in the championship game.
After the upset in Corvallis, Ericksen went to Nendel’s Inn, where his parents were spending the night.
“UCLA was staying there, too,” Ericksen said. “When I got there, the players happened to be in the lobby. We were going up to the second floor and Bill and Greg Lee got in the elevator with us. Lee looked at me and said, ‘Hey Bill, that’s the guy who checked your shot.’ Bill got a sheepish look on his face and said, ‘That was a pass.’ ”
Ericksen got to know Walton after he became a Blazer. Walton invited him to dinner at the A-frame house in which he was living in West Linn. Ericksen was living in West Linn at the time, too. This was in 1975, during his second season with the Blazers, when Walton was heavily involved in his social activism. Jack and Micki Scott, political activists who were being pursued by the FBI on allegations of harboring Patty Hearst across the country after her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army, were living with Walton. Walton had recently taken part in a press conference in San Francisco and defended the Scotts, asking people to “stand with us in the rejection of the United States government” while calling the FBI “the enemy.”
“The Scotts were on the lam, and they were there,” Ericksen said. “Bill had some marijuana and we smoked a joint. It was kind of strange. But Bill was a very nice guy, sincere. He always greeted you with, ‘How are things with you?’ You could tell that he cared about people.”
The ‘70s were a turbulent time in America, with Watergate and the Vietnam War and student protests causing unrest on college campuses. Bill was one of four children to Ted Walton, who worked 37 years with the San Diego County Welfare Department, and Gloria Walton, a librarian. They raised him in a progressive environment, encouraging their kids to think freely and speak their mind. Bill, who was once arrested during a protest at UCLA, carried his counterculture mentality with him to Portland.
I knew Jack Scott pretty well and John Bassett, Bill’s attorney in Portland, a little.
“Bill became famous — or infamous — for three things,” Bassett told me for the Northwest Magazine story. “He thought Nixon should be impeached, he was against the war in Vietnam, and he thought the FBI was not acting in the best interest of the people. That was radical in those days, and I don’t know if I could have said things the way he did. But most people today would agree that he was right.”
I’m not sure about the FBI part, but Bill was a young man of his convictions. During his time with the Blazers, Walton aspired to be a “breatharian,” subsisting on the clean air of the universe. For a time, he carried a knapsack that had distilled water, herbal teas and natural foods.
“I was there when he went on a carrot juice diet and was primarily eating seaweed from the Bay of Fundy,” Steele told me Monday, chuckling at the memory. “As a breatharian, the idea was to let his hair grow long, absorb sunlight, take a lot of baths and soak in the water.
“When he was on his carrot juice diet, it was not something you wanted to be close to. Not only was there an odor, but he literally was sweating carrot juice. His game whites would be tinted orange.”
Geoff Petrie was Walton’s teammate for his first three seasons in Portland.
“Bill thought the rest of us were real strange,” Petrie told me for the Northwest Magazine piece. “He would come onto the team bus, say something like, ‘I can’t stand the smell of you meat-eaters,’ then go sit down and listen to the Grateful Dead. The first year Bill came in, for whatever reasons, he wasn’t totally focused on basketball. He had an avant-garde lifestyle, he had some injuries, and he was so thin that people thought it was affecting the way he was playing.”
That began to change in 1976, when Walton added meat and more protein back into his diet. If there were hard feelings from teammates about Bill’s attitude and behavior — and there were at times — they evaporated in the delirium of winning an NBA championship in 1977.
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Many of the observations you are about to read are about the Bill Walton in the second part of his life, during the years after his playing career ended.
“There was a tremendous transformation in Bill from his playing days to post-playing days,” said Twardzik, 73, who lives in Pinehurst, N.C.. “It is fairly well documented that he was rather skeptical of the media and wanted to be left alone when he went out in public. With all the injuries he had and the emotional struggles he had, after his career ended, he did a complete 180.
“I don’t think I ever saw him any happier than he was the last 15 years of his life. He wanted to interact with people. He would go out of his way to interact with people. He turned his skepticism of the media into becoming one of the media.”
Walton became more accessible to his former teammates through the years.
“As he got older, he became very outgoing, especially after he conquered the speech impediment,” Gross said. “From that point, he was a joy to be around.”
Steele noticed it, too.
“When he came into the league, I always thought because of UCLA and the sheltering he received, and the pressure he had in being No. 1 pick in the draft, he had a difficult time associating with or being able to communicate with the guy on the street corner,” said Steele, who lives in Portland. “But over time — maybe it was due to overcoming his stuttering, which was a great accomplishment — he became so open to anybody and everybody. From my viewpoint, that included strangers. His personality changed over the last 40 years or so. He kept opening up.”
Gross, Davis and Hollins all used the same phrase in describing Walton as “the ultimate teammate.”
“Bill was supportive of all of us,” Hollins said. “He always deflected credit toward his teammates and away from himself. He knew how good he was. He knew what he meant to the team, but he wanted all of us to be successful. He recognized every teammate’s strength and then he played to it. He knew what you could do, and when he had the ball tried to take care of you in that manner to make sure you could be successful. That’s the mark of an all-time great player.”
“He was all about winning,” said Gross, 70, who lives in Lake Oswego. “It wasn’t all about him, though for what he did for our team, it was hard for it not to be. He made everyone a better player. He certainly did that for me.
“Bill was extremely skilled. He had very bad feet but really good footwork when it came to playing basketball. He had excellent vision, was a great passer, could shoot the ball, played very good defense and had great timing as a shot-blocker.”
Steele lockered next to Walton for five years at the Coliseum. They weren’t close friends off the court.
“I got to know him more from sitting next to him in the locker room than I did socially,” said Steele, now 75. “We didn't socialize other than road trips. But I loved him as a teammate. The thing I admired most about Bill was he truly loved to play basketball. To be around that type of energy was amazing. He made playing so enjoyable for everybody else. When you moved and got open, he passed the ball to you. It was a great pleasure to play basketball with Bill Walton.”
Calhoun averaged 3.4 points and 2.1 rebounds during the championship season.
“I was 10th or 11th man,” said Calhoun, now 73, “but Bill still made me feel good about the contributions I was making. His leadership was evident. He was willing to give respect to the guys who weren’t star players. It was a testament to his positive personality. He made everybody feel included.”
“Bill cared about guys,” said Davis, 68. “He was just an example of what a champion looks like. Because of Bill Walton, all of us on the 1977 championship team -- from the players to coaches from the front office, administrators, secretaries — are able to call ourselves champions. The rest of us contributed, but he was the main guy to make it happen.”
“Culturally, we were so different,” Twardzik said. “He was from Southern California; I am from a small town in Pennsylvania. We were the exact opposite politically. We didn’t do anything socially.”
None of that affected how they played together on the basketball court.
“Bill made a lot of sacrifices for the well-being of the team,” Twardzik said. “He could have scored a lot more points. That was not the primary option for him. He was not only an extremely good passer, he was a willing passer. And his passing made everybody else better.
“What I liked about Bill as a person was his honesty. If you asked him a question, you’d better get ready for an answer you might not like. But it would be an honest answer.”
Twardzik started with Hollins in the backcourt through the entire regular season in ’77. But when Twardzik was injured early in the playoffs, Coach Jack Ramsay had a decision to make. Steele was a veteran and a former starter. Davis was a rookie, though he was lightning quick and had averaged 8 points in just 18.4 minutes per game through the regular season.
“Jack was not sure what move he wanted to make,” Davis said. “He went to Bill and said, ‘I’m thinking about starting Larry.’ That wouldn’t have been a bad choice. Larry was a good, veteran player. It would have been perfectly understood by everyone. But Bill looked at the situation from the standpoint of, what is it that we need here right now to help us win?
“He said, ‘I suggest you start Johnny Davis.’ Jack was quizzical about that choice. He went to (assistant coach) Jack McKinney and said, ‘I had a conversation with Bill about who we should start and he said Johnny, the rookie.’ Jack said, “I agree with Bill.’ ”
Davis got the nod, played well — great at times — and the Blazers didn’t skip a beat. He would go on to a successful 10-year playing career.
“That jump-started my career,” Davis said. “Without that word from Bill, I would have languished on the bench and maybe never had the opportunity to demonstrate that I could be a capable NBA player. Jack didn’t see it. Bill saw it.”
Most Blazer fans have seen the clip of the final possession of the close-out Game 6 of the ’77 Finals, when the 76ers, trailing 109-107, had three shots at tying the game but missed. After the third attempt, Walton backhand tapped the ball out to Davis, who grabbed it and dribbled out the clock.
Over dinner one night many years ago, Davis asked him about it.
“Bill, did you know I was out there, or did you just tip it out to see what would happen?” Davis asked.
“I knew you were there,” Walton said. “I knew where everyone was.”
“And he was serious,” Davis said. “He tipped it into an area that only I could have gotten to. It was a controlled push-out of the ball to that area. I’ll never forget that familiar hand going up above all others as he pushed it out to where only I could get it.
“That was the biggest possession of the whole series. If we don’t secure that rebound and a Sixer grabs it and puts it in, they might win in overtime, and it would have been tough to win a seventh game in Philly.”
Walton told me for the Northwest Magazine piece that he had more fun playing basketball that season than at any time in his career.
“The thing I most enjoyed was going into towns on the road and beating everybody,” he said. “Everybody. There was nothing more fun than beating a team in front of its home crowd. We were able to mold a group of guys with one common goal — perfect basketball — and it was so exciting. I thought we would have championship team after championship team, I really did.”
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Hollins and Walton became good friends quickly. The friendship held strong through nearly a half-century.
“We were real close,” Hollins said. “We would have long conversations. We talked more regularly than probably anybody else in our group. I think the only one closer than me to Bill had been Luke.”
Maurice Lucas has been gone for 14 years now, also the victim of cancer. Son David has carried on his legacy through the Maurice Lucas Foundation, designed to provide opportunities for youths in school programs, activities and sports.
David considered Walton “like another father to me. I grew up with him.”
“His passing has been hard for myself and the Lucas family,” David said. “I can’t imagine how the Walton family feels. I feel for Lori and the boys. I know exactly how they feel, losing a father to cancer so fast. It has been an emotional day, but one thing Bill taught me was to have strength and positivity. He lived that every day. I’m trying to live that through Bill.
“Bill was an outstanding basketball player, but more importantly, an amazing man off the court. Look at the strides he made since he retired and how many relationships he built and the positive energy he brought every day.”
Lucas was an All-Pac-10 player at Oregon State. He played at the same time Luke Walton was a star at Arizona.
“Bill and my dad would be at the games, sitting side by side,” David said. “That was pretty amazing.
“Bill was my father’s No. 1 fan. Dad was Bill’s best friend. I remember going to the Oregon Hall of Fame ceremony when Dad got inducted. We were walking from the parking garage and Bill was yelling out, ‘Maurice Lucas is going into the Hall of Fame! One of the greatest Blazers of all time!’ He was always speaking highly of my father.”
Hollins was a rookie with the Blazers in 1975-76, Walton’s second season.
“We worked out together,” said Hollins, now 70. “He invited me to his house. There were a few people there I didn’t need to meet at the time. He was always good to me. He was happy I came to the team. I fit what he saw as a vision of how he would like to play. Unfortunately, he didn’t stay healthy that first year. Toward the end of the year we had a little run (winning their final six games), and things were looking up.”
But coach Lenny Wilkens was hired, to be replaced by Ramsay, who had coached the Buffalo Braves the previous four seasons.
“I had mixed emotions,” Hollins said. “I loved Lenny. He had drafted me. He was mentoring me. But I loved the way Jack’s teams played in Buffalo. Bill felt the same way.
“Jack was perfect for us. We were perfect for him. We had all the tools that fit how he wanted to play. We could pressure defensively, we could run, we could pass, we had high basketball IQ and we competed. Jack could see that, but we could see it as players, too. During training camp, we started recognizing we had a chance to do great things. In our minds, nobody was better than us.”
Walton took Hollins to various workout spots in Portland — to Loprinzi’s Gym, to Mount Tabor, to the Jewish Community Center.
“He took me under his wing,” Hollins said. “Wherever we could find a gym, we would play one-on-one, or against whoever was in the gym. He liked the positive end of competition, when you won and made all the right plays. We became close through that relationship.
“Bill was funny. Outgoing. Gregarious. Talkative, even though he stuttered early on. He wasn’t talkative in public or to the media as much, but around teammates and friends, he was outgoing. A very astute thinker. He thought the game of basketball. He thought the game of life and how it could be better, how he could have a bigger impact on people’s lives outside of basketball. That’s why he was involved in protests and other political things.”
Walton lived in Northwest Portland but later also had a farmhouse in a rural area east of Portland.
“It was a beautiful spot out there in the country off of one of the rivers,” Hollins said. “I went out to visit one time. I knocked on the door and some guy answered. I thought maybe I was at the wrong house. He said, ‘Bill’s out there in that shed you drove by.’ Bill and his family were living there. The main house had a number of people staying in it. Bill was always communal during that period in his approach to living.”
A few years ago, Walton agreed to visit St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis.
“He called me and said, ‘Lionel I’m not sure I want to see all those sick kids,’ ” Hollins said. “I said, ‘Bill, you’ll be fine.’ I went with him. He enjoyed the day.”
Hollins was traded from Philadelphia to the San Diego Clippers in 1982. Walton was attending law school at Stanford at the time and had an agreement with the Clippers that he would play only on weekends.
“Bill invited me to stay at his house, and I did for some time,” Hollins said. “His wife was there, but he was there only for those weekends when the Clippers were home. There were a few other people living with him — some I knew and some I didn’t know. But he took care of everybody.”
At the end of his NBA career, Gross played 27 games for the Clippers in San Diego the same season as Hollins.
“I lived in Bill’s house for three months but I never saw him,” Gross said. “He always had something going. I saw his wife, his kids, but never him.”
Walker came to Portland as a rookie out of Virginia for the 1976-77 season. Early in the 1977-78 season, he was traded to Seattle, meaning he earned championship rings in each of his first two NBA campaigns.
“I knew Bill was a fantastic player,” said Walker, now working as chief revenue officer and deputy athletic director at his alma mater in Charlottesville, Va. “When I was in high school in the East, I’d stay up late to watch UCLA play. He was so skilled and mobile and great defensively. I was keenly aware of how good he was.”
Walker said he got a chuckle out of Walton always claiming to a height of 6-11.
“I thought he was at least 7-2,” said Walker, 69. “Bill was a real interesting blend of demanding as a teammate, but at the same time completely unselfish. He might give you a look, but if you missed a couple of shots, he would still get you the ball the next time.”
Walker, Hollins and Walton were the only ones living in “Portland proper” during the 1976-77 season.
“I didn’t know anybody in town, and I was always appreciative that Bill often invited me to dinner at his place,” Walker said. “In every way, he was generous with people around him and teammates. When Lionel and I went to his house in Portland, we could have 20 people there for dinner. Many of them were living there. Maybe we got introduced to half of them. We would have conversations and a great meal. There were always people around. He was very giving.
“Bill and I went to the ‘Who’ concert together at the Coliseum. I remember that clearly. We were standing in the middle of crowd, way above everybody else. If he was self-conscious about it, it didn’t show. For his larger-than-life status in every way, he was such a public guy.”
Like Hollins, Walton introduced Walker to Loprinzi’s Gym. They played one-on-one at the Jewish Community Center.
“He was so agile, it was hard to score on him, and so darn competitive,” Walker said. “Jack McKinney had to referee the scrimmages during our practice sessions. Bill would get upset with a call and yell, ‘McKinney! Bad call, McKinney!’ He was wired that way. As much as anybody I ever saw, he wanted to win everything, every time.”
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Some of Walton’s teammates talk about his intellect and curiosity about life.
“Bill was a brilliant man,” Davis said. “I don’t mean just basketball. We all know his brilliance on the court, but he was far deeper than that. From an intellectual and emotional maturity standpoint, Bill was brilliant. I had many conversations with Bill over the years. I was amazed at the amount of things he knew about and had interest in. We talked about a lot of things unrelated to basketball.
“He was well-read. He was ahead of most people in his thinking and his taste. He was eclectic. He had friends in every aspect of life — politicians, musicians, historians, genealogists, physicians. Bill was that guy. Sort of a Renaissance man.”
Walton made friends with Portland-raised pro golfer Peter Jacobsen through a mutual friendship with former Oregon athletic director Pat Kilkenny.
“I came to absolutely love and admire Bill for being the kind, soft-spoken, big-hearted guy he is,” Jacobsen told me. Then he laughed. “I know. When you watched him broadcast a game, you were hoping he would sit down and stop waving his arms.”
Jacobsen and Walton co-hosted several charity dinners for Kilkenny’s foundation in San Diego called “Lucky Duck.”
“Bill was a Bruin, but he was also a huge Duck fan,” Jacobsen said. “He had great love for Phil Knight and Pat and everyone who was a Duck. He had a huge heart. I talked to (Pacers coach) Rick Carlisle and (musician) Bruce Hornsby about Bill today. All of his friends had great affection for him. Bill will be greatly missed.”
When Davis was playing for Indiana, the Pacers had a game in San Diego against the Clippers. Walton invited Davis to accompany him to a symphony orchestra concert the night before the game.
“I had never been to anything like that before,” Davis said. “I was an urban kid from Detroit. I could tell you about Motown, but this was exposure to another element of life. I thoroughly enjoyed that evening with Bill. I’m sure he was thinking, ‘I’m going to take Johnny Davis to see this because it will be a new experience for him.’ We had dinner and talked about it afterward. I have never forgotten that night.”
“We had a lot of good conversations,” Hollins said. “Bill was very smart, a deep thinker. He would make you think. I would ask him different questions and try to make him think outside his box.”
Davis and Hollins both emphasize Walton’s empathy for others.
“He genuinely cared about people — especially people he thought were getting the short end of things,” Davis said. “He was a champion for people who maybe couldn’t do it for themselves. If he could help them in any way, he would. I saw that time and time again with Bill.”
“Bill believed in caring for people who had less than him, and wanted to try to make a way better for them,” Hollins said. “Some people believe in something until the trend or the fad is gone. Bill strongly believed in the things he believed in, but he was willing to listen and let you believe in what you believed in, too. We never had a debate, where one person was wrong and you shouldn’t believe that way. Never. That’s the beauty of who he was. He allowed you to be you. You had to allow him to be who he was and you could still be friends.”
During Walton’s heyday with the Blazers — the championship season and the 1977-78 campaign in which they started 50-10 before injuries ruined everything — he would run downcourt waving his hands over his head in circular fashion, to the amusement of his teammates.
“We would joke about that,” Steele said. “We would say, ‘Bill, no need to do that.’ As soon as we got our hands on the ball, it was basic movement. That was the way we played the game, with constant movement.”
“Spinning his hands like a pinwheel,” Neal said with a chuckle. “He was indicating movement. Our game was movement. We didn’t have a lot of set plays. We would react to what the defense did.”
Years later, when they were teammates in Boston, Ainge -- who had watched Walton play with the Blazers as a youngster growing up in Eugene — would kid Walton about it.
“I remembered the guy rolling his hands above his head like a traveling call when he was with Portland,” Ainge told me. “When he got to Boston, I would make fun of him at practice by doing that while I was running down the court. He would say, ‘What are you doing?’ I would say, ‘I’m calling a play.’ ”
Walton enjoyed pushing the buttons of his teammates. Sometimes his foil was Neal.
“Bill and Lloyd used to go at it almost daily,” Twardzik said. “Lloyd was one of the all-time great chirpers, and it would escalate from there.”
“Bill liked to keep stuff going because he was lively,” Hollins said. “My rookie year, he was out of action with a broken big toe and was watching from the stands one day in practice. He was ragging on Lloyd for something. Lloyd threw some water at Bill and he came out of the stands. I remember Lenny telling them that if it didn’t end right there, he was going to fine somebody. Lloyd reached into his pants for his wallet and said something like, ‘Here’s my money in advance.’ ”
Hollins remembers Walton bringing a guitar with him on road trips. “We called him Arlo Guthrie,” Hollins said.
“I remember practicing at some private school in Milwaukee that had a little locker room and one shower, Hollins said. “Bill had long hair. He got in there and took forever washing his hair. The water got cold, and everybody else had to either take a cold shower or had to wait until we got back to the hotel. He heard about that for a while.”
Walton left Portland on bad terms. He came to believe the fractured bone in his left foot, which kept him out of the 1978 playoffs and was a problem for the rest of his life, could have been avoided had not doctors — including team physician Bob Cook — administered pain-altering shots. In 1979, he asked the Blazers to trade him, and they did, to the Clippers. In 1980, attorneys Bassett and Bruce Walker filed suit against Cook and 10 unnamed physicians, asking for more than $5.6 million in damages. The issue was settled out of court, with sources telling me Walton’s take was in the area of $50,000.
“It was sad,” Gross says today. “It tore the team apart. It affected me. I enjoyed playing with him so much. We fit together as teammates. I didn’t have the same experience (with doctors) he had, although I had my own problems with my ankle. I wanted to continue playing in the league. And he wanted to, too, but in his own way. I never agreed with what he did, but I understood why he did it.”
“All I can say is, I had complete confidence in Bob Cook and the care I got from him,” Twardzik says today. “Bill handled it the way he felt he had to, and we all moved on.”
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In 1985, Walton moved on to Boston after five injury-plagued years with the Clippers. He was sent to the Celtics for forward Cedric Maxwell and a first-round draft pick that, ironically, wound up being traded to the Blazers, who took Arvydas Sabonis.
Boston’s doctors examined Walton’s legs and weren’t sure if they should allow him to pass the physical.
General manager Red Auerbach took matters into his own hands.
“Red walked in, looked at Bill and said, ‘What are you doing? Do you want to play? Do you think you can?’ ” said Ainge, then a starting guard for the Celtics. “And Bill said, ‘Yeah, I want to play. Yeah, I think I can.’ Red said, ‘OK, you’ll pass the physical.’ ”
Walton stayed healthy, playing 80 regular-season games and 16 more in the playoffs, helping the Celtics to an NBA title.
“It was a gift for the Celtics,” Hall of Fame sportswriter Bob Ryan told NBA Radio on Monday. “People were skeptical. He had a very disappointing tenure with the Clippers. (Fans) felt they wasted their money. He had been so injury-plagued, nobody was sure how much he had left. Expectations were not that high. But Bill got healthy enough to give them a great year of basketball.”
For Ainge, it was a treat to play alongside one of his boyhood heroes.
“He was so special to watch as a kid growing up, with the Blazers but also with UCLA,” said Ainge. “I loved everything about the program at UCLA. That was the most important date on my calendar as a young kid, when the Bruins played the Ducks at the Pit. For me to get game tickets from my parents, I had to get a 4.0 on my report card. It was fun rooting for him in college and seeing him with the Blazers.”
When he was at North Eugene High, Ainge attended a Blazer basketball camp that Walton worked in Portland.
“Ten years later, when he came to the Celtics, he remembered it and knew all about my history,” Ainge said. “I was amazed.”
During the 1985-86 season, Walton backed up Robert Parish and Kevin McHale at center and power forward and earned Sixth Man of the Year honors.
“It was a unique situation all the way around,” Ainge said. “He was a huge help to us that year, having his size and intelligence and passing. Having Bill upgraded us from being a great team to a super great team.
“Bill knew how grateful Robert, Kevin and Larry (Bird) were to have him. We were guys who looked up to Bill as young players and knew all about his career. We were excited to have him. He brought so much energy and life to the team. He felt gratitude for being able to play and be part of something special.”
Said Ryan: “Bill was a key component of that team. It gave them a dimension no team ever before or since has had — a Hall of Fame punch at center (with Parish and Walton) the way the Celtics did that year.”
Ainge said he has dozens of stories involving Walton. He told me a couple.
“Bill would carry a chess board with him on the plane for road trips,” Ainge said. “He would play it by himself on the plane. When we would be warming up for practice, he would be saying, ‘Did any of you see the move Bobby Fischer made on Boris Spassky last night?’ We made fun of him a little bit. It was like, ‘You’re so full of it, Walton. Who talks about that stuff?’ He was really into it.
“I had learned how to play chess as a kid but I wasn’t that good. One day, I challenged him. I beat him. I played him again and beat him a second time. Then Scott Wedman challenged him, Jerry Sichting challenged him, and Bill lost a couple, won a couple. ‘You’re not that good, Bill.’ ”
Like Walker, Ainge got an invitation to attend a concert with Walton — but with his all-time favorite band, the Grateful Dead. (Legend says he saw the band play more than 1,000 times). Ainge declined.
“Bill liked to tell the story that my wife wouldn’t let me go, but that’s not true,” Ainge said. “I told Bill, ‘I know you like the Dead, but I’m not in love with the band like you are. I’m willing to go to the concert, but give me some music of theirs that you love.’ He gave me a tape. I listened to it on the way home and on the way to practice the next day. I told him, ‘Bill, I’m not feeling what you’re feeling about the Grateful Dead. Tell me your favorite song and I’ll listen to that.’ He ripped the tape from my hands and said, ‘When you’re a Dead fan, it’s all one song.’ ”
Ainge and I shared a laugh.
“Bill was fun for everybody on the Celtics,” he said. “Everybody liked being around him. It felt like he was close with everybody. He treated everybody really well in every respect.”
In Ainge’s office, he displays an autographed ball from his three favorite teams of all-time — the ’77 Blazers, the ’86 Celtics and the ’08 Celtics. Walton was a member of two of those teams.
“I still think what he did for that ’77 championship team was as good an individual performance that I’ve seen,” said Ainge, who has 19 grandchildren from his six kids. “It was an incredible team to root for, and Walton was such a charismatic leader.”
It looks like they let almost everyone into the Trail Blazers’ locker room after their championship-clinching victory over Philadelphia in 1977 (courtesy Dennis Dimick)
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Walton’s second career — as a broadcaster — began with calling a Continental Basketball Association game in 1991. But it was made possible years earlier, when as a 28-year-old he had a conversation with Marty Glickman, a legendary New York broadcaster.
“Marty was a close friend of mine,” Hall of Fame broadcaster Marv Albert told me. “Marty worked with a lot of broadcasters at NBC. He helped Bill overcome the stuttering. He told Bill to slow down his thoughts, to read out loud a lot and to chew sugarless gum. That would help the jaw muscles and strengthen them. Bill had trouble with some words; Marty told him to practice saying them aloud and keep repeating them.”
Walton would go on to become one of the most entertaining — and also polarizing — analysts in sports broadcasting history. He won an Emmy in 2001 and worked for more than 30 years, calling college and NBA games.
“It’s rare for someone to come as long a way as Bill did,” Albert said. “He once said to me, ‘At 28, I learned how to speak. It was the biggest accomplishment of my life, and everybody else’s biggest nightmare.’ ”
Albert first met Walton during his rookie season with the Blazers.
“It was early in my career and I was working for WNBC-TV in New York,” said Albert, 82, who retired in 2021 after nearly 60 years behind the mike. “We did an interview when he came to play the Knicks for the first time. It was just the two of us sitting in the (Madison Square) Garden press room. He was extremely shy. It was impossible to get a complete answer in every statement he made. I came to realize that he was guarding against his stuttering. Then I think of working with him at both NBC and TNT, and he would not stop talking.”
As a broadcaster, Albert said, “Bill was different. He was colorful, and sometimes extremely funny. We had a lot of laughs. He was sometimes over the top, zany, eccentric, and enjoyably controversial. I thought in recent years, Dave Pasch worked extremely well with him doing the commentary. Bill would say anything that was on this mind, and he liked to talk. I don’t know many people who made such a metamorphosis.”
Walton became famous for his hyperbole and filibuster-like commentary. Sometimes he paid attention to the game he was calling; sometimes he didn’t. He was on the mike in 2000 when, during the Blazers-Lakers playoff series, Rasheed Wallace threw a towel in Sabonis’ face.
“It was one of the lowest moments of my life,” Walton said afterward. “If I were any kind of man, I would have got up from that broadcast table, walked across the court and punched Wallace in the nose. I let Sabonis, the game of basketball and the human race down that day.”
All through his broadcasting career, Walton was hurting at some level physically.
“He went through terrible pain,” Albert said. “He told me had had undergone 39 surgeries during his lifetime, which is ridiculous.”
Kevin Calabro, the TV play-by-play voice of the Trail Blazers, worked several games with Walton on TNT through the years.
“We had a great time,” Calabro said. “He was such a good guy. He was a consummate pro.”
They met when Calabro was radio voice of the Seattle SuperSonics and Walton was broadcasting with the Clippers.
“Bill would call any time they would play the Sonics and want to know about the team,” Calabro said. “He would do his homework. We would run down the list of every player on the roster, the coach, what’s the team doing, what are they trying to achieve. Good questions. It made me feel great. Here is a contemporary of mine, a basketball and cultural icon, asking for my opinions. For him to reach out like that felt like a compliment.
“I enjoyed working with Bill. He was always mischievous. He would throw a couple of lines out there and see if you were going to play with him. It was like, are you going to play with him a little or just play it straight? We had good conversations on the air. He was thoughtful to people, empathetic, receptive to ideas. He loved to poke fun at himself and other people. He would be chopping it up, just one of the guys.
“Bill was talented in so many areas. He had a great curiosity about stuff around him other than basketball. He liked to communicate that to people in any form. Sometimes it would be on a Wednesday working Cal vs. Stanford in a blowout game, and he was going to tell you about the history of Astoria. He studied what and who was around him. He was very much a guy who was in the moment.”
Walker recalls a phone conversation with Walton in the early ’90s during which he told Wally he was going to pursue a broadcasting career.
From The Oregon Journal after the Blazers’ 1977 championship
“I held the phone away from my mouth for a minute and kind of chuckled,” Walker said. “But he did it. He was always opinionated, but he had the stutter and was self-conscious and frustrated about it. Then he overcame it. What incredible grit and perseverance to become a broadcasting star with a unique perspective.”
Sometime in the ‘90s, the 1977 Blazer team held a reunion at Lake Tahoe.
“We were all there,” Walker said. “We took a vote, a raise of hands in front of Bill. The question was, ‘Which guy did we prefer? The quiet, self-conscious guy who talked less, or the new guy who is making up for lost time and is talking all the time?’ It was a unanimous vote — give us back the old guy.”
Walker laughed. When he learned the result of the vote, I’m sure Walton did, too.
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How good a player was Walton? Pretty damn good.
“One of the greatest college players of all time, for sure,” Ainge said. “Who knows what he’d have become had he been able to stay healthy. When he came to the Celtics in ’86, it was his 11th year (in the NBA) and my fifth. I said, ‘Bro, I have played more games in my career than you.’ That was crazy. It was too bad.”
“When healthy, he was the epitome of the all-around center,” Ryan said. “He was then the greatest passing center of all-time. Jokic is the only person who should be mentioned in the same breath in that department. At his peak, it didn’t get better than Bill Walton.”
(I would offer: Sabonis deserves to be mentioned in the same breath, too.)
“Bill was the best all-around center I ever saw,” Davis said. “When you look at the total game — defense, shot-blocking, passing, rebounding, outlet passing, leadership — he was the best. Kareem (Abdul-Jabbar) and others were accomplished, but from the standpoint of checking all the boxes in what it takes to be a super player and also a winner, I say Bill Walton.”
“If you could put his one-and-a-half years into 15, how many MVPs would Bill have had?” Hollins asked rhetorically. “I’d say four or five. His whole career was about winning. If he had been available for a higher number of games, he would have won more. We would have won the championship in 1978. The injuries kept piling up and we wound up just being another good team at the end. But he was about winning. That’s what he loved.”
“Our grandchildren visited this weekend and asked me, ‘Who is the best player you ever played with?’ ” Twardzik said. “I played with Dr. J (Julius Erving) and the Iceman (George Gervin) in Virginia (with the ABA Squires), but without a doubt, Bill was the best player I played with. For those two years, he was the best player in the league. He was unbelievable.
“The best player in the history of the game was Wilt Chamberlain. I think Bill could have been the second-best center had he stayed healthy — better even than Kareem. He could defend, block shots, score, and he made the players around him better. He was the whole package.”
Now he is gone. Not a perfect human being, but a largely beloved one.
“There will never be another Bill Walton on this earth,” David Lucas said. “People say he was one in a million? He was one in a billion.”
“Bill was truly what you could call a good friend,” Davis said. “There was nothing fake about Bill. He was authentic, he was sincere, he was honest. I am really going to miss him.”
At the end of our conversation, Hollins thanked me for the call.
“I’m glad I could help show people who the real Bill Walton was,” he said. “Yes, he was Big Red, the Chief. He was complicated to a lot of people. To his closest friends, though, he was just Bill.”
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