Bill Walton Was Basketball’s Cosmic Explorer

Photographs: Getty Images; Collage: Gabe Conte

The video—a clip of an NBA broadcast, 53 seconds long, buried deep on YouTube—at first seems to be about Robert Sarver, the since-deposed owner of the Phoenix Suns. We’re in the closing moments of a Sun-Lakers game, Phoenix cruising to an eventual win, and as the camera cuts to Sarver, color commentator Bill Walton tees up what appears to be a tribute. “Robert Sarver, from San Diego, University of Arizona, bought the team from Jerry Colangelo, and the vision,”—his rumble suddenly becomes thunderous—“to somehow acquire Boris Diaw.” Walton pauses, mid-pivot.

“And when you look at Boris Diaw, what he’s done to this franchise, he’s changed everything. And as we celebrate his brilliance—and when you talk to Boris Diaw, what a classical human being he is.” Another pause, and then another left turn: “It was 201 years ago today,” Walton says (prompting a baffled “Yeah?” from his broadcasting partner), “that Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 in E flat, which escorted in the Age of Romanticism in music.” (He misses a verb here, I think, and technically it’s E flat major, but let him get where he’s going.) “And when I look at Boris Diaw, I think of Beethoven and the age of the Romantics. This guy has got it all.”

Boris Diaw! Longtime NBA vet, undersized forward-slash-center (unless measuring horizontally), renowned for both his cappuccino consumption and his point guard-grade passing ability. Career averages of 8.6 points, 4.4 rebounds, and 3.5 assists per game. A cult favorite among self-styled basketball hipsters, to be sure, and a cool and fun player to everyone else. But Beethoven? Yes, Beethoven.

This was the special genius of Walton, whose death at 71 of cancer was announced on Monday. He was basketball’s cosmic explorer, both during his career as a boundary-busting Hall of Fame player and then in his occasionally meandering (though never less than entertaining) work as a broadcaster.

Walton was something like a basketball Zelig, party to an unusually large chunk of essential hoops history. At UCLA, he led coach John Wooden’s Bruins to consecutive undefeated seasons and an 88-game winning streak. In Portland, he led the Trail Blazers to their first-ever title, and more or less invented a new way to play the center position—passing like a point guard generations before Nikola Jokic would do the same. He’d also feature heavily in David Halberstam’s Breaks of the Game, a perennial pick for the greatest sports book of all time. Injuries would derail his time in Portland, and much of the next decade of his career, though he’d emerge to help the all-time 1985-1986 Boston Celtics win a championship before retiring and beginning a career in the broadcast booth.

Walton seemed interested, the whole way through, in developing not just as a basketball player but as a person. He was a Grateful Dead superfan and an antiwar activist. (“Your generation has screwed up the world. My generation is trying to straighten it out,” he said in a statement after being arrested for protesting the Vietnam War in college.) And when he began working as a color commentator, he seemed to bring his whole self to that job, too.

In the wake of his passing, NBA Twitter shot to life with favorite Walton moments. Comparing Nikola Jokic to “a Nelson Mandela or a Martin Luther King or a Mahatma Gandhi, someone who sees the future before anyone else does.” Giving a copy of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to his creationist-curious broadcasting partner Dave Pasch—during a Pac-12 broadcast. Comparing the 2019-20 Kansas Jayhawks to an active volcano. Remembering some guys (“Greg Popovich! Chauncey Billups!”) while wandering through his inexplicably glowing backyard into his home studio before a broadcast.

My Walton moment is that Boris Diaw clip. It was in frequent rotation during my junior year of college, when a couple of buddies and I gathered each week for a self-assigned, self-taught independent study course (Smoking Weed and Watching YouTube Basketball Clips 202) that met on Tuesday afternoons. This was the age of the basketball hipster; a crew of writers and bloggers had pioneered a self-consciously thinky way of watching and talking about basketball that my friends and I found eye-opening. The big idea was that players like Boris Diaw were just as deserving of deep dissection as, say, Kobe Bryant.

How great, then, to learn that Walton had been there the whole time—that a slick-passing, croissant-chomping big man had a fan in one of the greatest, and weirdest, to ever do it. And it wasn’t just a bit. Indeed, for decades Walton made the case that basketball was just one way to tap into the great celestial wackiness he revered. In his personal cosmology, a meaningless Suns-Lakers tilt on a Tuesday night could provide the same portal to transcendence as a performance of a Beethoven symphony, or a cherished Dead tape, or a walk through a forest of sequoias.

On Tuesday, Pasch, Walton’s longtime broadcasting partner, shared on X a number of text messages he had exchanged with him through the years. They are thrillingly wacky, and more than a little moving. It seems only right to leave you with one. After Pasch asks whether Walton has received the year’s college basketball schedule yet, Big Red replies:

No, I sadly have nothing,

Except the sun,

And you,

Goodbye, Bill. We sadly have nothing, except the sun, and the memory of you.

Originally Appeared on GQ