Mike Lupica: Bill Walton was as brave as his game was beautiful

There is so much to talk about today now that the great Bill Walton has died at the age of 71, died and left behind a world that won’t be nearly as smart without him, or curious, one that could never be as much fun without Bill Walton in it.

He was the basketball hippie who played for John Wooden, he was tent follower for the Grateful Dead, and was a campus activist at UCLA, a 60s kid there even though he didn’t arrive until the 1970s.

And later in his life, much later, he reinvented himself all over again as everybody’s colorful and occasionally crazy uncle talking about basketball on television, wanting you appreciate the game he was watching as much as he did.

“I know they call soccer the beautiful game,” he told me once. “Not as beautiful as basketball.” So on the day of his passing, a day when basketball mourns a death in its family for a man famous in that sport for more than 50 years, what you need to remember about Bill Walton is that he was the one with the beautiful game.

Bill Walton was the one who played the position of center with an unparalleled combination of skill and grace and imagination and passion, who when he was young and before he started getting hurt, played that position as well as it could possibly be played.

My dear friend Bob Ryan, the great columnist and Hall of Fame NBA writer from the Boston Globe, someone who wrote about pro basketball as well as it could ever be written, once said that if you brought all the all-time best players to an imaginary playground, and your job was to pick the best team, his first pick would have been the young Bill Walton.

He is talking about the Walton from UCLA who once shot 21-for-22 in an NCAA title game; the Walton who won a championship with the Trailblazers in 1977, beating Julius Erving and George McGinnis and a kid named Darryl Dawkins in the Finals after losing the first two games; the Walton whose Trailblazers were 50-10 the season after that title before Walton injured his foot and his basketball life was permanently changed.

“He just exuded life,” Ryan said on Monday afternoon after he had learned of Walton’s death from cancer. “He exuded life and loved life and in all the years when I knew him, there wasn’t a part of life that he didn’t find interesting. And he loved basketball completely, mostly because he considered it an art form.”

Walton played on a high school team, Helix High, in La Mesa, Cal. that won its last 49 games. He once won 88 games in a row at UCLA after his team won its first 73 games. In that ’73 title game against Memphis, he scored 44 points and had 13 rebounds and seven blocked shots.

He became an MVP with the Blazers and MVP of the NBA Finals and then, after years of surgeries on his feet and ankles, he came back with the Celtics and became Sixth Man of the Year on the 1986 Celtics team that had Larry Bird and Robert Parish and Kevin McHale and won it all.

When Walton was traded to the Celtics that year, one of the first things he did was drive over to Robert Parish’s house and say, “I’m not here to take your job. I’m here to help.” And help he did, becoming one of the most remarkable sixth men in NBA history, and forming an extraordinary combination with Parish at the center position. This from a man who used to joke that his legs were really shot by the time he got to UCLA and that “I really peaked when I was 12.”

And, of course, his fierceness about his beliefs and political convictions was as deep as his love for his sports. He was arrested in 1972 for protesting the Vietnam War and, in a world before we ever even thought about things going viral, the image of him being arrested on Wilshire Ave. did go viral, Walton’s arms above his head. Truly, he was a child of the 60s in that moment, a kid who had grown up watching Muhammad Ali make protest and political dissent into something noble.

He would later become a far more controversial figure because of those beliefs, supporting his friend Jack Scott when the FBI was after Scott for harboring members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Walton spoke out against his own government again, referring to the FBI as “the enemy.”

At the time, there wasn’t another prominent white athlete in America staking out political ground like this, or speaking out in protest as Walton did from Black churches. But Walton never did these things for show, whether you agreed with his positions or not. He believed what he believed. “One of a kind,” that’s the way NBA commissioner Adam Silver describes him. And Bill Walton was.

“I know I’ve gotten twice as much as I deserve because I’m white,” Walton once said.

Even long after his playing career ended, Walton’s body continued to betray him. He would speak on more than one occasion about debilitating back pain in his 50s that he said had him considering suicide. He once calculated that he’d had three dozen orthopedic surgeries in his life.

This still a remarkable life, when you consider the sweep of it from high school on. Walton was eventually voted as one of the 50 best players in NBA history. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame 31 years ago. And through it all, whether as a player or broadcaster who overcame a speech impediment, Bill Walton continued to do this one thing: He made the gym better as soon as he walked into it.

I was lucky enough to see him play at his best. I was lucky enough to get to know him later in his life, and mine. I was glad my sons got to meet him. Bill Walton always said, “Life is about growing.” Only now does he stop.

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