Earlier today, the sad news broke that legendary basketball player and commentator Bill Walton passed away at 71 after a battle with cancer.
Walton was enshrined in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1993. Walton is among the top three all-time great college basketball players, alongside Duke Blue Devils great Christian Laettner and fellow UCLA Bruins alum Lew Alcindor. (better known to everyone as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) Walton was part of the famed 88-game winning streak by the Bruins.
In 87 games for the Bruins, Walton averaged 20.3 points a game, including a 44-point performance in the national title game, which is still a record to this day. He also won the Naismith College Basketball Player of the Year thrice from 1972 to 1974. Walton joked that he was coach John Wooden’s easiest recruit while being his worst nightmare that drove him into an early grave at the age of 99.
While his NBA career was limited in the number of games he played due to various back and foot injuries that only allowed him to play in 44 percent of regular season games, despite being in the NBA from 1974-1988.
Walton still won two NBA championships with the Boston Celtics for the 1985-1986 season, and the team that drafted him, the Portland Trailblazers, in the 1976-1977 season. Despite the consistent injuries, Walton won the NBA Most Valuable Player award in 1978 and even the Sixth Man award in 1986.
Walton was not shy about controversy throughout his playing career as an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. After his basketball career, Walton became a color commentator for CBS, NBC, and ESPN from 1990-2009, when he left ESPN after ongoing back issues since his college basketball days, ultimately resulting in surgery to alleviate his pain.
What is more impressive about his commentator career is that he stuttered until age 27. Eventually, Walton would make his return covering PAC-12 games full-time in 2012. Walton would use catchphrases such as “Throw it down, big man!” and was hyperbolic in his delivery but beloved to everyone. He was so hyperbolic that he once said: “John Stockton is one of the true marvels, not just of basketball, or in America, but in the history of Western Civilization!
Walton loved to wear tye-dye shirts throughout his life and his commentary career when allowed to be himself more. He also crowned the Pac-12 “The Conference of Champions.” The Pac 12’s website posted today that we were the “Conference of Champions” not because of trophies or medals but because of the amazing individuals, champions in life, who compete in this league and cement their legacies of excellence.
There is no better example of this than Bill Walton. One of his most significant contributions to basketball was when, before the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, Spain, the national team from Lithuania wanted to secede from the clutches of the Soviet Union and represent themselves.
The biggest problem the Lithuania team had when they left the Soviet Union was money, so Walton took it upon himself to contact friends who would help with travel and equipment.
Those friends happened to be Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead.