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 player.
