Back from the Dead

by Bill Walton

  One Saturday I was sitting in the front seat of the family car, broken-down and old as it was, with a basketball in my hands, rubbing and caressing this most perfect orb, drifting and dreaming about the game, about passing and running and blocking and rebounding. And then I looked over at my dad, fiddling with the radio dial, trying to find his loves—Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Liszt—anything to make his day tolerable. But something was wrong. My dad was an eternally happy man, but this day I noticed his clenched jaw, the tension in his neck, the angst in his face. I sensed in him that day the sadness of realizing one’s life is beginning to slip away, as he was helping me chase my dreams.

  I reached over and turned down the radio. “Dad, thanks so much for driving me to these games. I can never tell you how much I love you, and how much I appreciate what you’re doing for me. And one day, Dad, I’m going to pay you back for you doing this, for your sacrifice. One day, Dad, I’m going to be in the NBA. And when you’re in the NBA, Dad, and you’re the best player, which I intend to be, they call you the Most Valuable Player, the MVP. And guess what, Dad. When you’re the MVP of the NBA, Dad, they give you a free car. And Dad, when I win that car, I’m going to give it to you, in appreciation for what you’re doing for me right now.”

  My dad looked quizzically back at me as he reached to turn the car radio back up and said, “Well, Billy, that’s really nice. Now tell me. What is this NBA you’re talking about?”

  A dozen years later I was proud and fortunate to be able to present to my dad that NBA MVP car. Only it was a truck, a brand-new Ford pickup with a camper on the back that came when I was named the MVP of the Portland Trail Blazers’ 1977 championship team—although we all knew that Maurice Lucas was the real MVP. But they gave it to me, and I was not smart enough to give it straight to Big Luke, nor was I going to turn it down. My dad was so happy, and real proud. Every day, through to the end of his life, my dad would drive all over town in that MVP truck and wave to all his buddies. There is nothing like the pride of a dad. Nothing.

  My dad was a great father and a great man, and we had a fantastic home life. We all had dinner together every single night without fail—nobody ever missed, we weren’t allowed to. We’d share stories, listen to music, play music—I played baritone horn and a bunch of other horns in the family band—and read books. My dad loved the outdoors, and we went on the greatest family vacations, driving all over the Golden State: the eastern Sierra, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, the volcanoes—Shasta and Lassen, Big Sur, Big Basin, Santa Cruz, Monterey, Santa Barbara, and the northern redwood coast. I would get to sit in the front bench seat of the car, next to my dad, holding the big folding map and navigating our route. We’d spend weeks at a time camping out, hiking, swimming, climbing, running, laughing, reading, playing chess, and staring at the stars. Singing around the campfire became a nightly family ritual: “Oh Susannah” . . . “Clementine” . . . “Tom Dooley” . . . “Travel On” . . . “This Land Is Your Land” . . . “God Save the Queen.” It was all just better than perfect.

  My dad also took me on special all-day hikes all over east San Diego County’s spectacular backcountry. We’d regularly cover twenty-five to thirty miles at a time.

  During my time with the Sisters of Perpetual Misery at Blessed Sacrament, the big year was 1960, when I was eight years old. But the date that is seared into my mind is March 20, 1965.

  I was perfectly happy living a television-free existence, not that I knew any different, since both my mom and FCC chairman Newton Minow had declared TV a “vast wasteland,” with nothing on it worth watching. I had my books, music, newspapers, and Chick Hearn on the radio. But then one day I read in the paper that the 1965 NCAA championship game between UCLA and Michigan was going to be televised live from Portland, Oregon, that night. I had never seen a basketball game on TV, but I asked my neighbor friend Mickey if I could come down to watch it on his set. When the game came on—in dynamic and vibrant black-and-white—I was stunned, staggered, and flabbergasted by the scene.

  The Michigan Wolverines were introduced first. They were undefeated, ranked No.1 in the nation, and had the most prominent player in the country. They were the big, powerful bullies from the Big 10, led by the iconoclastic forward tandem of Cazzie Russell and Oliver Darden, backed up by the bruising center Bill Buntin, and coached tenaciously by Dave Strack.

  Then it was UCLA’s turn. They were the reigning NCAA champions, but without the previous year’s star, Walt Hazzard, who had graduated. I had known of the UCLA team through the newspaper and radio, but I was dumbfounded to see how tiny, skinny, and scrawny the Bruins actually were—particularly compared to the Michigan behemoths. Keith Erickson, Kenny Washington, Gail Goodrich—they all looked like little children straight out of Disneyland. I thought they actually looked a lot like me! Goodrich was so short and cute that they called him Stumpy. My first thought was, There is no way these little, skinny, scrawny UCLA guys have any chance whatsoever against the big brutes from Michigan. I knew firsthand how these games played out, after having lost so many battles to my brother Bruce and his ultimate teammate, the pampas grass. I just knew and feared that the Bruins would end up crying to their moms! I had no idea what Johnny Wooden was going to do here.

  But then the game started, and I sat transfixed in complete amazement as the Bruins proceeded to put on an absolute clinic. They ran the Wolverines right out of the gym with perfect John Wooden basketball: physical fitness, fundamental skills, teamwork, full-court pressure defense, and a relentless fast-break attack. The Bruins never got tired, and the five starters stayed in for almost the entire game. UCLA ran mighty Michigan off the floor, and little Gail Goodrich scored an NCAA Championship game record 42 points. It was that day, that moment, watching in awe and with incredible and developing respect, that I said to myself, That’s what I want to do with the rest of my life. I want to go to UCLA. I want to play for Johnny Wooden. I want to play like that and be a part of an NCAA championship team.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  Here Comes Sunshine

  I can’t come down, it’s plain to see

  I can’t come down, I’ve been set free

  Who you are and what you do don’t make no difference to me

  In the 1960s, a raw, naïve, and confused reporter asked boxer Sonny Liston what he had done to land time in prison. Sonny’s bearishly growling reply: “I found things before people lost them.”

  I was lucky. The things I was looking for didn’t belong to anybody; they couldn’t be owned.

  In the sixties I found myself—and a lot more. At school I found Rocky and basketball. In books I found Bill Russell, White Fang, the Joads, Israel, Ireland, the Sea of Cortez, and Michelangelo. On the radio I found Chick and Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain, and Oscar Robertson. Far beyond the Laker games were the rare and special nights when Don Dunphy, ringside, would bring to my bedroom—or the living room, as my dad liked these, too—the vivid blow-by-blow brilliance of Muhammad Ali, taunting and dancing over the latest in a parade of humiliated foes in a winning streak that would run to 30 straight before Joe Frazier ended it on March 8, 1971, when I was a UCLA freshman. In newspapers I found John and Bobby Kennedy, John Lennon, Martin Luther King, Sargent Shriver, John Wooden, the Alberts—Schweitzer and Hoffman—and the self-centered Ronald Reagan and the soulless Richard Nixon.

  By the time I was fourteen, my days of boredom were so far behind me. I didn’t think things could get any better. But then I found rock ’n’ roll. And things were never the same again.

  Music had always been magic to me, the way that the sound and rhythm and poetry could captivate people and unite complete strangers in an instant and intimate emotional bond with no conversation necessary. With my deeply embarrassing and limiting speech impediment, that last part was enormously important. When I enjoy music, everybody around me knows it and my pleasure multiplies by theirs and theirs by mine, and the musi
cians are in on it, too, all of that emotion expanding in endless loops of intensifying euphoria and everybody sharing every bit of it. It makes me happy. It’s the same thing that happens on a winning basketball team or on a long, hard climb on my bike.

  I grew up in a classical music household, with music playing all the time. My dad taught music, played piano, and sang, and exposed all of us to the masters—Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Bach, Chopin, Liszt, Schubert, Haydn, Schumann—from our earliest days. Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture became my first go-to song when I needed to get ready.

  My dad insisted and required that each of us take structured music lessons. One of my greatest failures as a dad was that I didn’t demand the same from our own children. We all played different instruments and even had a family band—Bruce on trombone, me on the baritone horn, Cathy on flute and clarinet, Andy on sax, and my dad on piano and vocals, although he could play any and all instruments. He could sight-read and play by ear. He could do anything and everything. My dad was awesome!

  As certain as I was that Rocky, Chick, Russell, Wooden, Ali, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Shriver, and all my other heroes had somehow targeted me, little Billy, to receive, grow, and thrive from their teachings, I was also sure that the new music I was starting to hear on the radio and records from the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Dylan, Joan Baez, Creedence, and all the rest, was not just music that was meant for me—their songs were actually about me. And not just me, they were about all of us. This would become a critical and essential element in my life, as it still is today.

  These days, San Diego is the eighth-largest city in the country, but in the mid-sixties it was still a small town. How were we to know? It was what we had, where we were, who we were. San Diego was home to our country’s first dog beach and first clothing-optional beach. Those were some of the primary places where we hung out.

  Dogs run free, why not me?

  In our inland neighborhoods there were endless miles and miles of open space, hillsides and valleys and rolling fields that were empty—no roads, no houses, no businesses—nothing but dirt, rock, brush, and limitless blue sky. On Friday nights, and all through the weekend, we would gather with our friends and cover entire hillsides with blankets and coolers. Our local bands would set up generators and amps and microphones and we’d have our own festivals, rocking all day and night. I never had such a good time.

  One day we were hanging out at Black’s Beach, the fantastic stretch of the Pacific just below the cliffs of La Jolla and Torrey Pines. At the end of a long day of swimming, bodysurfing, and celebrating all the joys that nature has to offer, we hiked back up the canyon to where the security of the UC San Diego campus had kept our car safe. Today UCSD is one of the top universities in the world, but in those days it was just getting started, mostly Quonset huts and tents. But it did have its Main Gym, which we knew well. Still buzzing from the beach, in our cutoffs and little else, we saw crowds of cool-looking people gravitating toward the center of campus. They had to have been heading for the Main Gym.

  What’s going on here?

  I walked over to a guy standing at the entrance. “Hey, what’s up?”

  “There’s a concert tonight.”

  “Really? Who’s playing?”

  “Some new, young guy from Tijuana. Says his name is Carlos Santana. Come on in!”

  We looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders, said, “Here we go!” and walked right in—no tickets, no money, no shirts, no shoes, but plenty of service. We elbowed our way down to the front of the stage. And . . . oh my gosh! The throbbing energy and racing pulse of Carlos’s music, with his array of drummers, percussionists, and dancers, live, right there in front of us, was like nothing I had ever heard or felt before. It electrified me. It became me. And I became the music—and I shared it and it shared me with everybody else in the place.

  And then the lightning-bolt flash of inspiration seared through my entire being: This is ME!

  Now there was so much more to my life. It wasn’t just basketball, or a Laker game or an Ali fight on the radio, or a book late at night. I’d recently upgraded to an AM/FM combo radio, which took all of what little money that I ever had. Most important, this capital investment in my infrastructure expanded my mind and my universe. It was on the FM band that I found KPRI, where you could lie back and trip over the entire seventeen-minute version of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” followed by a full side of the new Doors album, from “Break on Through (to the Other Side)” to “Light My Fire,” with no commercials to ever bring you down.

  Our new best friends became KPRI’s DJs. They were our tour guides, teachers, and travel agents. Like the librarians and my bike, they could take us to previously unreachable destinations with the Doors, the Stones (“Satisfaction”), the Byrds (“Eight Miles High”), Jefferson Airplane (“White Rabbit”), Otis Redding (“Tramp”), Velvet Underground (“I’m Waiting for the Man”), Country Joe & the Fish (“I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag”), the Beatles (“Strawberry Fields Forever”), the Chambers Brothers (“Time Has Come Today”), Hendrix (“Purple Haze”), Procol Harum (“Whiter Shade of Pale”), Cream (“Sunshine of Your Love”), the Moody Blues (“Nights in White Satin”), Dylan (“Like a Rolling Stone”), and the Who (“I Can See for Miles”).

  We were on our way, and nothing was going to slow us down.

  One day we were listening to our new friends at KPRI as they were blowing out the most incredible guitar and rhythm jam. It went on and on, just the way we liked it, for what seemed an eternity, and we couldn’t keep our soaring minds and bodies tethered to this earth. When the jam sadly ended, the DJ came back on with the information and the instructions: “Boys and girls, that was a new band from San Francisco. They call themselves the Grateful Dead, and the story goes that when they played a concert up there last weekend, so many people showed up that everybody got in free. Well, boys and girls, the Grateful Dead are supposed to be playing a concert this weekend in Los Angeles, and my guess is that if enough people like you show up, you’ll all get in free, too!”

  That was all of anything we needed. Let’s go! And so many people did that things got perfectly out of control. Or, maybe it was that proper order was restored. Yes, we got in free. And some of us elbowed our way to the front. Being extremely tall, with red hair, freckles, and a speech impediment, I somehow never had trouble getting into anything—or up to the front of the stage. One more time, things were never the same again.

  From those moments until now and forever, every concert for me is a gathering of the tribe in celebration, where the drummers and the bass set the beat, the rhythm, and the pace; and the guitars, piano, and singers tell the stories of life and death, success and failure, love and loss, hope and despair. It’s what I live for.

  I began having a recurring dream where all of it would come together. The music and the basketball were the exact same thing. You have a team with a goal, and a band with a song, and fans cheering because they’re happy, but also to make the players perform better, faster, and to take everybody further. During the game, during the song, everybody goes off, each in their own direction, playing their own tune. But then with the greatness of a team, the greatness of a leader, and the willingness to play to a higher calling, they’re all able to come back and finish the job together—to win the game and send the people out into the night ecstatic, clamoring for more.

  Listening to Jerry and the Dead, or to Dylan, Neil Young, all of them, you always think, Yeah, that’s the guy. He knows my life. He knows what I’m thinking. He knows what I’m feeling. He knows where it hurts and what’s going on. And he’s always right.

  The music I was hearing and the basketball I was playing became one. The way it starts and then plays out—guys getting together, gathering around with equipment—they just start playing and figuring things out. Music, basketball, it’s all the same.

  It all rolls into one.

  A wonderful thing about basketball is that on
every one of your trips up or down the floor you have an opportunity to make a positive contribution to the outcome of the game. It’s the same with music. If you’re going to win 88 games in a row, as we did at UCLA, or 142 games in a row, as we did spanning Helix and UCLA, or you’re going to be up onstage to bring euphoria to millions of people over the course of fifty years, you have to do basically the same thing. You have to master your own skills, anticipate all the possible movements of the other players, and know how to react to everything, especially when things go wrong or off the tracks.

  I had very little experience as a child with things going wrong. I have my parents, Rocky, and Chick to thank for that. And San Diego, too, where everything was beautiful, everything was positive, and everything was going to be just fine. That was the way my world was. I thought that was the way the entire world was, even though I should have known better. I knew that my dad’s job as a social worker exposed him every day to terrible sadness in lives that were far from perfect. But he never brought any of that negativity home, and he and my mom were always cheerful and supportive of everything we children did or thought. It never dawned on me that problems in the world were pervasive, permanent, overwhelming, or unsolvable. And with Bill Russell and Muhammad Ali showing us how to win all the time, who or what was to stop us?

  Over time I learned that few have the kind of perfect childhood that I did, particularly a lot of my NBA friends, and that even fewer were able to overcome their difficult circumstances with the glorious success and dignity of Bill Russell. The roughest early going that I know of was Spencer Haywood’s, as he brilliantly chronicled in his book, The Rise, the Fall, the Recovery. Spencer grew up outdoors, without a house, with no roof over his head, between the town dump and the cotton fields where his family slaved for subsistence in Mississippi, along the big river and its delta. When the dump trucks came they ate and found clothes and the stuff of life.