Back from the Dead

by Bill Walton

  Jerry Garcia carried a real burden of sadness throughout his life. And people never stopped dumping their tragedies on him. One of Jerry’s greatest strengths was his ability to take on the sadness of this hard and cruel world and to make it beautiful with that guitar, that soulful, spiritual voice, that honest emotion in the lyrics that he sang and wrote with his band and coconspirators, particularly Robert Hunter and John Barlow.

  Take a sad song and make it better.

  We were having the time of our lives going to Grateful Dead shows whenever we could. To say nothing of the big weekend rock festivals that were the precursors to Woodstock. It was 1967, the Summer of Love in California, and there was a concert or festival, big or small, in San Diego or Los Angeles or even Tijuana almost every weekend. And not only would I go—always without money, without tickets, just show up—but sometimes I knew the people who were working on the shows. And they would give me a special T-shirt and some cash and say, “Okay, Billy, you’re the bouncer today.” Only, I wouldn’t keep people out. I’d let ’em all in! And let them do whatever they wanted! At the end of the day, I had cash in my pocket, a new T-shirt, and a giant grin on my face.

  I was into everything. I loved the totality of it all. Knowing full well the importance of hydration, nutrition, and aeration, our preparations would begin many hours in advance, just like getting ready for a game. Our experiments taught us a lot about how to achieve peak performance on command. We got pretty good at it, and on the days when it didn’t work just right, we knew we’d have another chance at perfection tomorrow. We were practicing all the time. And I love practice.

  That was my world, as it still is today. We never slowed down. And to me that was always the real beauty of basketball, music, and life in California. Like the sun, it just keeps coming. The only time we’d ever stop was when we just couldn’t stay awake any longer. But even after all-night journeys through the universe, I still always got up at the crack of dawn so that I could dive right back in, ever more deeply into another new day. The thought or question of How am I ever going to find something fun to do today? never crossed my mind. We had it all. Basketball, music, books, my bike, the universe. What more was there?

  By now, the music was constantly playing, even without the musicians or the stereos. It was in my head. It was in my soul, with a relentless rocking backbeat that empowered me to shift into a higher gear and keep going forever. I could not get enough of basketball, and I now was playing as much as I could, not only at Muni Gym, but also in the gym at Helix, where my heroes and idols played.

  Helix was a great school. Big, with thousands of students, terrific teachers, wonderful facilities (although they didn’t build the swimming pool until just after we graduated), and plenty of beautiful girls, including the future wives of Pat Riley and Danny Ainge—Christine and Michelle. (I’m pretty confident, and most hopeful, that they didn’t get married until the angels were already out of high school.) With remarkable and very cool teachers at Helix, there was always so much to do: Mrs. Drake and Mr. Higby, English. Messrs. Braun and Walker, algebra. Mr. Ramsey, chemistry and physics. Messrs. Boone, Feezer, and Woods, history and civics. Mrs. Duke, calculus. Mr. Freid, geometry. Mr. Ray, photography. Messrs. Vogel and Nash, biology. There were some who were not much fun and kind of weird, but they still got the job done.

  Every fall, just before classes for the new year started, my dad would visit Mr. Benton Hart in his principal’s office. My dad always wanted to know what teachers I was going to be assigned to. And if he didn’t approve, he would convince Mr. Hart to make the appropriate change. They developed a great relationship.

  Long before I got to Helix, they already had a storied tradition of winning basketball, with multiple championships under their legendary coach Bob Speidel. The core of the mid-sixties teams that I so idolized from my days in elementary school consisted of Bob, Willie, and Emory in the backcourt, and brothers John and Al up front. All of them had part-time jobs opening up the gym for the free public play that was the norm in those pre-Reagan days—everywhere. Holding keys made them kings. Bob had a younger brother, Dave, who was—and still is—my best friend, for more than fifty-two years now. My friendship with Dave meant everything. Both of us had older brothers, with older friends, and we were always pushing the outer limits. And the fact that his older brother had a key to the Helix gym made everything even better.

  When I was just a skinny sophomore at Helix, Dave’s brother gave me my own personal key to the Helix gym, and this added a whole new dimension to my world. I now held the key to the kingdom. Every player in town soon knew I had it, and we could now organize a high-level game at a moment’s notice. This included the new guys in town, the San Diego Rockets, an expansion NBA franchise that started up in 1967. Oh my gosh! Little Billy, now or soon to be running at Helix with my newest, biggest, famous friends: Elvin Hayes, Rudy Tomjanovich, Calvin Murphy, Don Kojis, John Block, Pat Riley, Jim Barnett, Hambone Williams, Toby Kimball, Rick Adelman. And the coaches! Pete Newell, Alex Hannum, Jack McMahon, giants all. Who knew or cared that the first-year Rockets would finish with the worst record in the league? They were in the NBA! They were our heroes. And we were playing with these guys! And they were our friends, too, and still are! They couldn’t have been nicer.

  One day I was home reading, dreaming, planning, scheming, when the phone rang. My mom picked it up only to hear a deep and very mature voice demanding on the other end, “Is Billy there?”

  My stunned mother was caught completely off guard. “Who is this?”

  “Is BILLY there?”

  “WHO IS THIS? I’m Billy’s mother.”

  “Ma’am, you just tell Billy that the Big E is looking for him to open the gym tonight.”

  My mom put her hand over the phone and yelled to me, “Billy, who is this guy Biggie?”

  “Mom, please! That’s Elvin Hayes!! Now please, Mom. Please give me the phone!”

  “I don’t know,” my mom said. “Who’s Elvin Hayes? And what does he want with YOU? He sounds so old, Billy! Is everything all right?”

  I was never so embarrassed.

  It was during a day of pickup basketball at Helix that summer of ’67 when I was having a big day, just on fire, and I was torching some really old guys—they were in their thirties. They did not like this little fourteen-year-old boy with flaming red hair, freckles, and who couldn’t talk having his way with them, and much more. So they took me down with the old one-two, high-low. They tore my knee up, then stood over me with happy smiles on their faces.

  I knew right away I was in trouble. It hurt a lot, and I couldn’t shake it off or out. I knew I couldn’t play for a while, but when it wasn’t getting better by the fall, I had to have surgery. Now I was scared. It was the first of what has come to be thirty-seven orthopedic surgeries on this body. I was fourteen. It was 1967. The doctor didn’t know what to do. After the surgery, he told me to just go home and lie in bed for three months and hope and pray for the best.

  Three months later, when I got up out of bed, I realized that I had grown six and a half inches, although I gained only five pounds. My parents were shocked. My coach was overjoyed.

  When I got back onto the basketball court, I realized that I could no longer run like Jerry West or Pete Maravich. So I decided that I would now pattern my game after Bill Russell’s. I figured out how to make it work, and before practice one day, I explained it all to my Helix coach, Gordon Nash: “Coach, it’ll be great. I’ll just play half-court. I’ll stay at the defensive end, block all the other team’s shots and get all the rebounds, and our guys will race up the court and I’ll throw them the ball so they can score in transition. And I’ll just wait for the game to come back to my end and do it all over again!”

  Coach Nash was the perfect successor to Rocky, and once again, things fell into exquisite order for me. When I was a freshman, the program had still been run by Speidel, who’d been around since the fifties. He was a good coach who’d had championship teams, but th
e old-school style he favored was a methodical, slow, plodding control game that Helix would win, by a score like 42–39, all because of the brilliant strategic endgame choices of the coach. Speidel’s players were rightfully proud of their success, and I looked up to those guys and to Speidel. But it wasn’t the exciting, dynamic, up-tempo game that I had learned to love from Rocky and Chick, and yearned to play. And it didn’t fit any of the music that was in my head. Please, let my people “play” basketball!

  I like it fast and explosive, always have—up and down, with an open throttle. One day at the end of our freshman year, Coach Speidel called all the players in for a meeting. Next to him was Gordon Nash, a very cool guy, but who never really said much as Speidel’s assistant coach. He was the biology teacher. Speidel stood up and announced, “Boys, I’ve got some bad news for you, but good news for me. The bad news is I’m leaving Helix . . .”

  We had to hold back to keep from cheering. His good news was that he’d taken a job as a coach, or something, at some sort of college, I guess, in Missouri or someplace. Who knew?

  “But I want to tell you,” Speidel continued, “that Coach Nash will be the new head coach, and I have full confidence that he’ll be able to carry on with everything I’ve been able to establish here at Helix.”

  Speidel said goodbye, and Coach Nash waited until he left the room and the door was closed. Then he waited another twenty seconds or so. Finally, in a careful, guarded voice, he said, “Guys, we’re going to do things a little differently from now on. We’re going to run. And we’re going to press. And we’re going to score as many points as we possibly can every game. And everything is going to be about the fast break. And we’re going to win—big—and have tons of fun all the time.”

  We couldn’t believe it. We were so happy. This was like everything Jerry, Bob, and Neil promised. We were saved. We were delivered. We were set free. We could not contain our joy and good fortune. We started cheering and yelling like crazy.

  The new way for us at Helix was what we knew from the streets, and it was fantastic. I loved rebounding, blocking shots, and starting the fast break. It became, and remained throughout my career, my favorite part of the game. I was getting the ball or grabbing it off the board or out of the air and firing quick-release outlet passes to my teammates, who were all speedy midsize guys, like I used to be.

  Well, not all my teammates were whippets. One was my brother Bruce, now a big, strong, bruising, 6'6" stud who was literally twice my weight. I was still recovering from the surgery through most of our sophomore season, but the next year we really got going. When we got past two early embarrassing and puzzling losses when I was a junior, we soon found a rhythm, style, and groove. The crushing wins and fluid command performances started to come with great regularity.

  We were beating teams by 30 or 40 every game, with me averaging good numbers at both ends of the floor, despite getting double- and triple-teamed, which made it ever easier for me to find open teammates for simple baskets. With the increasing success came more of the violence and dirty play that took my knee in ’67, and the endless elbows, forearms, and fists were coming from every angle, rearranging my nose, teeth, jaw, ribs, and fingers. It was the new pampas grass bush—with legs.

  By now, though, Bruce was my best friend, and he had stopped stealing my food. He became the perfect big brother, and he made it his priority to protect me. Midway through the season, we came up against El Cajon, one of our big rivals, not that they were ever any good—just a bunch of guys who thought they were tough. In our first game with them that season, two brothers who were linebackers on their football team took turns pounding me as we opened up a huge lead. At one point I was finishing a fast break, taking off for a layup when one of the brothers ran under me and brutally cut me down with a cross-body block. As I writhed on the floor and Coach Nash threw his clipboard and screamed at the refs, the El Cajon fans cheered as the guy who assaulted me strutted across the floor, pounding his chest. When the game got going again, we were back on defense when, all of a sudden, the same guy who took me down went down himself, like a sack of bricks, as if he’d been shot by a sniper. I didn’t know what happened—nobody did. There was total silence while he lay there, gasping for breath.

  Down the road, Bruce came clean. “There was a big crowd under the basket, and as he came through my space, I knew it was one of those perfect moments when I could nail him with a classic shot to the sternum—boom!—and knock every bit of wind right out of him. You get hit like that, you feel like you’re going to die, like you want to die. It was perfect. Everybody was looking around, thinking, What the heck happened? Because nobody saw the shot. By the way, Billy never had another problem with El Cajon.”

  We won that game, by almost 50 points, and never lost again, 49 straight wins, ending up 62-2 over our final two seasons at Helix. I am not, and never was, a stat guy. My goal, my game, my life has been about being on the winning team. In a world gone mad before our eyes over statistics, where you are deemed to have played well if you put up big numbers, my world was defined by UCLA and John Wooden, and the Celtics with Red Auerbach and Bill Russell. If you are on the winning team, you played well. If you’re on the losing team, you stunk it up and it’s time to get back to work.

  In our senior season our average margin of victory was 36 points. We won seven games by 50 or more, and one by 96, after leading by well over 100 in the closing moments. Defense, rebounding, and passing were, and always have been, what I loved most about basketball. I scored when I had to—29 points a game, shooting 79 percent from the field, to go along with my normal 25 rebounds and dozen blocked shots.

  * * *

  I was John Wooden’s easiest recruit ever. I knew from the time I was twelve I was going to go to UCLA—if they would have me. Coach Wooden didn’t know that, nobody else knew it, but I did. I always liked playing up—against bigger and better competition. Playing for Rocky, then Gordon Nash, then John Wooden seemed like the perfect progression, and dream, for me. Even before shutting out all other future possibilities as I watched that UCLA-Michigan final in 1965, I had been mesmerized as a twelve-year-old by Coach Wooden’s lecture at a University of San Diego basketball clinic that Rocky had arranged for me to attend.

  By the time I was a junior at Helix I was receiving too many letters to count, every day from every college in the country. I didn’t even bother to open most of them. The only letter that really mattered to me was the first one that came. I was still a skinny, scrawny sophomore. It was from Denny Crum, the assistant at UCLA, the one Wooden put in charge of finding the next generation of Bruins.

  The letter went something like this:

  Dear Billy,

  It has come to our attention that you are a good basketball player. We just want to make sure that you are aware of our interest in you. We also want you to be aware that UCLA has strict academic standards and that you need to make sure that you are fully prepared and qualified when the time comes so that you can be accepted into UCLA.

  Sincerely, Denny Crum

  I was so excited, I showed that letter to my mom and dad, and to Dave and all the rest of my friends.

  While I was still healing during our sophomore season, we had a very good team, losing in the final game of the California Interscholastic Federation championships to Mount Miguel, our rival from the next burb over the hill. They went undefeated that season and were coached by a former UCLA and John Wooden player, Dick Ridgway. I am still close to several of their guys. Then our junior season began and we had that really good team, one that kept getting exponentially better by the day.

  One morning in Los Angeles, Denny Crum walked into John Wooden’s office and said, “Coach, I’ve just come from watching the greatest high school basketball player I’ve ever seen. His name is Bill Walton. He’s from San Diego, he’s six ten, and he’s got red hair and freckles.”

  At the time Crum spoke those words, Coach Wooden had under his supervision the greatest college basketball player a
nybody had ever seen, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and UCLA was on its way to winning its third straight national championship under Wooden, and fifth in six years.

  As Crum tells the story, Coach Wooden stood up, walked slowly and silently around his desk and across the office, shut the door, and then fixed a cold, hard stare at Crum. “Now, Denny,” he said. “Don’t make a stupid statement like that. You’ve recruited other guys who were probably a lot better than Bill Walton. Did you tell me he was a redheaded, freckle-faced boy from San Diego? Well, San Diego has never even had a Division One player that I’ve ever heard of. Much less one with red hair and freckles. People are going to think you’re crazy, Denny.”

  Crum shrugged. “You know, Coach, Bill’s dad is a Berkeley grad, and if we don’t get him, we’re going to be playing against him. And I want you to know—he’s going to be really hard to beat.”

  Wooden was far from convinced.

  Crum urged, “I think you’d better go see him play, Coach.”

  Wooden eventually gave in to Crum’s relentless pressure, and under Coach’s orders, Crum called Wooden’s wife, Nell, to tell her that Coach wouldn’t be home for dinner that night. “Because he’s flying down to San Diego to see a young man play high school basketball,” Crum told her.

  “That’s impossible,” Nell replied. “John never goes to see a player!”

  “Well, he’s going to see this one,” Crum assured her. “And he won’t be home for dinner.”

  After the short flight south and a drive in a rented car, they arrived at the gym. Trying to slip in quietly, they found seats in a remote corner of the stands. But immediately the crowd started buzzing, then chanting Coach Wooden’s name, then lining up for autographs. Down on the court, every guy on our team was thinking, Coach Wooden is here, and he’s going to notice ME and I’m going to get a scholarship to UCLA if I have a big game! So right away our regular game plan—based on defense, fast-breaking, high-octane offense, and discipline—went out the window and everybody started jacking up shots whenever they had the ball. We were playing wildly and totally out of control. Coach Nash was livid. He called a time-out and barked, “Now come on, guys! I don’t care who is up there in the stands tonight. We are Helix, and we are going to play our game!” So we settled back down and got rolling again, and ended up winning in another typical rout. I had another big game.