Back from the Dead

by Bill Walton

  Coach Wooden sat there watching me play for the first time, and Crum swears that he barely said a word. “Game ended, we got in our rental car, drove back to the airport, got on the plane, got off in L.A., walked to my car. I drove him back to campus to pick up his car, and all the while he said nothing. Not a thing. As he got out of my car, Wooden said, ‘Okay, Denny, that was great. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.’

  “And then he looked at me for a few seconds, thought a bit, and finally said, ‘Well, he is pretty good.’ ”

  After that, I began getting a phone call every Monday night at 6:15—for this, dinner would wait—either from Coach Crum or Wooden, often both. They would tell me about everything going on at UCLA, and not just about the team and their building plans for the future, but about life as well—what was happening in the world and on campus, the debates and issues and politics of the day, since emotions were beginning to heat up in Westwood as they were in colleges and cities across the country. I appreciated that they treated me like an adult, very much like my parents did, always interested in me and what I was doing, reading, and thinking.

  One night Coach Wooden came to our house for dinner. We all sat down at the table and my mom brought out an enormous bowl of potatoes. Coach later told me his first thought: Okay, this is a very nice way to start dinner. Then he realized that that bowl of potatoes was just for Bruce. Since Bruce had already committed to play football at UCLA, Coach’s next thought was: How are we ever going to feed these guys?

  The only way I would not have gone to UCLA was if they didn’t want me, and that didn’t seem to be the case. But that didn’t stop a lot of coaches from trying to change my mind. From the time I was fifteen, the coaches came in relentless waves with their offers and promises.

  Billy, come to our school and we’ll make you the most famous player in the history of our program. You’ll set all the records.

  Here are the three C’s of college basketball: cash, car keys, and a condo.

  Mr. Walton, how about a new job?

  Mrs. Walton, how about a shopping spree? How about some new jewelry?

  Billy, here’s the cheerleader’s phone number. She’s our closer!

  Let your imagination run wild.

  The madness about where I would play college basketball continued to swirl. But Coach Wooden closed the deal with his simple but powerful and direct message: “Billy, I know what the other schools are promising you. That’s not the way life works. There are no guarantees out there. The only thing I can promise you is that I’ll give you a chance—a chance to be a part of something special. But please recognize that to be a part of something special is a privilege—a privilege that you will have to earn every day. Billy, I’ve seen you play. And you’re the kind of spirited and enthusiastic competitor that we like at UCLA. But if you want to be a champion in everything you do, from now on—forever—it’s not how good you are. The determining factor is who your teammates are—and how good they are. You are good enough to get it done, but if you want to win everything, all the time, you must make choices in life to play with players like the ones we have at UCLA. Because your ultimate level of achievement, accomplishment, happiness, and success in life is not really based on what you do. It’s dependent on how good those other players are. And those other players are what we have at UCLA.”

  Pretty soon, most of the other coaches knew not to waste their time on me. But one who would not leave me alone was Johnny Dee of Notre Dame. I kept telling him, “Look, I’m going to UCLA. I have no interest in going to Notre Dame. Why would I want to do that?” And he’d come right back with, “No, no, Billy. You’re a good Irish Catholic boy. You need to come to Notre Dame.” He just would not let it go. He chased me all over, even after high school when I was on the road with the U.S. National Team. Finally, I grew so tired and exasperated with him chasing me around all the time that I called Coach Wooden and said, “Coach, there’s this guy named Johnny Dee—”

  Coach cut me off. “Bill, you don’t need to say another word.”

  I never heard from Johnny Dee again.

  I wasn’t the only easy recruit for Denny Crum and UCLA that year. There were two other All-Americas in the state of California: Greg Lee from Reseda and Jamaal Wilkes from Santa Barbara by way of Ventura. We all knew of each other, but we never met until the three of us went on a simultaneous recruiting trip to Stanford after our junior seasons, in the spring of 1969. It was the only official recruiting trip I ever took. Greg was a 6'5" guard who had grown up around UCLA sports. His dad, Lonnie, had played on the last pre-Wooden UCLA team, coached Greg at Reseda, and also managed all the ushers at Pauley Pavilion and the L.A. Coliseum, so Greg had been at every UCLA sporting event from his earliest conscious moments. He was a UCLA ball boy, valedictorian of every school he ever attended, and a superstar basketball player in high school—a two-time L.A. City Player of the Year. He spent his summers as a counselor at Wooden’s basketball camps, and it was the natural progression and order in life that Greg would become UCLA’s next great playmaking guard. He was virtually a son to Coach Wooden.

  Jamaal was, in his own way, the same kind of guy as Greg. The son of a Baptist minister, Jamaal was 6'7" and even skinnier than me. He was a great student, a terrific leader, polite, sweet, and articulate. And his game was classically pure. He could run, pass, shoot, dribble, defend, rebound, think, catch, and slide swiftly into any position with his impeccable footwork. Many years later, when Coach Wooden was already long retired, he was asked to reflect on his vision of a perfect player. Coach said, “I would have the player be a good student, polite, courteous, a good team player, a good defensive player and rebounder, a good inside player and outside shooter. Why not just take Jamaal Wilkes and let it go at that.”

  At Stanford, the three of us endured a weekend of unrelenting hard sell from the Stanford family and their coach, Howie Dallmar. It wasn’t until the very end of the trip that we finally found ourselves together and alone—eating strawberries on the veranda of the Stanford Country Club—at last with some private time to talk. Coach Dallmar had excused himself from the table for a moment. Instantly it was clear that Greg, Jamaal, and I were all thinking the same thing: Let’s forget about all this nonsense and just make a deal right here and now that we’ll all go to UCLA together. Our commitment and the deal were sealed.

  When we were seniors, arrangements were made for the three of us to watch each other play. Greg would have a game in L.A., and Jamaal and I would connect at the gym to watch him. “Now that’s our guard,” we’d say. Another night, Greg and I would go together to Jamaal’s game. “Okay, that’s going to be our forward.” And then our Helix team had a tournament game somewhere in the suburbs east of L.A., Covina, perhaps, and Greg and Jamaal would be there. “This is going to be our center.” That night, the first time Greg and Jamaal saw me play, the halftime score was 79–6 in our favor. We had a good team at Helix.

  Greg remembers being astonished by what he saw. “We go to see Bill play. He doesn’t take a shot the entire game—and ends up with forty-five points. What? Then you realized: He got every rebound, blocked every shot, and every time one of his teammates missed a shot he just tipped it back into the basket. No shots. Forty-five points.”

  As our winning streak at Helix mounted, we started drawing really big crowds, and we got to play several of our games at the 12,000-seat San Diego Sports Arena, as early-evening preliminaries to the NBA Rockets’ games. One of those Rocket games was against the Lakers, with Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, and Wilt Chamberlain. That also meant that Chick was there. We’d get to stay and watch the game after ours was over, but as soon as we finished we had to get off the court as quickly as possible so the pros could start warming up.

  As I was walking off the floor with my head down, still so painfully shy and self-conscious in public, I was aware of the Lakers coming onto the court, but I didn’t raise my eyes or head. With our game over, so was my opportunity to express myself. Basketball, books, and musi
c set me free, but the social aspects of the rest of my life were still a major, painful, and very difficult challenge for me.

  All of a sudden I was stopped dead in my tracks by a gigantic, thick, heavy, black arm.

  I looked up—and it was Wilt.

  And Wilt looked down with the biggest and warmest grin on his gigantic bearded face and said to me, “That was a great game, Billy.”

  I was shocked and amazed and awed.

  And then from Wilt: “We’ll be seeing you up here in the NBA real soon!”

  * * *

  CHAPTER 4

  * * *

  Pleased to Meet You, Hope You Guess My Name

  What’s puzzling you, is the nature of my game.

  I was just seventeen. Our team at Helix had gone 33-0 in my senior year, running our two-season winning streak to 49 games and winning our second straight California championship. It was early March 1970, and the best seniors from around the country would now go on to play in various all-star games and showcases, the biggest and most famous of which was the Dapper Dan Classic in Pittsburgh.

  Jamaal, Greg, and I had already committed to play for UCLA and John Wooden, but we were done for the school year and would have to wait until college started in the fall. This was utterly ridiculous. Everybody else from around the country got to play on the national stage, but not us. We were bound by the rules of the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF). Sadly, the CIF high school rules of the day didn’t allow players from our great state to play on any team but their own school’s in any event that fell under CIF jurisdiction. That included all the national all-star games. It was the CIF’s rule, their game, their world, and what were we to do? I had not yet formulated or incorporated into my life the mantra that it is easier to get forgiveness than permission.

  Nonetheless, there was still plenty of great ball to be had. Muni was always there. As were the NBA’s Rockets. Epic runs all day and night. We played all the time, every day, at a very high level, against everybody we could find. We also made regular trips across the border to Tijuana, where we would jam all night in every kind of game imaginable. Oh my!

  It was great, but I missed playing for something big, up on the grand stage. Then one day a phone call from a distant relative changed everything forever. Fon Johnson was coaching a team down at the Naval Training Center, and he wanted me to play on it. So down I went to check it out. All the guys there were grown men, adults in the Navy. And they could all play. They were fit, tough, rugged, and played with a purpose and passion that reflected the dire straits they were facing: either make the team and get the job done, or get sent to Vietnam.

  In 1970, all of us between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six lived under the constant threat of getting drafted and sent to Southeast Asia. Most guys would do anything they could to avoid the draft—stay in college as long as possible, deliberately fail the draft board intelligence test, pay a shrink to declare them insane, claim that they were gay, even move to Canada. When the options ran out and guys had to actually put on a uniform, they would then do everything they could to escape combat deployment. Some got to write for the newspaper; some got to play in the band. The ones who were tall, strong, fast, and talented got to play basketball.

  When Coach Fon showed me around that first fateful day at the NTC, the fog lifted, and I was bathed in the glorious sunshine again. NTC was about an hour’s bike ride from home each way, but I sometimes got a ride in a car.

  And it was all perfect. All of the other players were at least five or six years older than me, recruited for the team mostly out of colleges and inner-city basketball hotbeds from across the land. They were essentially pros, not quite good enough for the NBA, but they were really good, tough—and fit. And now me: 6'101/2", maybe 190 pounds, a skinny high school senior coming to check things out, chasing the dream. I was ecstatic, although, I readily admit now, very naïve.

  We practiced a lot. And Coach Fon loved the fast break. Up and down we went, endlessly celebrating how great it was to be playing ball. A lot better than Vietnam. And, with rules that allowed dunking, which was prohibited in my high school—and college—years.

  But there were also games. It was March. Spring. The end of the basketball season, with a new flowering opportunity—an upcoming tournament, the California AAU Championship—a title that no team from San Diego had ever won before—and the CIF couldn’t stop me from playing. Perfect! Running at full speed and never looking back, we tore through team after team all the way to the final round, where the championship would be decided in a best-of-five home-and-home series against a very good squad from downtown L.A. that called themselves the Live Five, for very appropriate reasons. These games were as exciting and fun as any I have ever played in my life. We packed college gyms in both cities, the refs rarely called anything, and a typical score was something like 150–147. It was fantastic, up and down the floor at the fastest conceivable speed, every trip a fast break. We won the series and the title—and it was only then that I learned there was even more to come. The California winner got to move on to the National AAU championships, to be played in Columbia, South Carolina.

  I had never been east of the Grand Canyon, and that was by car on a family summer trip. But I was chasing it down, building my life, and I was not going to let anything or anybody stop me, certainly not my parents, who were very concerned about what little Billy was doing. Not the least of their concerns was that I would have to miss some days at school—TO PLAY BASKETBALL, of all things!

  And so I went. South Carolina was a long way from San Diego, in many ways. It was as far as I’d ever gone from everything I’d ever known, and on my first cross-country flight I stared out the window the entire way. When we got off the plane I couldn’t believe how different everything was. Not only did I feel far removed from California in miles but also in time. A lot of what I saw, heard, and felt there made it feel like the Civil War never happened, and that the civil rights movement was just an inconvenient truth. Only two years earlier, police officers had opened fire into a group of South Carolina State University students gathering outside a segregated bowling alley, killing three teenagers and injuring twenty-eight more. Most of the students were shot in the back. Despite efforts to bury the incident, wounds from the Orangeburg massacre were still very fresh within the black community when I arrived in the state.

  Being in a place so out of touch with the reality of my world was weird. And when we started playing basketball, things got even weirder.

  There were eight teams in the national championship tournament, from all the basketball capitals—New York, Illinois, Kansas, North Carolina. A lot of the players were military, and all of them were grown men, much older than me. I was the only teenager, still nominally in high school. But I was there to play, and I was ready.

  As we checked into our motel in Columbia, Coach Fon instructed everyone to meet in the lobby at the appropriate time the next day for our ride to the gym for our first game. I was so excited I could barely sleep. I have always enjoyed the preparation for a game as much as anything—figuring out how we were going to get it done, and summoning the emotional commitment that would be required. There is nothing like the way your body finds its rhythm as you build toward getting into the zone for the game.

  Hating the waiting, I was the first one down in the lobby the next day, plenty early, more than ready to get going. Then the coach arrived and we waited for the rest of the guys to join us at our appointed meeting time. And we waited. And waited. And waited. Ten, fifteen, maybe an interminable twenty minutes went by, and nobody else showed up. Where were they? We had a game. Let’s go!

  Finally the coach handed me a room list and said, “Billy, you better go look for them.”

  So off I went, knocking on doors but finding no one, until finally a door eased open under the pressure of my knock, and I found the whole team packed into a single room, in a haze of smoke, drink, and pungent fumes, enjoying themselves and the company of a handful of beauti
ful women in various stages of . . . everything.

  Here we were, ninety minutes from our first tournament game, and these guys had the mother of all parties well under way. They all looked at me, inviting me in, as I stood there in the doorway, staring in disbelief.

  “WE HAVE A GAME—LET’S GO!”

  I had never seen anything like this.

  I quickly herded the guys up and out of the room, down to the lobby, and into some cabs. We were finally on our way. We got to the gym barely in time to dress and warm up. Then the game started—and we were immediately destroyed.

  Our guys were moving in slow motion, totally out of everything. I was flabbergasted. Since I was the only player on our team who could move, and I was otherwise feeling great, I had a big game. But we lost by an incalculably horrible margin and were immediately eliminated from the tournament—an embarrassing one-and-done.

  While I was in South Carolina, I had some contact with the University of South Carolina coach, Frank McGuire, who knew about my commitment to UCLA—but that didn’t keep him from trying to change my mind. I also somehow found my way up to Duke—there are vague memories of a private jet or something—but I was only interested in playing with Greg and Jamaal, and for Coach Wooden.

  I soon went back to San Diego and was figuring out what would come next—besides finishing high school. I wasn’t there long when the phone rang—again.