Back from the Dead

by Bill Walton

  “Billy, my name is Colonel Hal Fischer, and I’m an officer with the United States Army. And Billy, our team just won the championship of that national AAU tournament in South Carolina. I saw that game your team lost, but I liked what I saw of you, Billy. My Army team is heading over to Yugoslavia to play for the world championship, and I just want to tell you, Billy, that I’m hoping you would consider becoming part of our team. It’ll be a great three months!”

  World championship? Yugoslavia? U.S. Army? Three months? I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Even though I had no interest in the Army, or any of this colonel stuff, it took me only a nanosecond to answer Fischer, “YEAH!!! LET’S GO!!!”

  When I told my dad the news, it took him even less time to firmly respond, “No way!”

  “Billy, I was in the Army,” he said. “I’ve been over there. That’s not for you! You’re not going.”

  My high school principal had pretty much the same reaction: “Absolutely not! You can’t leave school for three months! What do you think we’re running here?”

  But I was going. In fact I was already on my way. I just grabbed my stuff and left.

  The Army sent me an airplane ticket, and I flew to New York and found my way to someplace called Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, where the team was holding tryouts. Coach Fischer hadn’t exactly mentioned that I would have to earn a spot on the team. There were twenty-five of us: twenty-four men from their mid-twenties on up who were all U.S. Army soldiers and essentially semipro basketball players, and me, just barely seventeen, and on my own. They quartered us in some dusty, drafty old barracks, with terrible beds that I couldn’t squeeze into. Everybody hated the conditions, but at least they fed us—or anyway, something that I thought was food.

  Then we gathered for our first training session and meeting with Coach Hal Fischer. OH MY!

  His opening remarks went something like this: “Gentlemen, I am the coach. There are twenty-five of you motherf—ers here, and there are only twelve spots on MY team. We are going to have three weeks of tryouts. We are going to play all day, every day. And at the end I’m going to pick twelve guys. Those of you who make the team will fly with me first-class to Europe. For the twelve who make the team, it will be the best trip you’ve ever had. And for you thirteen f—ers who don’t make it, I am a colonel in the U.S. Army. We are at war in Southeast Asia, and I will personally sign your combat orders for Vietnam. Everybody get that? I’m going to find out which of you a—holes really want to be on MY basketball team.” He finished by taking a long swig from his hip flask.

  Fischer was the scariest and meanest person I ever met—to this day. He would yell and scream and curse constantly. And drink out of that flask. I was stunned.

  As a student in the game of life, I always loved math. And while I don’t know the exact percentage, it is a most conservative estimate that more than 50 percent of the “words” that came spilling and slurring out of “Coach” Hal Fischer’s mouth would never be used by any normal human in front of their parents, children, or on television.

  Every other coach I ever had as a young player was a John Wooden disciple. Wooden, like Lenny Wilkens and Jack Ramsay in Portland, Gene Shue, Paul Silas, and Don Chaney with the Clippers, and K. C. Jones and Red Auerbach in Boston, gave their lives to coaching, teaching, and promoting the game in its beautiful, purest sense. They were constantly out in their communities selling the dream of what could be. That sales job affected every community and coach in the area. It’s the foundation of how the game was built into what it is today. And that early foundation worked its way down to little Billy, first through Rocky, and then through my fabulous coach at Helix, Gordon Nash.

  But Fischer was the antithesis of everything I knew and loved about basketball, and life. Fortunately all the other guys on the team were great to me. After Fischer would yell, scream, and curse in my face, my teammates, particularly Kenny Washington, who had played on UCLA’s 1964 and ’65 NCAA Championship teams, and Tal Brody, Art Wilmore, and Darnell Hillman, would come over, put an arm around me, and whisper, “Don’t worry, Billy. Johnny Wooden is nothing like this maniac.”

  I ended up making the team—but I was totally unprepared for a three-month overseas trip. Some of the guys took me on the subway into Manhattan to get a passport and some clothes. The next thing I knew, we were on a plane flying across the Atlantic. Our final destination would be Yugoslavia, but on the way we made a series of stops across Germany, France, and Italy, and I’m sure a number of other stops for training and exhibition games against local club and national teams.

  The trip was at the same time the best and worst experience of my life. The best part was the travel, playing ball, and being with the guys. We would move every day, from city to city, usually by bus, sometimes by plane or military jet, arriving each time to a grand ceremony, welcomed by dignitaries, bands, news media, and a festive lunch. The worst part was the coach. You could not invent a more miserable human being than Colonel Hal Fischer. He made Bob Knight look like Mother Teresa. Fischer would greet each city’s host and ranking officials with a handshake and a snaky smile, and if he was satisfied that his English was not understood, he would curse each person out in some scurrilous way, loudly enough for all of us to hear, purely for his own amusement. He was an arrogant, crude, vulgar, boorish bully of the lowest order.

  Practice was fantastic, though. I was having the time of my life playing every day, all day with such terrific players, guys I’m still close with today—Kenny, Darnell, Tal, Art, Mike Silliman, Garfield Smith, Warren Isaac. But the games were a miserable disaster, at least for me. In a new, exciting city every night, in a sold-out arena filled with raucous fans, our team would burst out of the locker room onto the floor, the game would start—and Fischer would never play me. Never. I would just sit there on the bench, game after game. And while he never played me, he certainly never missed an opportunity to yell and curse me out.

  We were closing in on the start of the World Championship Tournament, soon to begin in Ljubljana. One particularly beautiful spring day we arrived in a spectacular coastal city on the Adriatic—Zadar. At lunch, Coach Fischer came up to me with his usual deranged look in his bloodshot eyes. I had become numb to his rants by this point, basically just ignoring him, wanting the whole thing now to just be over as quickly as possible. But this time was different. He surprised me with a new kind of sneer mingled in with his daily F-bombs.

  “Hey, Billy, this game we’re playing tonight . . .”

  Yes . . . am I finally going to get to play?

  “. . . the team we’re playing just had all their big men called up to the national team. They don’t have any big guys for tonight . . .”

  What is he telling me?

  “. . . Billy, would you mind playing for the other team tonight?”

  He wants me to play for the other team?

  “Yes!” I begged. “PLEASE!”

  I just wanted to play. I’d been sitting on the bench forever.

  “Please, just let me play,” I said. It didn’t even matter anymore who I played for.

  I am not sure I was ever more excited before a game, then or since. When we got to the arena that night, I made my way to the host team’s locker room. They gave me a uniform that didn’t fit, I couldn’t understand a word of whatever language my new teammates and coach were speaking, and they didn’t speak a word of English. But this was basketball!

  The place was packed and the joint was jumping—it always was. This was Team USA, on the move. Events like this didn’t happen every day in Zadar. And the huge throng of loyal local fans went even crazier when they saw the tall, skinny, freckle-faced, redheaded American boy go out to jump center for their team.

  Zadar has a terrific basketball history. It was home to the legendary Kresimir Cosic, a seven-footer who became an international star and Hall of Famer after playing college ball at Brigham Young. He turned down opportunities to play in the NBA to remain loyal to Yugoslavia and Croatia, but has been
named by FIBA, the International Basketball Federation, which sits atop and has jurisdiction over the entire sport, as one of the one hundred greatest basketball players EVER—which covers a lot of ground and time. Cosic had just been called up to the national team when I arrived in town, and with me in his place, the scene was surreal. The crowd grew louder and crazier as “our” team proceeded to give Team USA all it could handle. I was having a huge game, torching the guys I had played with in practice every day for the previous ten weeks.

  Now, besides being an evil person, Hal Fischer also knew every dirty trick known to man and devil. Fischer took great pride in coaching his players on how to play dirty—how to hit guys, knee them, trip them, submarine them, kick them in the groin—and get away with it. That was his game. That was his life.

  And so, in my role this night as the Zadar team’s center and savior, I decided that I would take full advantage of my opportunity to use all of Coach Fischer’s tricks against his players—my own real teammates. The crowd took great delight in all my strategic employments of elbows, feet, knees, hips, and hands, and so did the Yugoslavian refs, who I don’t think called a single foul against me the entire game.

  I was on fire, and we took the vaunted Americans right down to the wire, maybe even into overtime, losing by only a point or two at the final buzzer. To the fans it was as good as the upset of the millennium. They stormed the court, ripped off my jersey, hoisted me onto their shoulders, carried me out of the arena, and ran me up and down the streets chanting, “WAL-ton! WAL-ton! WAL-ton!” When I was finally able to break away and get back to the hotel, the guys were waiting for me. Even they were amazed by what they had just witnessed.

  We were back at it again the next day, moving inexorably toward Ljubljana, and unbelievably—staggeringly—nothing had changed for me. I was back in my customary spot on the bench—and there I stayed for the rest of the trip. Hal Fischer never said another word to me. In the world championships, our team ended up disgracefully in fifth place. Yugoslavia, led by Cosic, was the champion, followed by Brazil, the Soviet Union, and Italy.

  Years later as we reminisced about what went wrong, we came to the inevitable but unanimous conclusion that if we hadn’t had a coach, we would have won the whole thing.

  As soon as our last game ended, Fischer astonished us with the news that he was immediately booking our team on another exhibition tour, this time through Greece and Africa. Mutiny ensued. Nobody wanted to spend another minute with this guy—so there was an immediate and unanimous NO! and we all went home. Three months had gone by. I needed to get away from this madman—and so did everyone else.

  Back in the United States, at New York’s JFK Airport at the baggage claim, with all the guys saying goodbye to each other, Fischer approached me. I just stood there staring blankly at him as this slithering serpent tried his best to be human and say thank you. He offered an extended handshake. I would not take it. He finally stopped mumbling; there was nothing left for him to do or say. I stood tall and held my ground. The only thing that I could and did say in parting was “F— YOU.”

  To this day I am still the only high school player ever to be a member of the U.S. National Team in a world championship or Olympic tournament.

  Back in San Diego, I still had to deal with the small matter of graduating from high school. I was basically walking off the plane and into my final exams, but I aced them. School and basketball were always the easiest parts of my life. At graduation, I was near the top of my class, and now there was nothing standing in the way of me and UCLA—and Coach Wooden.

  More than three decades later, I got a phone call from a complete stranger. She kindly said that there was somebody who wanted to talk to me.

  It was Hal Fischer. He was in the hospital, and he was dying. Choking back emotion and tears, he gravely said he didn’t have much time, and he wanted me to know before he left for good that he was sorry for what went down between us. He said he should have played me in Yugoslavia, and that if he had, we would have won.

  I held my tongue, biting it until it bled. I told him that it was okay, that I had gotten over it and moved on.

  When the line and everything else went dead, I don’t think I believed what I had just said.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  You Say You Want a Revolution

  Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, we’re finally on our own.

  This summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio.

  Growing up, I was raised to believe that Americans were different, somehow better, because of what we were all about and what we stood for. That the wars we fight are moral and just, and always in defense of truth, honor, and righteousness. That people who work hard will get ahead, that our workers and our products are the best in the world, and that our economy and taxation systems are structured to ensure that there is never a lack of opportunity and jobs. That we settle our differences through compromise and open and honest elections, never resorting to political trickery, bribery, or assassination. That all of us are equal, and that any discrimination left over from a darker age based on skin color, religion, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, or personal lifestyles and choices would quickly fade away. And that on our team, most everybody has something, because when only a few have it all, we really don’t have much of anything.

  I was able to see John Fitzgerald Kennedy in a parade that stopped by our school in San Diego in June 1963, and his smiling image, waving to us in our uniforms from his open limo, said all of this about America and more. But almost immediately things started to get sadder and stranger. Exactly six days later the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi. JFK was killed seventeen days after my eleventh birthday. Riots consumed Watts, Detroit, and other urban deserts. The year 1968, with my basketball flourishing, also brought the terrible chaos and carnage of the Orangeburg massacre; the murder of Martin Luther King and the Holy Week Uprising; Bobby Kennedy gunned down; and bloody riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Ronald Reagan, representing the beginning of the selfish and greedy dismantling of our greatness, was in the California statehouse. Richard Nixon, the prince of darkness, somehow conning too many that he stood for a better tomorrow, won the White House.

  In January 1969, while I was dreaming about my UCLA life that would begin after one more school year, violence shocked the Westwood campus. The increasingly assertive Black Panther Party and a rival black nationalist group called Organization Us were locked in a struggle over control of the African American studies program. At a meeting in Campbell Hall, an argument boiled into a gunfight that left two student Panthers, Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, dead.

  Everything I had grown up believing was turning upside out and inside down.

  By the spring of 1970, I had already run away to join the circus on the European tour with Colonel Hal Fischer and the U.S. Army. While I was having the best and worst experience of my life both at the same time, the world that I would be coming home to was changing drastically—and I didn’t even know it. As we rolled along trying to survive the madness of Fischer, there was barely any news available from home, so who knew anything, in our little insular world, about Nixon’s decision in late April to launch a massive invasion of Cambodia, vastly expanding the war in Southeast Asia?

  On May 4, just a few days from the start of our basketball world championships, who on our tour of madness had any idea that powerful, emotional, desperate protests were breaking out on virtually every college campus in the America that we had left just a few months ago? We were in communist Yugoslavia, itself overwhelmed by its own massive dysfunction. It wasn’t until later that I learned that at Kent State University in Ohio, our own National Guardsmen, charged with protecting us, had opened fire on unarmed young demonstrators, killing four of them and wounding nine others, setting off a pervasive nationwide strike by students, effectively shutting down more than 450 colleges and universities. At UCLA, a state of emergency
was declared and hundreds of riot-geared, club-wielding “peace officers” arrested more than seventy students. Less than two weeks later, there was another college town police massacre, this time at Jackson State in Mississippi, where two more students were killed and another twelve wounded.

  What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground,

  How can you run when you know?

  The May 6 UCLA Daily Bruin editorialized: “The violence on this campus may be just another indication that America’s chances of achieving peace, in both external and domestic affairs, have slipped away. [Students are] angry because every day America seems to become more callous, more ruthless, and there is nothing they can do about it.”

  They said they’d stand behind me when the game got rough

  But the joke was on me, there was nobody even there to bluff.

  I’m going back to SAN DIEGO and UCLA! I do believe I’ve had enough . . .

  Nixon creeped and sleazed in with his secret peace plan. Vietnam exploded, then the campuses, then Watergate, and we looked around, thoroughly disgusted. What are you guys DOING? Everything and everyone we thought was right and normal and cool was being shot down, beaten up, and thrown in jail. And we were being told to go to Southeast Asia and kill all the people there. Yeah, right. For what?

  Muhammad Ali said, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.”

  Bob Dylan said, “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.”

  Nixon boasted, “When the president does it, it’s not illegal.”

  Dylan finally asked, “Will all the money you’ve made ever buy back your soul?”

  The supercharged mix of emotions ignited the firestorm. The nationwide student strike in the spring of 1970 was another breaking point for a whole generation, inspiring and driving a movement to upend the old rules that impeded honesty and freedom. The calls to action came from Dylan, Joan Baez, John Lennon, the Doors, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Country Joe McDonald, Richie Havens, Jimmy Cliff, Phil Ochs. The world as it could be. The songs did not only express anger; they clamored for peace, freedom, hope, joy, and love.