Back from the Dead

by Bill Walton

  When I flew up to Portland to sign the contract that spring, it was a beautiful day in the Great Northwest, and everybody was all excited. I was signing the largest financial deal in the history of all team sports. And Sam and Ralph, the Blazers, the media, the fans, and some “friends” who seemed to think that they were part of the deal were all aglow.

  The only thing that I cared about was that Sam and Ralph had indeed been able to write it in there that I was in charge of my own personal grooming—such as it was.

  As I sat in the Blazers’ offices meeting the staff members—there were eight total front-office employees at the time—I was waiting to go into the conference room to meet the assembled Oregon press corps. As the Blazers ownership group was orchestrating everything and we started to shuffle in, one of them leaned in toward me and whispered in mid-procession that all would be fine, but please don’t mention the coach’s name (which I didn’t know anyway) because they were going to fire him the next day.

  And so it began—signing up for something that I was totally unprepared for.

  I was ready for Oregon, Portland, and all the things that it had to offer. Phenomenal geography, Native Americans, history and all, with the rivers, valleys, mountains, volcanoes, high deserts, the Columbia River Gorge, a magnificent coast, and so much more that I was soon to discover. A governor, Tom McCall, who was a visionary leader in so many of the areas that I loved and lived for. A city mayor, Neil Goldschmidt, who was very cool and receptive to making everything better. And a population that was totally into the things that turned me on, although in those days, there seemed to be more people in Westwood and at UCLA than were living in the entire state of Oregon.

  What I wasn’t ready for was the business side of the sport, something that now seemed to take precedence over everything else. Everybody was so nice and trying to help, but I didn’t know what I was doing, just getting started, on my own and all, for the very first time.

  I was also totally unprepared for the weather, which was unlike anything I had ever seen.

  After San Diego, I thought UCLA was cold, damp, wet, and foggy. In Oregon, I was fully convinced that the sun had burned out and life as we knew it was rapidly coming to an end.

  The Blazers got me a new car—whatever I wanted. I got a Toyota Land Cruiser, and immediately took the top off. That didn’t go well. They were building me my own special house, south of town, on the biggest river and with more fresh water than I had ever seen. It had everything custom-fit for my height and size. It was very nice, but that didn’t work out, either—for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which was that it was on Nixon Avenue. What was I thinking?

  I was making all sorts of new and interesting friends. It was a whole new world. I read a lot of the history of my new Oregon home, and decided that I wanted to take a summer job as a lumberjack. The Blazers were aghast, but they did help in every way they could. They tried—man, did they ever try—to make it all work. They helped get a friend and me jobs out in the mountains east of Eugene. We didn’t last long. The reality did not meet the dreamy myth, what with the danger, the giant chain saws, cables, trucks, winches, bulldozers, devastation, cutting down the forests and all.

  I quit the lumberjack job and headed out on a major backpacking trip in the same central Oregon area, up one of the forks of the McKenzie River, only to be driven out by the giant bloodsucking mosquitoes—which were the size of pterodactyls—everywhere. I quit that trip, too.

  I ended up taking a journey of discovery, exploration, and experimentation that began with all the hot springs in the state and ended at the coast, where I met Jeb Barton and bought my first tipi. It was all so stunning, and so different from Southern California. Trees, rivers, wildlife, and no people—WOW!

  I connected with Dick Trudell, a Dakota Sioux Indian, who had grown to become a lawyer and master legal expert, ultimately settling in San Francisco. Dick has spent his life trying to right the wrongs that history has forced on us. I’ve tried to stand in his giant shadow whenever possible. He’s still at it, braver, sharper, tougher, and more determined and tenacious than ever. We’re still going for it today—together.

  Back in Portland, I was reading the local paper and saw that the Grateful Dead were in town that night at the downtown Paramount Theatre, on Broadway—right in the middle of it all.

  I hightailed it down there early in the afternoon, stood in line to buy a ticket—general admission, as most of their shows were in those days. Then I used all my quickness, agility, and sharp elbows to get a great seat, dead center and about ten rows deep. It was perfect. It was my first time in this ornate temple. The show was about to begin, and everybody was ramping up their preparation in fevered anticipation for the upcoming ceremony. Most of the focus was on flexibility, hydration, and nutrition.

  When the band came out to start the show, they kept glancing out into the crowd with puzzled looks. They kept muttering to themselves during the song breaks, not able to figure out why everybody was sitting down except for this one tall, skinny, redheaded geek. Nobody ever sat down at a Dead show. It was one of the reasons that we went.

  Then they changed their way of thinking to—hey, everybody is dancin’, but that redheaded guy is standing on his chair and blocking everybody’s view. That was untenable. This was the Grateful Dead. Where everybody got a chance to be a part of the deal.

  They finally figured out that everything was fine. That everybody was dancing, including me, and that I was just very tall.

  Unhappy that those behind me couldn’t see, the band sent somebody from the crew out to the audience to tell me that they would prefer that I come and watch from the stage so that everybody else could see.

  I wanted no part of that. I had spent the whole day trying to get just where I was. In the perfect spot: dead center, and up close. They pleaded. I turned them down.

  What were we all to do? The show was in full swing. I told them that I was staying where I was, but that I would come backstage at halftime. The guy left me two backstage passes, and he and the crowd let me be.

  I went backstage at the break, and things have never been the same since.

  I had had numerous opportunities to meet the band at many of the shows I had been to before. It’s a very friendly place. But I was just too shy. And I couldn’t talk. So what was I to do?

  But this time I took a chance, and they couldn’t have been nicer. As they all still are to this day. What a family. What a team. All of them. Including Ram Rod, who was from Oregon and loved basketball, sports, his home state, and all things Grateful Dead. After seven years of going to the concerts, I was now happily and proudly on their team. And on their team I remain.

  Not too much later, the Blazers called me in and told me they wanted their doctor to operate on my knee, the same knee that I tore up in 1967—seven years earlier.

  While the knee bothered me, like my feet, and now my spine, it was just part of life at this point. And I had learned to deal with it.

  They said the surgery wasn’t structural, just a cleanout of all the loose junk that was floating around in there, the stuff that would every now and again cause my knee to lock up so that I wouldn’t be able to move it until I was able to physically massage the crud temporarily out of harm’s way.

  I listened to them and did it, though it was very close to the start of the season. So now I’ve got this recently operated-on knee, coming on the heels of my broken spine from seven or eight months ago, my chronically sore feet, and a whole new world on every front.

  I woke up in the hospital to find our new coach standing over me—Lenny Wilkens—along with his new assistant, Tom Meschery. They had been two of my favorite players as a young NBA fan, and as coaches they were as cool as could be.

  * * *

  When I joined the Portland Trail Blazers in the summer of 1974, they were basically still an expansion team, even though they were now starting their fourth year.

  They played in a beautiful building, the “Glass Pala
ce,” the Memorial Coliseum. It was the same building that had hosted the 1965 Final Four. The same place where the first basketball game that I ever saw on television was played. It held 12,666 people for an NBA game, but the Blazers had never captured the fans’ imagination or stirred much loyal interest or passion as they struggled to attract just a bit over half the house to games that they rarely won.

  Going into that season, we certainly had some talented players. There were a couple of recent NBA Rookies of the Year in Geoff Petrie and Sidney Wicks; a very nice swing player in John Johnson; a previous No. 1 overall NBA Draft pick in seven-footer LaRue Martin; a proud and fierce semi-tough, semi-big guy, the frustratingly antagonistic Lloyd Neal; a competitive swing man in Larry Steele; and our coach, Lenny Wilkens, who was going to play as well. In retrospect, Tom Meschery should have played, too. But sadly he didn’t, except for an occasional romp in practice when we were short of healthy bodies. Those attempts didn’t go real well, as Tom and Sidney would eventually get into ugly and brazen fistfights—EVERY TIME. When Tom was an active NBA player, he was the one guy who ever got into it with Wilt. A cerebral genius off the court, Tom loved to fight on it.

  But beyond those players, we didn’t have what it took to make a complete team. And it was all very disconcerting. For the first time in memory, I was on a team where skills and talent were lacking. Some of the guys couldn’t dribble without having to watch the ball. Many had sloppy, careless, or no footwork. A bunch had no left or off hand. Some couldn’t catch. Others couldn’t shoot, rebound, or pass.

  Here I was, at the top, the pinnacle—or so I thought—here in the dream-of-a-lifetime NBA for the very first time, and far too many of the guys couldn’t play, couldn’t execute the basic fundamentals. What a nightmare! You couldn’t make our high school or college team unless you could do everything. That was John Wooden and UCLA basketball, the culture that had been my life.

  Lenny and Tom did their best. But they had no power over anything other than the in-game stuff, like substitutions and strategy—such as it was.

  I came with high hopes and great intentions and expectations. But I was finding out that the whole thing was a giant step down from what we had at UCLA.

  Many different, disruptive, and often devastating cliques developed on the team, and the chemistry was basically awful—if it existed at all. Sidney quickly became my best friend on the team. I would spend a lot of time over at Sidney’s apartment in what free time we did have. He was in his third year, and he had a lot of things figured out—none of which he was too happy about. Geoff Petrie was very nice, too. They all were, although Geoff and Sidney did not seem to get along, which seemed quite weird to me.

  Geoff and JJ—John Johnson—had nice games, but they were mostly played off their own dribble. And that was not the game that Sidney and I brought from UCLA.

  Lloyd’s game was a combination of skill and bulk. He was not explosive, but he had good footwork, hands, finesse, and touch. He had two nicknames: “Ice,” for all the ice that he constantly used to try to heal his battered body, and “Bottom,” a reference to the anatomical part of his body that he used with remarkable effectiveness to knock you completely off balance and out of the way so he could finish a play.

  And then there was LaRue, a fine, polished, and well-liked gentleman who was totally miscast in his position as The Franchise. His basic limitation was that he wasn’t passionately in love with the game—which is a foundational requisite for ultimate success.

  We would all play, and we would all fight and get into everything, little of it good. But we were trying to move forward.

  After my knee surgery, I struggled to get back with it on the court. I started playing almost immediately after my knee surgery, continuing an ill-advised and foolish trend of always coming back to the game too soon after serious injury. And my body was just not right in those early practices when we were trying to find any sort of chemistry.

  As my hair kept growing, along with what there was of my facial hair and beard, people started to realize that I was serious, and that I was not going to cut my hair. David Crosby was very proud. I became the first player in NBA history to have a ponytail.

  And then the business side of the whole deal kept popping up. Everybody wanted a piece of the action. The fast-food companies and the soda-pop people were persistent. A lot of the local companies wanted to do endorsement deals. But that just wasn’t my thing. The way I saw it, my deal was to play, to fill the house, and to win the championship—and I would get paid for that.

  But this one guy kept persistently coming back, dogged in his tenacity. He had a start-up company, and he had some shoes that he wanted me to wear. I told him that I had a pair of shoes. He told me that he wanted to pay me to wear his shoes. I told him I got paid plenty to play basketball, and that I really wasn’t interested. He kept after it and kept telling me that I was his guy—Oregon, cool, and all that—and his offers kept getting more and more generous. I was getting embarrassed, because I knew I had already made up my mind. I wasn’t going to do it, and there was nothing that was going to change my way of thinking. Finally, he left, never to return.

  His name was Phil Knight. His called his start-up company Nike. Who knew? Certainly not me. Phil has gone on to become one of the most important figures in the history of sport. And his Nike dream is the envy of our sporting and business world. Every time I connect with Phil now, to this day, he always shakes his head, echoing Coach Wooden: “Walton, you’re the slowest learner I’ve ever seen.”

  I joined the NBA at a fabulous time, with lots of great teams, players, coaches, and particularly centers. Every night I would have the opportunity to play against the likes of Kareem, Dave Cowens, Nate Thurmond, Bob McAdoo, Bob Lanier, Elvin Hayes, Wes Unseld, and Clifford Ray. Yes, I was sad to be missing out on the recently retired guys like Russell, Wilt, Willis Reed, and Walt Bellamy. And Artis Gilmore and Moses Malone were in the ABA. But every night there was somebody who was really, really good that I had to beat if we were going to come out on top.

  We started the NBA exhibition season in Los Angeles against the Lakers. I got to play that night against Jerry West for the first and only time. He retired pretty much right after the game, suffering from the ravages of time. It was the first time that I had ever played against a guard who had total control of the game. He was as good a little guy as I ever played against. He was incredible even at the very end, hobbled as he was—brilliantly able to dictate every other player’s movement on the court just by what he did with his mind, body, spirit, soul, and the ball. It was exhilarating and eye-opening.

  We won the game, although I was soon to learn that the only thing more meaningless than the halftime score of an NBA game is the final score of an NBA exhibition game.

  Quickly on the move through the NBA exhibition schedule, we landed in Dayton, Ohio, in a made-for-TV extravaganza created by Don Nelson pitting us against the Milwaukee Bucks and Kareem. Kareem was one of my heroes. He was one of the major reasons that I had gone to UCLA. I had worn his No. 33 in high school. He was the standard of excellence that everybody was measured against—and would be for the rest of time.

  This was the first time I ever played against him. I had no chance. I was not ready, physically or on any other level. Kareem’s Bucks were still very good, although they no longer had Oscar Robertson. They had lost to the Celtics in the NBA Finals the year before in one of the greatest championship series ever played, where the road team won the last five games of the seven that were played, including a Celtic rout of the Bucks in the finale in Milwaukee.

  The game for me was a complete disaster, as I could do so very little, and it showed just how far I had to go, both as an individual and in pulling our team—such as it was—together.

  Sports Illustrated made the exhibition their cover story that week.

  As the games of all kinds kept coming, I kept noticing something very strange that was happening as an everyday occurrence. As soon as the first half e
nded every night, some of our players, a coach, and some staff members would sprint off the court heading to the locker room. I was used to playing all the time, almost always finishing the half on the court. So what was the rush to get off, and why waste the energy and effort to run full speed to the locker room?

  When I would eventually get there myself, imagine my surprise to find the guys in there smoking cigarettes and pounding down carbonated caffeinated soda.

  * * *

  The regular season started soon enough, and although we were doing OK as a team and attendance was starting to build, there was no real magic or spark to what we were doing on or off the court.

  Lenny and Tom did their best, but as a collective group, we had no tangible, positive chemistry. The ball didn’t move much. There were far too many individual agendas. Selfishness and greed were rampant, and there was lack of skill and talent on a flawed roster. The trust and mutual respect that is a must for a team to succeed was nowhere to be found.

  And Lenny and Tom could not get the support they asked for and needed from the front office. They kept telling the front-office guys that this whole thing was not working and that team chemistry was the biggest reason.

  We kept moving forward, though, ever so slowly, but certainly not in a straight line. And then one day about a month or so into the season, I got to the game and I couldn’t run, try as I might. Every time I tried to run, there was this deep burning pain in my foot. And I couldn’t figure it out.