Back from the Dead

by Bill Walton

  Dick Trudell was always there, fighting the good fight for the cause of indigenous rights.

  The Grateful Dead came through town often, and our home became a sanctuary, never more so than the time we were set up like bowling pins by the police, and half our guys ended up in the jailhouse for the night. Jerry would bring his Jerry Garcia Band over to the house, too. One day, after they had played in San Diego the night before and were on their way to the next show, they stopped for lunch on their way out. The band’s tour bus came rumbling down through the neighborhood, escorted by a sizable contingent of Hells Angels, all on their very large and loud Harleys. Some of the neighbors were peeking out from behind their curtains, safe in their locked houses. When everybody was inside our place, all the neighborhood children came running over. While we all ate, swam, and enjoyed a most perfect San Diego day, Jerry positioned himself by the pool in the shade of an Australian tree fern and entertained all the youngsters with exciting tales of adventure, exploration, and experimentation. He signed all their musical instruments and patiently posed for countless pictures. Then they were on their way. And when the roar of the departing motorcycles finally faded into the distance, some of the older people finally felt it was safe to come out of their houses. The children all said it was the most fun they ever had.

  There were regular trips to Europe to teach basketball. One time we witnessed for the first time a young Arvydas Sabonis, who turned out to be the second-best nineteen-year-old player I’ve ever seen, after Kareem. We tried to kidnap Sabonis and bring him home to the NBA, but we were unsuccessful.

  I connected with Craig Sherman from Montgomery, Alabama—the youngest son and scion of a pedigreed family of memorabilia collectors. He has stayed on as the curator of the Bill Walton Intergalactic Museum ever since.

  Still, I felt like I wasn’t making any real progress. It was like I was treading water. And if Dr. Wagner was right, if I would never play again, then I needed a new game.

  As I was struggling to get through my latest round of injuries, I came to know David Halberstam. He had become a friend of Jack Ramsay after meeting through a mutual friend, Gay Talese, at Gay’s pad in New York City. That friendship blossomed, and then when the Blazers blew up over my medical treatment, David took particular interest. I had known of David for years, being an avid fan and devout reader of all his wonderful work, such as The Best and the Brightest, The Making of a Quagmire, The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy, The Powers That Be, and One Very Hot Day. But I had never met him until he came calling in the midst of his research on The Breaks of the Game, his book about the Trail Blazers in the midst of my injuries and divorce from the franchise. It’s the only book of his I haven’t read—though I’ve tried many times. It’s just too close for me, too personal, and too depressing.

  My relationship with David quickly changed from interviewee to friend—and teacher, counselor, and moral compass. We would meet up on our travels for dinner, movies, the theater, concerts, ball games, and events, with our children, too, who became close. And every time he would hear that I had been injured again, he would send me a big box of new books to read. He worked in conjunction with my mom and dad as my personal librarian. The only other time in my life that my parents were even remotely impressed with anything that I ever did, other than introduce them to David, was the time we had internationally acclaimed and award-winning political cartoonist Paul Conrad over for dinner.

  When David heard about the Bill Walton Orthopedic Health Summit at the LAX hotel and how I was at the end of the line, he really amped it up and started urging me to get on to something else, not wallow in the muck with Donald Sterling and the Clippers.

  He strongly recommended law school as my next step, and when he tweaked even the slightest of my interests, he pounced, telling me that if I was going to go—it had to be Stanford. I had no idea. This was a whole new world for me.

  He made the first call. And then he started working both sides. I didn’t really want to move the children again. And Stanford was very leery at first, with me being part of the unwashed masses, and a public school guy and all, particularly one that had consistently pounded their own basketball team. Stanford didn’t like my LSAT scores. I didn’t have the courage to tell them that I took it right after my major surgery with Dr. Wagner and that I was eating very powerful painkillers during my test, with my leg in a cast, the stitches still in, and everything propped up on a cushioned stool.

  David brokered a meeting on campus with Jack Friedenthal, the guy in charge of these things at Stanford Law School. Friedenthal was not convinced, but I was by now. And I became relentless in my dogged pursuit. They all recommended that I retake the LSAT, and supplement that with a Kaplan test course and the Evelyn Wood speed-reading program. I did it all, including staying in constant communication with this new Dr. Jack.

  I aced the LSAT the second time, and emboldened with my vastly improved score, I just started showing up at the school and Friedenthal’s office insisting that this was what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I eventually wore him down, and they let me in.

  * * *

  It ended up being fantastic. We bought a house on Louise Street in Menlo Park, right on the north edge of campus, at the end of a dead-end street. The children were in their own excellent schools, and I was a student exclusively, for the first time in my life since the third grade.

  It was a fabulous routine. Up early to get the children off to school, I’d then ride my bike to class, ride home for lunch, ride back to school for more class and library time, ride home for dinner with the boys, ride back to the law library until midnight, then head home and quickly to bed, in order to start it all up the next day.

  On many nights the Jerry Garcia Band would play at the Keystone down in Palo Alto, just a ten-minute bike ride from the law library. He would start the show at 11:00 p.m. I could leave the books, stacks, and my cubicle at 10:45, jump on my bike, and be there in place by the first backbeat on the snare drum, and the night was ours. John Belushi and Hunter S. Thompson were regulars on the tour at the time. They often led the ceremonial prayers.

  When Jerry wasn’t playing in Palo Alto, he was onstage up in San Francisco’s North Beach or over in Berkeley, always with the 11:00 p.m. sharp starting time. All the clubs were owned by the same guy—and it worked out perfectly. The rule was always the same: home before daylight, since school started early at Stanford.

  The full Grateful Dead began playing at Stanford’s Frost Amphitheater while I was there. A majority of my classmates all went as welcomed guests. We were warmly greeted at the back gate by Ram Rod and Big Steve, with the encouraging words, “Have a good time.”

  With major academic responsibilities at Stanford and being a dad to three young and growing boys, the days were always very full. On October 31, 1982, we were having Adam’s sixth birthday party at the house. All the neighborhood children and Adam’s and Nathan’s friends from school were there. And on that day, our youngest child, Chris, was born—during and at the party. It was a spectacularly beautiful sunny day. And when the other parents came to pick up their children, we could hear the departing youngsters telling their parents that it was the coolest birthday party they had ever been to. And that Adam got a new baby brother as his best present. And mine, too.

  The boys loved playing games of street football, in large part because the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers practiced right there at Stanford. This coincided perfectly during their rise to glory, with the unbeatable squad of Bill Walsh, Joe Montana, Ronnie Lott, Dwight Clark, John Taylor, Fred Dean, and all the rest. We would see them all the time on campus, we would watch their games on Sundays, and our children were all getting very much into it, so much so that they kept wanting me to go out and play football with them. But I couldn’t stand very well because of my foot problems, and I certainly couldn’t run or chase them. We improvised and devised a game where I was the permanent—but stationary—quarterback. I would sit in a chair in the middle of our
dead-end street, and all the boys would run, play, yell, and scream, as I would call the plays, throw the passes, officiate the disputes, keep the score and the peace when necessary, and announce the action as the broadcaster.

  Over a long period of time, my surgically reconstructed foot started to feel a bit better. Through it all we always kept to the street football games, the children never tiring of it. One day I was able to be the permanent but stationary QB while standing up. Later, as my health continued to improve, I was able to walk up and down the street, while the fast-growing children ran everywhere. Much further down the line, I was standing there in the street when one of the boys intercepted an errant pass, and as he was running for the game-winning touchdown, the other children starting to cry as their dad had let them down with a terrible pass, I took off running after the boy and caught him from behind, extending the game for at least a bit longer. And everybody stopped. It was the first time that some of them had ever seen me run. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been able to.

  And so it all began one more time—the long, hard climb back up the mountain. I slowly began to regain mobility, and the incessant pain began to fade away. Toward the end of my first year at Stanford, some of my classmates urged me to try spending some late afternoons down at the athletic fields on the Farm. They asked if I would play a very stationary first base on the law school intramural softball team. I eventually became mobile enough that we rotated our second baseman to a defensive rover position because I was able to cover the whole right side of the infield. In the beginning, at the plate, they allowed a runner for me for any ball that I put in play. Later I was slowly able to try it myself. We ended up winning the championship.

  From there, my classmates urged me to try the same thing on the law school intramural basketball team. We played the short courts at Maples Pavilion. The spring-loaded floor there continued to be fantastic. We won that championship, too.

  Back home in San Diego for the summer, I clerked at the longtime Stanford-influenced law firm of Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps. They couldn’t have been nicer, although I was hoping for more interesting work assignments. I did become extremely proficient at alphabetizing documents, or putting them in chronological order—I can’t remember which. Or whether it really mattered anyway.

  One of my fellow clerks, Tom Crews, coaxed me into playing on the firm’s summer basketball team. We won that game, too.

  * * *

  As the summer wound down and we were heading back to Palo Alto for the second-year go-round with the law school, somebody put together a special game built around me and my newfound ability to play a little bit for the first time in many a year now. It was in Las Vegas—at Caesars Palace, out back in the tent pavilion where they were regularly playing all the big tennis challenge matches that always seemed to highlight either Jimmy Connors or John McEnroe, or both. The bleachers and lights were already in place. All they had to do was roll out a court and some baskets. We had what we needed.

  They assembled a team of UCLA alumni. Our opponents were the UNLV alumni. We were coached by Walt Hazzard.

  There were no locker rooms, so we dressed in our hotel rooms and had to make our way to the court and game through the casino. Henry Bibby kept getting waylaid at the craps table, and we had to keep sending people back to get him. I’m told that he only made it a table at a time. The promoters were getting worried. The game was not televised, I don’t think, so it really was much more like a rock concert than anything else, with no official start time. We started when the fans showed up, the show was sold out, and I do remember that Henry did get there by tip-off.

  Sports Illustrated covered the whole thing and made a big splash of it. Coach Hazzard was under strict orders from the doctors—Tony Daly and Ernie Vandeweghe—to play me only sparingly, and in short spurts.

  Once we got going, we would always get out to big leads, and then I would go to the bench for my prescribed rest, and the old-time Rebels would fight back to take control. When I came back in, UCLA would again surge to a dominant position, and then I would have to go out. This cycle repeated itself throughout the long hot night in the desert. We had some NBA refs who had flown in from Los Angeles. They sure acted like they were well aware that UNLV was their host and meal ticket.

  We were playing to win, but in the end we couldn’t get the job done. And we lost. I think Henry left with a few minutes still to play, something about him needing to get back to the games inside.

  I was happy simply to have played at all. We had lost, but it was fun, and my foot held up to the limited but real basketball.

  * * *

  Back at Stanford, I just kept feeling better and better. I couldn’t resist the pull of what could have been. And, while still a full-time law student, I worked it out with the Clippers to let me try to play for them once a week. I would go to school all week long and kept up my very full schedule, including the Keystone late at night with Jerry, John, and Hunter. And then on the weekends I would fly down to San Diego and play an NBA game for the Clippers, returning to class immediately following the game, always studying in the airports, on the planes, in the locker room, wherever I could grab a quick read.

  After the first semester of my second year, we went home to San Diego for the holidays. It was there that I tried to start playing more and more often. First it was twice a week, one day of practice, then a game three or four days later.

  When that seemed to go OK, I moved it up to three days a week, always with at least a day of rest and recovery in between. Then every other day.

  When it was time to go back for the second and final semester of my middle year of law school, I decided that I wasn’t going back. I called Jack Friedenthal and sadly told him that I was going to chase this NBA dream one last time. He said he understood. I’m not sure that he really believed it all. He knew more than anyone how valuable that precious slot was that he had given me—by taking a chance on the unknown.

  But I was feeling better, and I had to try.

  I never did go back to Stanford Law School.

  I did return to the NBA, though—against all odds, and the dire warnings of the doctors. This was my life, and I had been given another chance.

  * * *

  Back in San Diego full-time again, I fell into as good a rhythm as I could hope for, except that the team was awful and all the problems that plagued every part of the franchise remained, and really were inexorably worse. The wildly rotating carousel of executives, coaches, and players continued at a dizzying pace.

  While I was able to keep playing, and more so all the time, it was never without problems. Every now and again, and with maddeningly frustrating regularity, Drs. Daly and Wagner had to keep going back in to continue the endless string of surgeries on my feet. Always cutting, carving, sawing, and chiseling—every couple of months. I generally had three to five foot and ankle surgeries a year, every year. I never successfully finished a single season without having to have more surgery, starting the vicious cycle over and over and over again.

  * * *

  In 1984, at the end of my fifth season with the Clippers, the team pulled up stakes and moved to Los Angeles. By this point I was playing well and fairly regularly, but still to no avail at the gate or in the standings—it never did work for me over any realistic stretch of time with the Clippers.

  All the while, the business of the Clippers was devolving in a dysfunctional, crazed, mad rush to the bottom, yet the exact opposite was happening elsewhere in the NBA. With the simultaneous rise of Jerry Buss, David Stern, Phil Knight, Nike, ESPN, and now Michael Jordan and agent David Falk, the NBA was experiencing a boom that changed the whole world of sports—forever.

  It was a world that I wanted to be a part of, but couldn’t get into as part of the Clippers. I had had enough. I quietly asked for a trade, something I’d been hoping for through the last few seasons.

  But the Clippers wouldn’t do it.

  I should have simply quit the team at the end
of that fifth season, when the Clippers abandoned San Diego, but I still believed that I was good enough to get the job done. Being eternally optimistic, I held out hope that it would and could work.

  When you’re injured as much as I have been, you have a lot of time to think—about everything. And whether it was in the hospital, in the weight room, at the doctor or physical therapist, walking the beach, riding my bike, wherever, I often thought of what would have happened if only one of my dreams had come true. What if I had been able to play at my previous MVP level? Or what if Donald Sterling had somehow, implausibly, become Jerry Buss or Red Auerbach?

  Neither miracle ever came close to pass. And in my sixth season with the Clippers, things only got worse. Nothing improved on the court, and I was done, spent, fed up, and had come to the end of the line with all things Donald Sterling.

  It didn’t help that in L.A., the traffic, the dirt, the noise, the crowds, the pollution, the losing, and the failures were all beating me down. It wasn’t for me.

  While in L.A., I did get to spend quite a bit of time with Coach Wooden. Sadly, most of it was at the hospital. Nell, Coach’s one, true, and only light, was fading fast. The slide down was long, hard, painful, and very tough. I was there when the light finally went out. None of us had any idea where we were headed.

  I had to move on, from everything. I started calling around. Jerry West and the Lakers were not interested. They had just beaten the Celtics for the title, and Jerry wanted no part of me.

  I called Red Auerbach in Boston. I found out later that when we connected on the phone, Red was in his office having a meeting with Larry Bird about the future of the team, after having just lost to the Lakers in the NBA Finals. When I told Red that I wanted to become a Celtic, he asked me to hold the line a second. He cupped the mouthpiece of his phone and looked across the desk at Larry. “It’s Bill Walton on the line. He wants to come to Boston. What do you think, Larry?”