Back from the Dead

by Bill Walton

  And in a five-minute, one-way conversation, he laid it all out for me. He explained how speech and communication were skills that had to be learned, like any other skill, which meant they required discipline, organization, persistence, patience, and a plan.

  He instructed me to chew sugarless gum to strengthen the muscles in my neck, jaw, mouth, and tongue. He then urged me to slow my thoughts down and to concentrate completely on the one word that I was trying to say at that moment—not three or four words, not phrases or sentences down the road. Then he directed me to read out loud in front of the mirror, to practice saying the words so I would get used to seeing myself as others would, so that I would eventually learn to like what I saw and was doing. He also told me to find written passages that had lots of the sounds that gave me the most trouble—for me that was easy: it was all of them. Then, after this practice, I should take the whole show out and into the world to become a teacher, first to young children, who wouldn’t care about my mistakes and problems, but who would be ecstatic that someone actually cared about them at all. And then to move on, forward and further, to everyone, whether they wanted to listen or not.

  As he came to the end, he encouraged me to take all the techniques, methods, and practice procedures that my great basketball coaches had taught me and apply them to speech. I should incorporate Coach Wooden’s Four Laws of Learning: demonstration, imitation, correction, and repetition. Just as I’d learned how to pivot, change direction, pass, rebound, shoot, and dribble, Marty thought that I could develop the skills to speak. And if I did all of this with the commitment, enthusiasm, and passion I had used in becoming a successful basketball player, I might have a real chance to learn how to talk.

  And that was it. I was on my way. Marty stayed with me and kept refining things. But much like how Coach Wooden told us before the games that it was now up to us, Marty let me go, with the freedom to fly and chase it all down.

  He ultimately encouraged me to study the people who were on TV all the time, and to study and learn from and about them the way I did my basketball heroes, role models, and opponents. I chose Jay Leno.

  Marty Glickman taught me how to learn to speak. It is my greatest accomplishment in life—and everybody else’s worst nightmare.

  Once I started to learn how to speak, and with the dogged encouragement of some friends, particularly Charlie Jones and Pat O’Brien, I started down this fateful trail. The only problem was that I couldn’t get a job. Anywhere. They’d all look at me and say, “Are you kidding me, Walton? We’re not putting you on TV. You’ll get up there and start stuttering and spitting all over everything and everybody. Then you’ll start talking about Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young. We can’t have that. Now get out of here and don’t come back. Quit bothering us!”

  With every rejection and shutdown, I became more determined. I came back to Coach Wooden’s final tool to overcome the adversity that he knew would one day come our way—the discipline, persistence, and perseverance to get what you want.

  Now, when you look like I do, and when you struggle with speech and communication like I still do, you hear the word no a lot. And I was up against things here. It was not looking good. I had no Plan B, and I was just hoping against hope for something positive to come my way.

  I was in church late one evening in 1990, praying for a better tomorrow, and I met Lori, this incredible angel of mercy. She’s intelligent, skilled, articulate, kind, fun, happy, and cute as can be. She has everything that I need, and she’s excellent at all the things that I like. Rest assured that she’s been there the rest of the way with me. I can’t speak for her, but it has been better than perfect for me—marrying this wonderful, caring, loving, interesting, and talented goddess of the night.

  It felt like a new day, but I still needed a job. I should have gone back to Stanford. But the children were older now, and I didn’t want them to have to keep moving all the time, after the bouncing back and forth for too many years now. I was up against things, time was short, and everybody kept saying no.

  But then one day, I got my first broadcasting job. It made no difference to me that it was a CBA minor-league game, on the radio, from Bakersfield, California, on Christmas Day, for no pay, with the team and the entire league folding the next day. But I got to call the game. And I was on my way—in the business of sports.

  I had no idea what I was doing. Or what I was getting myself into. But my friends were incredibly supportive and encouraging, and it kept on growing. I started doing all kinds of small events. Local news and remote hits from the shopping malls, and at grand openings of pizza parlors, car dealerships, whatever was happening that day. I elbowed my way in as a guest on countless radio shows around the country. I started writing articles and columns for whoever would publish them, pay me, or buy my next meal. I took any and every opportunity, often for no pay.

  In Los Angeles, I met Don Corsini, who at the time was running Prime Ticket, a fledgling cable sports network that Jerry Buss and his Lakers were behind. Don gave me my first TV game, then some games at UCLA and around the rest of the Southland.

  Then I stumbled into Ralph Lawler, the voice of the Los Angeles Clippers, at a convenience store by the beach in San Diego. He asked me what I was up to, and I brought him up to speed on my latest efforts. Soon after this chance encounter, Ralph called me with an opportunity to work with him on the Clippers’ local TV package in Los Angeles. I ended up doing Clipper basketball games with Ralph for the next thirteen years. It was easily some of the worst basketball ever, and Donald Sterling’s “business practices” were shoddy, despicable, demoralizing, depressing, and basically immoral, if not illegal. I got fired every year, sometimes multiple times. One go-round, I got the boot four times during the same season, including once at halftime.

  But Ralph and I became best friends, and I couldn’t wait to get there every day. Ralph is pure genius. As smart, kind, and generous as anyone I’ve ever known. He was able to make evil and weirdness fun. Working with Ralph was like playing basketball with Larry Bird and being coached by John Wooden—all at the same time. It was like making music with the Grateful Dead. He is a remarkable performer and teacher. And he’s the best friend a guy could ever hope to have.

  The opportunities started to come. Roy Firestone was responsible for lots of them. Even though his Up Close studio was in a most difficult part of L.A. to get to—Hollywood—it allowed me to spend countless long and late nights with varying combinations of Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan, Timothy Leary, and George Carlin. When Lori was still there after a spectacularly unending run, I thought I might have a real chance there. I had a run for a while as the announcer for the Dallas Mavericks. I was brought in by CBS for their NCAA March Madness and Final Four programming. I got to work with true legends and heroes, including Bob Stenner and Sandy Grossman. Eventually I was given a contract with NBC, where I spent ten years teaming up on one of the great broadcasting squads ever. Greg Gumbel, Tom Hammond, Snapper Jones, Jim Gray, producer Kevin Smolen, director John Gonzalez, and all-around Mr. Fix-It Jeff Simon were a band of brothers beyond description—as was our life together.

  I later followed the NBA media rights package to ABC and ESPN.

  In the early 1990s I got to follow Bill Graham as Father Time for the Grateful Dead on New Year’s Eve. Bill died in his helicopter, which tragically crashed on his way home from work late one night. It was a most solemn duty and responsibility—very much like following Kareem at UCLA.

  * * *

  All the while, the children were growing up fast. I got them ready for school each morning to the joyous rock-’n’-roll beat of our lives, and I would write on the boys’ lunch bags an endless variety of Coach Wooden’s maxims. The boys were so embarrassed, but when I would drop them off at school, all their friends would be waiting to see what I had written that day. Our boys would roll their eyes, and maybe the other youngsters did, too. As the children got out of the car, I would always say, as loud as I could, “I l
ove you!” They pleaded with me to stop saying it in front of their friends. But that just encouraged me. Then they would ask me if I would please drop them off a block from school so that I wouldn’t embarrass them. They were all very happy when they started driving themselves.

  We had our living room set up with the dining table positioned perfectly to watch basketball games in the evening. Michael Jordan was the main attraction, and he never failed to deliver. We scheduled our lives around the 5:30 p.m. (local time) Jordan tip-off. We never missed it. Nor did he.

  It was all completely unlike my own childhood. My parents were not into sports. We didn’t have a TV. There was not a single night of my childhood that I can remember, or think of, that both my parents were not there for dinner—often first to the table. The thought of scheduling anything, much less dinner, around somebody else playing a sport on television is as far from the reality of my childhood as you can get. But that’s how good and reliable Michael was. And a real measurement of how much the times had really changed. As a master teacher and performer, Michael Jordan was more than worth it.

  As my broadcasting and business career began to take off, I was on the road more and more, at a time when our children needed me more than ever. When I would start to pack for yet another trip, the muffled and pained refrain from the boys invariably came down to, “You have to leave town again, Dad?”

  In my absences, the children were now starting to find their own way, which, as anyone who’s ever had boys knows, meant that I was now responsible for enforcing the discipline that the boys lacked. They complained that I was always saying no, and that I was the worst dad ever. Their final option in our disagreements was, en masse, to threaten to go to Notre Dame.

  I tried to explain to them that I would love to say yes, but they were always asking me the wrong questions. And if they wanted me to say yes, then all they had to do was ask, “Dad, can we go to bed now? Dad, can I do the dishes? Dad, can I turn off the TV now? Can I go outside and play?” I tried to teach them about the importance of self-discipline, and that the culture of yes is built on a foundation of no.

  As the gorgeous afternoons of San Diego turned to dusk, the boys often found themselves on the backyard garage basketball court. I had always encouraged them to play sports for fun, health, and to learn life’s greatest lessons. I did not want to be their coach. I wanted to be their dad. And I told them that if they wanted me to be their coach, they would have to ask me to do that—but they needed to be aware that I am a tough coach.

  Too many times, as the evening would be coming on, some of the boys would come inside and start whining and complaining about how things were not going their way on the court out back. They would regularly ask me to call Larry and Magic to come over and help them with their games. One afternoon, Little Luke came inside crying. He said his older brothers, Adam and Nate, were cheating him and beating him up and keeping him from winning. I had lived that whole deal myself forty years ago with my own older brother, Bruce—so I knew that it was all true. But that’s also part of how you learn. I told him to get back out there and work it out. He came back soon, crying some more and rubbing his arm. He told me through his tears that they were unrelentingly mean out there, were cheating on the score and the fouls, and they kept knocking him to the ground. And now his arm was really sore. I told him to put some ice on it, that he’d be fine.

  Luke was still complaining about his arm the next morning and wanting to stay in bed and miss school. I wasn’t buying it, and again I told him to ice it. When Luke got to school, the school nurse called Lori and asked her to please come pick Luke up because he had come to class with a broken arm.

  * * *

  Without basketball in my life now, I was riding my bike whenever the surgeries and my health allowed me to. I couldn’t run or jump or hike—still can’t. But I can ride my bike, and I’ve made the most of it. And now that I was back in Los Angeles for business more often, I was able to spend a lot more time with Coach Wooden. I also began learning and studying classical piano, something I could do sitting down for the rest of my life. My dad was proudly ecstatic, although my practice habits—as often as possible, starting well before the dawn—drove Lori and the boys crazy.

  I was still finding my way as a TV and basketball announcer as well. In one of my first NCAA tournaments, there was a Florida State player who’d had a mercurial first half but looked awful down the stretch. Late in the game, we were told at the table that it was due to an upset stomach. And as my broadcast partner, Sean McDonough, was wrapping things up before sending viewers back to the studio, a flash of inspiration hit me one more time. So I leaned in for a final comment: “If this was me, I’d have taken that guy with the upset stomach down into the locker room, put a finger down his throat, have him puke it back up, and then get him back up here on the court and get going!”

  Sean looked at me, aghast, as if I’d just committed the worst atrocity in the history of the world. And he says good night to the world, and we’re off the air. I thought he was going to kill me.

  At every broadcast table in those days, there was always a telephone. The ringer was silenced so as not to disrupt the show, but it had a red light that would light up when a call came through. As soon as I stopped talking, the phone lit up like the Grateful Dead stage at the start of the second set. Sean McDonough suggested that it was probably for me.

  When I picked up the phone, the stern voice on the other end started right in. “Hey, Walton! My name is Neal Pilson, and I’m the president of CBS Sports. And Walton, if you look at your watch right now, you will note that it’s the dinner hour in New York City. Now, Walton, I’m here to tell you straightaway that we at CBS do not talk on our air about PUKING during New York City’s dinner hour. Got it?”

  He hung up before I could even say anything.

  I was beginning to make progress, but I still too often mistook activity for achievement. Flailing and grasping would best describe my efforts. But then I got a huge break: the chance to call a big game with the incomparable Dick Enberg.

  It was a big stage, and I was scared to death. I kept asking myself, What am I doing here?

  I was warming up with everything I had—everything Marty had taught me. I was chewing and chomping on my gum. I was reviewing everything, going over in my mind how it was all going to play out. I was writing everything down. I was memorizing all that I could. But I was petrified that I would freeze up, start stuttering and spitting all over everything, and be unable to get a single word out.

  And now Dick and I are out there on the court, on our stools, the moment before the moment of truth—and it’s more nerve-racking than anything ever. I’m sweating profusely, nervous, anxious, and our producer starts his countdown in our ears: 10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . .

  I look over at Dick. He’s having the time of his life. Waving to all the beautiful people, signing autographs. He knows that that red light is going to come on in a few more seconds and he’s going to love talking basketball for the next couple of hours.

  Dick looks over at me—just a wreck—and he’s quite taken aback. “What’s wrong with you, Walton? You look terrible.”

  I tell him, “I can’t do this, Dick. I don’t belong here. It’s just too hard. I’m going to start stuttering and spitting all over everything. I can’t do it.”

  Dick reaches over and pats me on the thigh. The countdown’s still going: 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . .

  “Don’t worry about a thing, Billy. That red light’s coming on in one more second, and there will be countless millions of people hanging on every word you say!”

  Thanks a lot, Dick. We were on our way.

  * * *

  In the years that followed, I had some amazing opportunities. I called the NBA Finals and the Olympics. I got to travel the world as part of the NBA’s program to develop the game of basketball around the world—Istanbul, São Paulo, Israel, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, Sweden, and beyond—running clinics with Jack Ramsay, Hubie Brown, a
nd Calvin Murphy. I was inducted into the Basketball and Academic All-America Halls of Fame and the Grateful Dead Hall of Honor. And for years I got to follow Michael Jordan’s Bulls, Hakeem Olajuwon’s Rockets, Stockton and Malone’s Jazz, Ewing’s Knicks, and Shaq and Kobe’s Lakers as they battled for the top of the mountain.

  There were times when I had to be escorted in and out of arenas by large contingents of armed police officers in cities where the local fans didn’t like what I’d said about their teams. Players and their family members would confront me at the games over the same issues. My hotel in Seattle was surrounded by an angry mob chanting for my head late one night after the game.

  We took outrageous space-jam odysseys through Australia after the Sydney Olympics and journeyed by boat down the great unknown of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River—twice.

  In 1997, the fiftieth-anniversary year of the founding of the NBA, I was most fortunate to be named one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History. They brought everyone together, a real gathering of eagles, over All-Star Weekend in Cleveland. On the night of the All-Star Game itself, there was a big ceremony at halftime, where we would be officially introduced to the crowd and the world on live television.

  We were all gathered in this one anteroom, all of the greatest players in the history of the NBA in a single space. At the beginning it was just us—no photographers, no agents, no handlers, no press, no posses, nobody—not even NBA commissioner David Stern. It was a perfect lovefest. Everybody was going around high-fiving one another; hugging; laughing; yelling; cheering; signing autographs; taking pictures. It was so much fun—even Kareem was having a good time.

  While everybody was milling around and celebrating, Wilt and Michael Jordan were off by themselves, seated at a side table. They were arguing vociferously about who the greatest of the 50 Greatest was. And they were going back and forth. Nobody paid them any mind, as it was like, Come on, let’s go, we’re here, and what could be better?