Back from the Dead

by Bill Walton

  Every time I looked back at Michael and Wilt, neither one would give it up.

  Finally David Stern comes in—with his list. And he starts lining everybody up in TV order to make it just right, the way the NBA always does things. As David is going about his business, he keeps glancing over at Wilt and Michael, who are still going at it. And David is getting exasperated, since this is going to be a live TV event that will wait for no one. So finally, up against the moment of truth and the clock one more time, David gets sternly serious as he barks at Michael and Wilt, “Come on, guys! Enough! Wilt! Michael! Come on, we have to go, NOW!”

  So these two timeless and epic giants finally do cut it off and slowly rise to their feet—and start their solemn walk to their rightful and designated places in line.

  Suddenly, Wilt stops and pivots backward to face Michael and all of us. The room becomes eerily quiet, because we all know that Wilt always had to, and did, have the last word.

  “Michael,” he says as he looks a young, little Michael Jordan skeptically up and down. Then he pauses as he looks up and down the line at all of us. Everybody is holding their breath.

  “Michael,” he says so all can hear, “just remember. When you played, they changed all the rules for you to make it easier for you to dominate!”

  Then Wilt glanced up and down the line one more time. He closed it out: “When I played, they changed all the rules to make it harder for me.”

  Wilt, now satisfied, proudly went and took his place, and we all marched out to take the court together.

  * * *

  Just two years later, we got the tragic news that Wilt had died. We were stunned. Wilt was indomitable, indestructible—and now he was gone. He was as great a champion as I’ve ever known—and an even better person. He would do anything for anybody, and yet he would refuse to ever let anybody talk publicly about his kindness or generosity. He lived to a higher standard than everyone else. And when I look back at Wilt’s numbers, they dwarf everybody else’s. So much so that when I point them out to the new guys, who weren’t there, they shrug and say that they don’t count—because he’s Wilt. He did the impossible. It may be the case that he’s not the greatest basketball player ever—how can you ever say who that one person might be? But there has NEVER been a single conversation about the greatest basketball players ever that didn’t have Wilt Chamberlain at the center of it all. Right where he belonged.

  Death was taking a terrible toll on my friends, heroes, and role models during these years—it has no mercy on this land. I have learned over time to never rank, rate, or compare children, coaches, championships, concerts, or congratulations—they’re all to be enjoyed in their individuality.

  The same forces that abhorrently try to drive and promote the individual over the team end up trying to minimalize and trivialize friendships, accomplishments—heck, all of life.

  So in 1995, when Jerry Garcia died—after giving us so much joy, and singing directly to and for each of us, for so many years—what were we to do? Like Wilt, Jerry is in a league all by himself. He was an authentically great leader in many classic ways: He made life fun. He made it fair. He made it real. He made it cool. He made you want to come back for more—forever. And then he was suddenly gone. We were left all alone, and nothing was going to bring him back, and things were never the same again.

  A few years later, we got the terrible news that Chick Hearn had passed away. He, too, had been omnipresent in our lives forever. He had been the Lakers’ broadcaster and the voice of reason, clarity, sanity, authority, and our moral compass for the past forty-two years. He was my best friend. And he was the same for everybody else who ever came into his universe. In many ways, it was his voice and spirit, so many years back, when I was just a child, that pulled me to basketball and started my endless dreaming beyond my own small life. Like with Jerry, whenever I stumbled, failed, and fell, whenever I was down, it was Chick who always kept me going.

  * * *

  Our own boys were now finishing high school and heading off to college, chasing their dreams and building their lives. Adam was a top student in high school, and a strong basketball player on a good team. But we realized too late that there was something horribly wrong about the coaching decisions on and off the court. We tried our best to come to a positive resolution with the school and its administration, but I will always carry with me that it was something I couldn’t do anything to change. We had time to find a different school and coach for Nate, Luke, and Chris—but Adam was a graduating senior when it all came down. He was already halfway out the door to LSU with Dale Brown, which luckily ended up being a great opportunity for him. Adam eventually went even farther south to play professional basketball in the Latin American leagues of Mexico and beyond.

  By then, Nathan was choosing colleges, ultimately deciding on Princeton, a most exciting adventure for him. He learned so much from coaches Pete Carril and John Thompson III, as well as Athletic Director Gary Walters. It also helped a great deal that David Halberstam was able to make some important introductions for Nate—teachers, professors, writers, business folks—all people who have been phenomenally helpful to Nate as he’s built his adult life. And because I was in New York and Philadelphia so much for work, I got to see many of Nathan’s college games on Friday and Saturday nights—more than those of any of his brothers. Years later, when Princeton did a historical retrospective of the greatest moments ever in its Jadwin Gymnasium, one of Nathan’s performances was No. 9 on the all-time list. I can proudly and forevermore say that “I was there!”

  Luke, up next, chose Arizona and Coach Lute Olson. He made his choice on his first recruiting trip, when Arizona was the reigning NCAA champion. He met Richard Jefferson, another high school recruit from Phoenix, on his visit, and he came home afterward and immediately canceled all four of his other allowable recruiting trips. He and Richard Jefferson had both made up their minds that they were going to be Wildcats and spend the rest of their lives together. When things got going in their games at the McKale Center, it was surreal beyond description to hear the crowd chant “Luuuuuuuuuke . . . Luuuuuuuuuke . . . Luuuuuuuke,” just as the Blazermaniacs had done for Big Luke in Portland so many years before. There were tears of joy and unremitting pride streaming down my cheeks as I immediately speed-dialed Maurice and held the phone up to the heavens so he could hear and feel it, too.

  Our youngest son, Chris, had a tough time growing up, in that his older brothers would pick on him, beat him up, and tease and taunt him to no end. Chris was the neat and tidy one of the bunch. Sleek, lean, and clean as could be, Chris liked to keep his room spotless and totally organized. He had to lock his door all the time to keep his brothers out and his stuff safe. If Chris ever forgot to lock that door, his brothers would move right in, trash the place, sleep in his bed, eat their meals in his bed, wear all his clothes, and use all his stuff. He would get so mad.

  Chris got his big break in the eighth grade when he found a top academic school in Rancho Santa Fe with an excellent basketball coach. He joined his cousin, Kam, Bruce’s only son, there—in the same class. And they fell in with a terrific group of boys, all under Coach Dave McClurg, who transformed those young people’s lives the way that Rocky, Gordon Nash, and Coach Wooden did for me. They became quite the team, playing and living like Coach Wooden’s teams, and winning all their games. Bruce arranged for Coach McClurg to spend a surprise day with Coach Wooden at the Mansion on Margate, with all the surrounding amenities.

  When it came time for college, Chris chose San Diego State, where my mom had gone to college, and just a mile from where we’d grown up and where my mother still lives in our family home today. Coach Steve Fisher had just been hired to build from scratch a program that was so far down, it was below sea level. It has taken a while, but Coach Fisher has now impossibly done what Lute Olson did so many years ago in Tucson. And now Coach Fisher has the second-best program in the western United States—after the Arizona Wildcats. Chris was one of Coach Fisher�
�s early, foundational recruits, and it has been a pure thrill to see the program rise with him at its core. I couldn’t be prouder—of Chris, Luke, Nathan, or Adam. I’m the luckiest dad in the whole world.

  * * *

  I eventually had the privilege and honor of broadcasting basketball games on television that each of our four sons have played in. But one that comes to mind today was in 2001, in the NCAA Regional Final, when Luke’s Arizona team played another heavyweight team, Illinois. The winner was going to the Final Four. And both teams had a real chance of winning the championship that year.

  I’m calling the game with Dick Enberg, and it’s a back-and-forth, epic confrontation. Everything is up for grabs. And in the closing moments, with the fate of the known world in the balance, Coach Olson gets up from his seat, looks down the bench, and motions for Luke Walton to get in there. Luke makes some nice plays, helps his team play better, and at the end of the game, ARIZONA WINS!

  The Wildcats are celebrating. They’re running up and down the court, arms and their “No. 1” index fingers pumping to the sky in full extension, cutting down the nets and mussing up Coach Olson’s hair and all—no small feat. Now Dick and I are already off the air, having given the show back to Greg Gumbel in the CBS New York studios. Dick and I are standing quietly back in the shadows, soaking it all in, basking in the happiness of these young people enjoying the grandest moment of their lives.

  Little Luke Walton, right in the middle of it all, sees us out of the corner of his eye and breaks away from the fun and festivities. He comes to Dick first, now a great family friend, and says that it’s good to see him. Dick, in his effervescent and bubbly style, starts pumping Luke’s outstretched hand, encouraging him to go for more, to go for it all. That it was all out there in front of him—right now.

  And then Luke turned to me—his dad. The dad who just hadn’t been able to be there enough for him throughout his young life. And Luke looks up at me with the sad and soft eyes of a young boy who only wants more from his dad and from his life. He puts his hand up and out to me. And looking right at me, Luke softly says, “Thanks for coming, Dad. Thanks for coming.”

  I pulled him in as close as I could and hugged him. I was crying—tears of joy, happiness, and pride streaming down my face. I told him that I was the luckiest and proudest dad in the whole world.

  * * *

  With time, all the skeletal problems that I had were worsening. Yes, my fused right ankle gave me a whole new start in life, in that it took the pain away and allowed me to keep going further and forward. But now the other ankle had been ground down to dust, too, and in July 2001, I had to have that one fused as well. I was down and out for another nearly nine months or more. My bad left knee continued giving me all kinds of problems, too. And by now all these lower-extremity problems were working against my spine, a recurring issue since I broke my back in 1974 playing for UCLA. I could still get around a little, but it wasn’t easy, painless, or pretty.

  * * *

  At the top of the list of the best parts of my life is that I was born, raised, and live in San Diego. And as my life has always borne out, the best also plays into the worst. Eighty percent of the television households in our country are east of Chicago, and everything in the world of sports television is about the East. San Diego is as far across the country as you can get, which means a lot of wasted time bustling around and flying back and forth to get to work—often way more than 600,000 domestic air miles a year.

  But we kept after it, all the while experimenting and exploring all kinds of new things in the technological revolution of media. This included a one-of-a-kind, award-winning, rock ’n’ roll satellite radio show in the early days for Sirius and their leader, Scott Greenstein. Like the Grateful Dead, the show had an amorphous start time, although it was regularly scheduled for Saturday night. It ended when we were done, often four, five, or six hours later. We covered a lot of ground. It was not a show for kindergartners. And I was there at the beginning—one more time.

  * * *

  In my TV world, as I was putting my 2002 Spring Calendar together around the NBA playoffs, in talks with NBA and NBC, it was increasingly clear that I would be out there, on the edge, literally the entire time. Our children were all gone now—in college and beyond. We decided that it might be best for me to just stay out on the road the entire run, and make it a tour that would allow me to go to the games as a fan, even when I wasn’t broadcasting.

  I like to tour, whether it’s with the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, the Rolling Stones, or on my bike—I’ve been doing it my whole life. Now it was with the NBA playoffs, too. We called it “The Love It Live Tour.”

  For the first thirty-one days of the playoffs I went from San Diego to Sacramento to Los Angeles to New Jersey to Charlotte to New York to Boston to Seattle to Portland to Salt Lake City to Indianapolis to Los Angeles to Detroit to Sacramento to Los Angeles to Sacramento to New Jersey to Orlando to Dallas to Boston to Dallas to San Antonio to Sacramento to Los Angeles to New Jersey to Somewhere to Sacramento to New Jersey to San Diego.

  Games every day. A young NBA superstud on the business side, Aaron Ryan, came with me and did all the really hard work. All along the way, I wrote one of the world’s first sports blogs, similar to the journals that I had kept from my other great adventures. This one was posted, published, and updated by the hour on NBA.com, supported by pictures new and old.

  We rarely slept. We were constantly on the move, powered by love, adrenaline, and some cool tie-dye shirts that the NBA had made up. The Love It Live Tour turned out to be one of the best things I ever did with my life. And by the end, we had flown over 40,000 miles, written over 55,000 words about it, and taken countless pictures. On the last night David Stern and Adam Silver gave me a signed and bound hard copy of the whole story.

  With the end of the Love It Live Tour also came the end of an era. Dick Ebersol and NBC parted ways with the NBA. And in the ever-changing business model of television and media, ESPN and ABC came in and bought the NBA rights package in 2002.

  Fortunately for everybody involved, ESPN and ABC had some fantastic people at the top, particularly George Bodenheimer and Mark Shapiro, two young, dynamic, and passionate leaders who understood that this whole deal is about fun and entertainment. And we jumped right on board this new bus and kept ramping everything up.

  The next season, ESPN and the NBA turned our Love It Live Tour into one of TV’s first reality shows, calling it Bill Walton’s Long Strange Trip. And it was true to its name.

  We covered a remarkable amount of territory on the show, including the first national broadcast of LeBron James’s basketball career, when he was still in high school. We spent days trying to explain Western civilization and life to Yao Ming, who had just arrived from China—all through the prism of the Grateful Dead. He was very kind, but I’m not sure he was able to really put his arms around it all. In Florida, I stopped in to see Larry Bird. Our conversations and show were centered around a chess game. Every time Larry fell behind, we would just swing the board around, changing sides. After seven or eight pivots, I was unable to mount a final comeback, and Larry walked off in triumphant glory—one more time.

  Because of my speech impediment, limitations, and communication challenges, I am terrible and awful on taped shows. But the NBA TV crew and producers, particularly Dion Cocoros, did everything they could to help me out. Even though we forgot about the time, sadly we did not keep the whole thing going long enough.

  The year 2003 brought both wonderful news and sadness to the Walton family. It was the year of Luke’s NBA Draft. All of us, Luke and friends included, watched from our house together. He had just gotten back after a rough senior season at Arizona, plagued by injuries, and he said that he had no idea where or when he might go in the meat market. After the first round passed without Luke’s name being called, the room was eerily quiet with growing tension. With each guy chosen before him, all of Luke’s brothers, and Richard Jefferson, John, an
d David—who grew up with us and were Luke’s lifelong friends, schoolmates, and teammates—would jump up saying, “That guy’s no good. Luke, you’re so much better than him, and all these other guys, too. What are they thinking?”

  Luke said nothing, just sat and watched. The second round started, and after a few teams made their choices, the NBA’s Russ Granik stepped to the microphone and announced that “with the thirty-second pick of the 2003 NBA Draft, the Los Angeles Lakers select . . .”

  Russ paused for what seemed an eternity. We all held our breath.

  “LUKE WALTON!”

  There was immediate pandemonium. And things were never the same again.

  * * *

  Lori and I went to Luke’s first NBA game that season at the Staples Center as proud parents. I wore a gold tie-dyed T-shirt. It couldn’t have been a better scene. The Lakers already had one of the great teams of all time, and they’d just added Karl Malone and Gary Payton. As the game unfolds, Phil Jackson has Luke in there with Shaq, Kobe, Karl Malone, and Gary Payton. The fans are having the time of their lives. And the Laker fans have already picked up the chants of “Luuuuuuke . . . Luuuuuuuke . . . Luuuuuke . . .”

  Luke has the ball in the middle on the break. He looks off Kobe on one wing, then Gary on the other. Then he lays off a no-look drop pass to a stampeding Karl Malone trailing the play, and Karl goes in and throws one down with a thunderous explosion.

  The crowd is going wild—dizzy with possibilities about what the future holds for this great team. “Luuuuuke . . . Luuuuuuke . . . Luuu-uuuuke.”

  I am quietly but proudly clapping politely when my laser focus on the moment is disrupted by a gentle tap on my shoulder. I turn to see a smiling James Worthy. He tells me that he’s now seen it all. Me, in a gold T-shirt, in the Staples Center, cheering for Karl Malone and the Lakers.