One of my biggest inspirations in life is Bill Walton. I became familiar with him through listening to him cover Pac-12 basketball games as a color commentator, during when I was in college, and especially right after graduating and moving back to Japan, when I ironically was watching even more of those games. To me, he completely revolutionized what it meant to call basektball games; that sometimes you didn’t even have to be talking about the game to be effective. I remember him asking Dave Pasch (the play-by-play announcer that Bill would be paired with a lot) one time about if he had read Infinite Jest. And then in true Bill Walton fashion, he would ramble on about the 7 Wonders of the World, and then the Vietnam War. And then Bob Dylan.
He would know an incredible amount of detail about the personal lives of the college athletes, and while that wasn’t really the thing I cared about when listening to him, there was this feeling that you were listening to a person who was curious and interested in the world around him, including even the very proximate Pac-12 basketball community, and you could get a glimpse into this wonderful web of knowledge and history he’d been able to weave in his head. I remember he would call every sporting event he called a “Celebration of Life”, and you could feel how happy he was to partake. He was also someone who wouldn’t shy away from controversy, even on air, and to me that was badass; I struggle to recall specific things he said, but I remember laughing about something Bill said while watching a game with my brother, imagining how furious the producers must have been. But to me, for us, the best part was just being able to listen to a person having fun, enjoying a basketball game as a fan, cracking a few jokes at the expense of Dave and maybe a few higher-ups at ESPN or wherever, just a free man being who he is.
So when Bill’s death was announced a few months ago, a little after the final basketball season of the Pac-12 as we knew it then, it came as an incredible shock, and was very sad. It’s still hard to believe, that a person who was so full of vigor and enthusiasm, who was calling games up until a few months before his passing, would be gone so suddenly.
I told some people about this, but I had somehow always assumed that within my lifetime, I would meet Bill Walton. There’s this fairly well-known book called “The Artist’s Way” which I used to read and do exercises from back during COVID, exercises that were supposed to help you understand who you truly wanted to be, what you wanted to do, stuff like that - and one of the exercises was to think of 5 people you’d like to have lunch with. I think I had picked some writers that I was into at the time; DFW was definitely in there. Then the book tells you to pick 5 completely new people; the idea was that the initial 5 people you picked would probably be people who you felt you had to say were your top picks, as in they were proper picks. But these next 5 people would then be people who you actually really wanted to have lunch with. Bill Walton was one of the first people on the list. I had just assumed that we would probably have lunch together someday - it didn’t seem that crazy, since his wife is Japanese, and I felt decently well connected with the American community here. But stupidly I forgot to take death into account.
And so as a way to commemorate Bill’s life the best way I felt I could, I decided to read his autobiography, “Back from the Dead”. Being familiar with his broadcasting style of spontaneous tagents, refreshing and brutally honest remarks, and most of all overwhelming positivity and joy, I thought it would simply be the book version of that. But I ended up being pretty wrong.
One thing that struck me the most about the book was the amount of pain Bill had struggled with throughout his life. I knew that his basketball career had been riddled with injuries, but when you read the book and more than half of it ends up being about the hardships and the pain, it was hard to skip the details the way I had done until then: as just part of the footnotes in the record books of basketball, and of the life of Bill Walton.
In fact the book started with, and lingered on, suprisingly dark and negative themes which stuck out to me the most vividly. I remember the book starting with Bill Walton crawling on the floor in his house because he is unable to walk properly. The details of Coach Wooden expressing his remorse that he had “failed his students” stuck as well (although why exactly he felt that way, I can ’t recall…). My view of Bill’s life changed drastically then; for someone who seemed to be having the most fun out of everyone whenever he was on air, his life story was uncharacteristically somber.
Looking back, this dark theme is actually the backbone of his whole story; the injuries, the chronic pain, his basketball career that was disappointingly cut short because of it, and the deaths of his coach, teammates and family, although redeemed in parts by his athletic (multiple NBA championships) and academic (studying at Stanford Law School while playing for the San Diego Clippers, which I had no idea about) successes.
Up until reading this book, I had always assumed that writing is the best way for someone to communicate their ethos. But when reading Bill Walton’s book, I felt that the part of him that I wanted to connect to the most - the fun-loving, gracious, gregarious, spontaneous, welcoming, encyclopedia-like, insanely interesting to the point of being, for me, almost mythical - was not there. When the facts are laid out, it’s hard to deny that it was a story with a lot of sadness, frustration, and disappointment.
But there’s the other interpretation that maybe this is purely Bill communicating his ethos. That this book was simply as accurately as Bill could have depicted his own life. That the Bill I thought I knew through his broadcasting was him when he got to briefly forget about the pain he was constantly going through.
Whatever the reason may have been, one thing that can be said for certain is that I couldn’t see anything resembling Bill’s broadcasting in Bill’s writing. In fact Bill the broadcaster and Bill the writer feel like they very well could be completely different people. It made me aware (and it makes me feel embarrassingly naive when I type it out) that the medium in which a person expresses their art can have such a large effect on what’s communicated.
I’ll miss Bill. Thanks for giving many people a reason to feel excited even with everything you were going through.