Bill Walton (1952-2024) – CelticsBlog

I remember the tall guy with the strawberry hair primarily as a bench fixture in the ‘87 season. Bill Walton, so the TV told my eleven-year-old self, had ankle problems and couldn’t play.

This guy who was there, regardless of whether he could play or not, who wasn’t at home, but was there on the bench with the team, was, my dad told me, one of the most incredible guys ever to play the game.

I couldn’t see it, and since this was 1987, it’s not like my dad could pull up YouTube clips of Walton’s career at UCLA.

But we can.

Walton was as exceptional as his body allowed him to be.

There are folks out there that just seem to have the wrong genes when it comes to their bones and their joints, and Walton was one of them. He averaged only 47 games per season, and his highest was when he was Boston’s 6th man on the ‘86 championship team, with a reduced load that let him play 80 games.

Walton loved the game. You’d have to, to play through as much pain as he did.

Walton loved the game so much he became a joke to a cynical class of fans who couldn’t hear Bill’s genuine enjoyment in his work as a color commentator.

To them he was a buffoon. A guy with a bit of a speech impediment who made crazy remarks that were unintentionally funny.

They couldn’t or wouldn’t see the true joy of a guy who was happy to be there, happy to be a part of the game he loved.

A game that didn’t love him back, at least not where his body was concerned. The pain Walton got from the game he loved was on a whole other level. It made him suicidal for a time.

Photo by Mike Lawrie/Getty Images

Yet the joy that was apparent whenever we heard Bill Walton on a broadcast wasn’t a mask. It wasn’t faked. It was genuine joy from a man who was in genuine pain, and that says more about Bill Walton as a person than anything he ever did on court.

Walton could criticize plays and players, but nobody remembers that because everybody does that. People remember Walton’s broadcasts because of how positive he was. He had generous and genuine things to say about almost everyone.

If someone tells you “this is the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had” in a certain tone of voice, you assume that it’s just a pleasant comment. If they say it in another tone of voice, you assume that it’s a joke, but if Bill Walton told you that, he meant it. He’d mean it even if he had just said it about the last cup of coffee he had, too.

That sincere enjoyment of life feels out of place today, and it was completely incomprehensible to the stubbornly jaded among us.

Did Bill compare Nikola Jokic to Gandhi and Mandela? Yes, he did, but the comparison makes sense. He wasn’t trying to exaggerate the accomplishments of one or diminish that of the other. He wanted to make a point about Jokic being able to see what he wants on the court and then do it.

And in the midst of that comparison, he talks about happiness.

It’s a subject that was never far away from Walton’s mind.

Here was a person who wasn’t defined by pain, despite its intensity. His joy was infectious, and as tributes come in from people who knew him, that is what they mention, every one of them. Not the pain, although that was something he was never afraid to talk about, but the joy.

He was 71 years old, but that love of life made him younger than his years, far younger than the body that finally gave out on him. Had he lived to be a hundred, he would have still been a young man.