Extra weird when your peer age group, or big brother age group anyway, start passing. All the Walton highlights I saw on ESPN this evening were late in his career when he played a supporting role for the Celtics. Before that, when he was still just a big hippie kid, he led the Portland Trail Blazers to their first and only NBA Championship in 1977.
I wanted to attend the deciding game that year. I'd already been to an earlier playoff game, where the crowd energy was incredible, a first for me and not like anything I'd experienced before. But the final game landed on my high school graduation day. I actually remember wavering about going to the game instead but tradition, or my parents, more like it, won out. At our grad ceremony many of us were packing radios and a cheer broke out as we were marching into the stadium. The Blazers beat the 76ers! It remains about the only thing I remember from that day.
Walton played like an all-time great NBA big man his first four seasons in Portland before injuries seriously limited his career. He came out of UCLA, which was dominant in college hoops in those days. He had one of those John Wooden bank shots. Textbook footwork. And, above all, he was a great team player and a special passer. Watching Walton snare a rebound and whip an outlet pass to a streaking Blazer, Lionel Hollins, Bobby Gross, Johnny Davis, etc, already near or past half court was a thing of beauty. Showtime before the '80s Lakers.
My closest brush with Walton, though, had come a couple years before, maybe 1975, one of my very first concerts, Commander Cody and the His Lost Planet Airmen and New Riders of the Purple Sage, at the old Paramount Theater in Portland. It was in the basement bathroom, the reefer smoke thick as fog, but there he was in all his long bushy red hair and headband Grateful Dead hippie glory, two or three urinals down, no one else around. I gushed "Big Bill Walton!" or something like that because I was startled, and excitable like that, and probably high as a kite. Walton chuckled, issued me a friendly 'hey,' and sauntered out, like a giant wizard amongst us silly Hobbits of the Shire.
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