For Bill Walton, An Endless Wait
By Malcolm Moran
The New York Times
To Bill Walton, basketball is a form of improvisational theater—live, unrehearsed, with a unique finish each time the lights are turned on. There is no script, just a schedule. At 7:05 on those nights that the San Diego Clippers are home, the ball is tossed into the air in the center of the Sports Arena and the show begins. Walton loves the moment.
A few years ago, during some difficult times when he was being accused of malingering and when his political beliefs and actions were being attacked, Walton decided that playing the National Basketball Association was something he enjoyed more than anything else.
“I like that excitement,” he said. “I like the uncertainty, that aura of the unknown. It’s thrilling to me as a spectator. It’s twice as thrilling as a player.”
Last Tuesday, at 7:05, as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar of the Los Angeles Lakers stepped into the center circle, Bill Walton of the San Diego Clippers settled into his seat in the stands at the Sports Arena. He was also at midcourt, but he was upstairs, at the rear of Section 1, about halfway between the floor and the roof. He is there for each home game as the Clipper franchise struggles without him, as it will for the foreseeable future.
For now, at least, two days before his 28th birthday, Walton can do little more than watch and hope. A condition that has been diagnosed as a congenital abnormality in the bone structure of his left foot has caused four fractures of the tarsal navicular bone in the last two and a half years, the most recent one in an exhibition game on September 26. He believes he can recover and play again, but he does not talk much about the immediate future. “I really try my best not to think about it,” he said. “It can get pretty frustrating. Mostly, I think about how to get better, rather than what might have been.”
Still, Walton is a spectator in a participant’s paradise, maybe forever. Since the 1977–78 season, when he was the most valuable player in the N.B.A., he has played in 14 regular-season games. It is not unrealistic to think they were his last.
In the legal opinion of the San Diego franchise, as stated in a $12.5 million suit filed Thursday against two British insurance companies in a United States District Court in Los Angeles, “Walton is now permanently and totally disabled and will never again be able to continue his occupation as a professional basketball player.”
In the opinion of Irv Levin, the club owner who signed Walton to a five-year contract in 1979, “With the benefit of hindsight, if I was aware of certain medical histories of Bill’s and what evolved from it, I don’t think we would have gone ahead with the deal. I have heard nothing from any qualified doctors that he could play N.B.A. basketball. It’s one thing to run on the beach or ride a bike, but it’s another thing to play N.B.A. basketball. That’s what we paid for.”
In the opinion of Dr. Anthony Daly, an orthopedic surgeon who has treated Walton since January 1979, the injury “will heal again, but if he goes out to play basketball, it can break down again. Since it has broken down four times, I think he’ll need an operation. It’s going to be a little bit of a gamble. To my knowledge, it hasn’t been done at all with any athlete. He’s somewhat hesitant to have it done, and justifiably so. The major risk might be that he might have pain in normal life. I don’t think there is much of a risk.” Dr. Daly has said that the operation “could require that the small bones in [Walton’s] foot be fused together.”
And in the opinion of Bill Walton, “One thing I do know is that I have to live the rest of my life with this body. You can’t go around changing all the pieces. It’s one thing to have a set plan for a certain injury. You tear a cartilage in your knee, you tear it open, take it out, and 99 percent of the time you get better. They don’t even talk in terms of percentage with me.
“I still see no reason why I can’t return to be a fine player in the N.B.A. I’m basically a very, very optimistic person. There’s no reason why athletes can’t play until they’re 37, 38 years old in professional sports. I feel I’ve got somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 years left.”
Until the most recent injury, it seemed his problems had ended. “After I saw him go through training camp,” said Paul Silas, the new coach of the Clippers, “we were all excited. He was playing basketball. He started to block shots, do all the things he once had done. He didn’t have any pain. He was really running and jumping and doing everything everyone else was doing. He didn’t do it for the whole two hours, maybe for an hour. Everything was coming along except his wind, but that didn’t concern me at all.”
Silas said he had been satisfied with the pace of the rehabilitation, which Walton determined. Walton said the situation was different from the one in Portland, which led to his malpractice suit against Dr. Robert Cook, the team physician of the Trail Blazers, and others who treated him from March through July in 1978. The suit, which is expected to come to trial next year, charges the physicians with improper treatment of his injured foot.
It could be a landmark case, not only for Walton but for professional and college teams, whose medical practices, especially in the use of pain-killing drugs, are being questioned as never before. The climate began changing after Walton went public with his charges in the summer of 1978 against the same team he had led to a world championship the year before.
The plan this season was for Walton to be able to play seven to 10 minutes a game in the first month of the season, and increase the time five minutes each month. That changed, abruptly, after Walton’s second attempt to play this fall, when he left an exhibition game in Los Angeles.
Not only did the plan change, but his life did, too. “Obviously,” Walton said. “Large changes.”
Suddenly he finds himself with leisure time during a basketball season. He has started to play the drums, the first opportunity he has had to play an instrument since the beginning of high school. He also has had more time to play chess, and read, and watch television. At a time when many professional athletes are on the road, growing apart from their families, Walton has been with his wife and three sons at home, close enough to the San Diego Zoo to hear the calls of elephants at night.
At times in recent years their visits to the zoo often were short, because Walton’s left foot hurt too much to walk around.
Last week, he sat in the backyard, away from the family and next to the swimming pool, as he talked about the future. “I’d always like to be associated in some way with sports,” the former U.C.L.A. all-American said. “Possibly in coaching, possibly the business aspect. I think sports are good in most situations. I want to make the sports world as good as it could be. It could be great. It could also be terrible.
“Coaching college basketball at U.C.L.A. would certainly be one of my goals. I don’t know at what point I’d like to do that. I’ve got three young boys I’d like to spend all of my time with. From what I understand the life of a college coach is not conducive to family life. But there will be a time when that family is grown and gone. There’s nothing I like better than to see U.C.L.A. win basketball championships.”
He does not exactly fit the coaching image, having been a critic in past years of the sports establishment for not being aggressive enough in eliminating elements of racism, sexism and militarism from the playing fields. But then again, could this generation of athletes provide a morality that this generation of coaches has not?
Walton smiled. “I don’t think any generation has a lock on morality, or any generation has cornered the market on immorality,” he said. “Every generation thinks the previous generation is terrible and the succeeding generation is terrible. I just don’t think that’s the way it is. I used to, for sure. But you learn that life is the people that you’re around.”
It is something that Walton understands more and more, especially now that times have become difficult again and his physical condition is a subject for constant scrutiny by the news media. Except that this time—and with the near-tragic J. R. Richard case still fresh in the sporting world’s mind—there have been fewer charges of malingering from the news media.
“I could sit around and think about it all the time,” Walton said, “or I could pick up a paper and read about it all the time. That’s not my style. It would be extremely easy to just give up. But that’s never been my nature. It’s just too much fun to play basketball. Right now I just want to rest the foot until it gets better. I don’t want to pass up that opportunity for that much fun, that much excitement. I’ve learned to be patient. I’ve learned to accept the realities.”
Part of the reality includes some major contractual changes. He signed for five years at a guarantee of $500,000 a year—even if he does not play another game. The figure could reach $1 million a season, depending on the number of games he plays and the Clippers’ gross revenues.
So he sits, and watches, and files away bits of information on opposing players that he may never have the chance to use. He has sat for so long that his oldest son, Adam, whose fifth birthday was last week, once thought his father signed autographs for a living. For half of his son’s life, Walton has not been healthy enough to play regularly.
He listens to well-meaning questions from fans who say hello, questions that more often than not begin with the word “When” and have no answer. When Walton hears the questions, his eyes widen, he tilts his head, he shrugs his shoulders, and without saying a word his look says, “What can I say?” As he watched the game last Tuesday , a night that might have, under different circumstances, offered a matchup between Walton and Abdul-Jabbar, the Clippers fell behind the Lakers by 28 points by halftime on their way to a 30-point loss.
A fan passed by and said, “We wish you were out there.”
“I wish I was, too,” Walton said, almost too softly to hear.
© The New York Times
(c)1994 NBA Properties, Inc. and/or Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Obviously it's not exactly the same, but it sounds familiar, doesn't it? I'll post the first part of it again, adding some emphasis to the parts that jumped out at me.
Last Tuesday, at 7:05, as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar of the Los Angeles Lakers stepped into the center circle, Bill Walton of the San Diego Clippers settled into his seat in the stands at the Sports Arena. He was also at midcourt, but he was upstairs, at the rear of Section 1, about halfway between the floor and the roof. He is there for each home game as the Clipper franchise struggles without him, as it will for the foreseeable future.
For now, at least, two days before his 28th birthday, Walton can do little more than watch and hope. A condition that has been diagnosed as a congenital abnormality in the bone structure of his left foot has caused four fractures of the tarsal navicular bone in the last two and a half years, the most recent one in an exhibition game on September 26. He believes he can recover and play again, but he does not talk much about the immediate future. “I really try my best not to think about it,” he said. “It can get pretty frustrating. Mostly, I think about how to get better, rather than what might have been.”
Still, Walton is a spectator in a participant’s paradise, maybe forever. Since the 1977–78 season, when he was the most valuable player in the N.B.A., he has played in 14 regular-season games. It is not unrealistic to think they were his last.
In the legal opinion of the San Diego franchise, as stated in a $12.5 million suit filed Thursday against two British insurance companies in a United States District Court in Los Angeles, “Walton is now permanently and totally disabled and will never again be able to continue his occupation as a professional basketball player.”
In the opinion of Irv Levin, the club owner who signed Walton to a five-year contract in 1979, “With the benefit of hindsight, if I was aware of certain medical histories of Bill’s and what evolved from it, I don’t think we would have gone ahead with the deal. I have heard nothing from any qualified doctors that he could play N.B.A. basketball. It’s one thing to run on the beach or ride a bike, but it’s another thing to play N.B.A. basketball. That’s what we paid for.”
In the opinion of Dr. Anthony Daly, an orthopedic surgeon who has treated Walton since January 1979, the injury “will heal again, but if he goes out to play basketball, it can break down again. Since it has broken down four times, I think he’ll need an operation. It’s going to be a little bit of a gamble. To my knowledge, it hasn’t been done at all with any athlete. He’s somewhat hesitant to have it done, and justifiably so. The major risk might be that he might have pain in normal life. I don’t think there is much of a risk.” Dr. Daly has said that the operation “could require that the small bones in [Walton’s] foot be fused together.”
Hill's injury isn't quite the same, the numbers are a little different, and he's a little older. But it's all too familiar - a player who had an impressive college career who was successful in his first few years in the league, before medical complications limited him to spectator status.
As most people already know, Bill Walton did play again and became a sixth man for the Boston Celtics, helping them win a championship in 1986. But he was never the same. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1993, and these days is an NBA analyst for ESPN after calling games for NBC during the 90s. He's also responsible for unintentionally humourous quotes that we won't get into here.
So is it out of the question to suggest Grant Hill might also be worthy of being elected to the Hall once he is eligible? If he can return and be a sidekick, a third option or maybe even a sixth man who is an important part of a winning team, for at least a couple of years...is he worthy of the Hall?
Like Walton, he spent a few seasons (six to be exact) as an All-Star calibre player, one of the best in the game. Last season he put up decent numbers when he was able to play. He had a fine college career. He hasn't won two championships as Walton did, but he might be able to pick those up if he's able to return.
So, with this in mind and assuming he'll be back in a smaller but still significant role, does Grant Hill still have a chance of being a Hall of Famer?
I'll post my opinion after a few responses.
