Bill Walton, my frequent correspondent for 15 years, was far more inclined to blame or credit Kismet – fate, the cosmos – than coincidence.
So it would have been a spiritual affirmation for him that on Monday, when I learned of his passing, I was reading Walter Issacson’s biography of Albert Einstein, the part about Einstein’s youth where he fantasized about riding the tethered universe to a beam of light. .
This was Walton’s preferred mode of travel.
There was a lot to learn – and unlearn – about Walton after I got to know him.
We met at a viewing party for CBS’s NCAA basketball tournament, a fabulous but defunct annual event that united media attracted by free meals and drinks. As former Post colleague Bernie Bard said, “If it’s not supported, it’s not journalism.” »
Walton was sitting on a couch in the corner when I introduced myself.
“I know who you are; I love your stuff,” he said. Suspecting that he was being more kind than honest, I replied, “You look familiar, but I don’t know who you are.”
And that’s how a friendship was formed. In fact, we exchanged so many emails that I stopped saving them as my “Walton” file grew.
But I learned a lot about Walton, I remember him easily and sensibly, and this week I praised a 6-foot-11 hippie covered in tie-dye T-shirts and singing songs from Grateful Dead.
What do you mean it’s a shock? Walton, at least since I knew him, was a social conservative, an old high school student easily explained away as a flower child consumed in a haze induced by something stronger than incense.
He once filled my head – and much of a column – with an angry glimpse of NBA and college players marching through airport terminals and congregating in hotel lobbies while wearing headphones to listen to music.
This infuriated Walton because he saw it as a “wall away” to separate the players from the audience. This detachment, Walton said, “created an ‘Us versus you’ atmosphere, because basketball should create a lasting personal connection with the audience.
He also despised post-play trash talk and showboating and their “ascension” to acceptable forms of civilized communication. He said they were “just anti-social”.
He didn’t preach, he didn’t teach, he didn’t seek to reach. It just bothered him.
Having already known Walton for playing in the greatest college game imaginable – his 21-for-22 against Memphis St. in the 1973 NCAA Finals (his only miss being disallowed for goalie goal? I always wanted to ask) – and his image of Someone stunned by the thin air his size forced him to breathe, these were words both surprising and welcome. He was not a die-hard son of the Woodstock nation.
He was, or became, a (full) adult who looked both ways before crossing the street. He was at least as much Ward Cleaver as he had been Eldridge Cleaver.
It still makes me wince to think of Walton, his skeletal body broken by his profession and his constitution, rising gingerly from that couch at the CBS Broadcast Center. He didn’t get up, he slowly unfolded himself.
As an analyst on college TV shows, he was too often necessarily idiotic, too eager to play the role of interplanetary character Bill Walton.
But he had his moments, those times when he couldn’t hide his visceral, instinctive responses after seeing his beloved basketball turn ugly.
One day, after a player was brutally and needlessly knocked to the ground, the victim writhed in pain while Walton’s playing partner tried to excuse the perpetrator’s indifferent act as non-malicious, so the The injured opponent was the victim of nothing worse than an accident.
“That’s easy for you to say,” Walton said, “he’s not your child.”
Now what am I going to do with all these emails from Walton, especially the ones that shared our vision of sports amid social decadence. As it turned out, he was like me – an early 1970s hippie who had moved on to responsible reality, mortgage and taxes included.
Who would have thought of it? Bill Walton, of all people, is an old-school social conservative.
MLB’s revisionist history is an insult
The more thoughtful can only marvel at the consistency of MLB under Rob Manfred. At the dawn of artificial intelligence, MLB was well ahead in the field of artificial additives, the kind that obfuscate rather than cure.
From the man who gave us devalued extra games with a runner automatically placed second rather than delaying the start of the next recreational league softball game, we now have revisionist history in the form of artificial integration by adding Negro League stats to MLB stats. . Such an amendment will give Manfred Abraham Lincoln’s enduring status as the “Second Great Emancipator.”
So Jackie Robinson no longer counts, Mr. Commissioner? Or were you the one who gave Branch Rickey the green light?
And given that under Bud Selig and now his protégé, Manfred, the American and National Leagues have been emulated, Robinson can take Larry Doby with him.
While Manfred is at it, why not, given the growing number of Japanese players in MLB, advocate for eliminating the attack on Pearl Harbor from history? Or the intrepid World War II truck drivers and loaders of the trans-European Red Ball Express who transported fuel, food and ammunition to white men at the front when they were blacks separated by the army?
Manfred’s latest contrived addendum is so absurd that it is both patently idiotic and insulting to those who suffered racial exclusion from MLB before Jackie Robinson.
It doesn’t change anything. Rather, it attempts in vain to legitimize and perpetuate pure nonsense among a dwindling number of better-informed fans – dwindling because they cannot suffer what MLB has allowed MLB to become.
But it certainly serves to highlight the contrived wish that is both running and ruining big league baseball.
By the way, how did you like Wednesday’s Yanks-Angels representing the two biggest TV markets? Did you miss it? It was on Amazon Prime. What’s in it your wallet?
Concession speech: Feast your eyes when the Mets lose
You can always find out when the Mets, on SNY or Ch. 11, lose at home. Lots of shots of food concessions.
So Rangers defenseman Jacob Trouba was hit with just two minutes left for a blatant elbow to the head in Game 3 against Florida, but was still fined $5,000 for that minor penalty? Fascinating.
Tuesday’s Dodgers-Mets opener provided good examples of this all-time strike zone being antithetical to reality. Several pitches just above the box were called strikes and the batters offered not the slightest hint of dissent. This is because the box was placed, once again, below the prescribed strike zone.
It’s quite a stir: Fanatics sports game ads offer ‘up to 5%’ return in credits on losing bets on Fanatics big league licensed team apparel, so Fanatics wins twice on losing bets.
Given the NFL’s sustained Super Bowl halftime preference for vulgar, N-word-spewing rappers who sexually objectify women, as well as the NFL’s recent public “distancing” from Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker. following his plea in favor of the family before the assembly of a Catholic college, reader Art Paradis suggests that Roger Goodell replace Butker with P. Diddy, rapper and kicker.
New York Post
