Bill Walton & The Ballad of the Hippie
Wherein I offer the secret to Bill Walton's success
It’s obvious what the secret was to the recently departed Bill Walton’s success as a broadcaster: He didn’t take his job too seriously.
Walton was a Hall of Fame basketball player at the college and NBA levels, but as a color commentator, he seemed to understand that a sports broadcast is fundamentally theater—a special entertainment product, not a religious ritual.
You can see it by watching any “Best of Bill Walton” video on YouTube. You could see it when he called a Chicago White Sox game and claimed to have no knowledge of baseball (“How many outs is that?” “One.” “How many do they need?” “Three.”). You could see it in this exchange with broadcaster Tom Hammond:
Bill Walton: “John Stockton is one of the true marvels, not just of basketball, or in America, but in the history of Western Civilization!”
Tom Hammond: “Wow, that’s a pretty strong statement. I guess I don’t have a good handle on world history.”
Bill Walton: “Well Tom, that’s because you didn’t go to UCLA.”
You can also see it just by scanning through a list of his one-liners:
“Come on, that was no foul! It may be a violation of all the basic rules of human decency, but it’s not a foul.”
“When I think of Boris Diaw, I think of Beethoven in the age of the romantics.”
“Mick Jagger is in better shape than far too many NBA players. It’s up in the air whether the same can be said of Keith Richards.”
“I had the only beard in the Western Hemisphere that made Bob Dylan’s look good.”
These last two quotes are central to understanding what made Bill Walton stand out. At his core, he was not a jock. He was a hippie.
His basketball career at UCLA in the early 1970s included 88 consecutive wins, two national championships, three straight player of the year awards, and one arrest for protesting the Vietnam War by taking over a campus administration building.
A 1974 Time article dubbed Walton the “vegetarian tiger.” He claimed in his autobiography that he’d attended over 800 Grateful Dead concerts, and called his induction into the group's Hall of Honor the highest tribute he ever received. He was a pothead, once quipping “I’m much better at getting high than getting low.” When Abbie Hoffman died in 1989, he didn’t just attend the funeral, he gave the eulogy.
This worldview is anathema to professional sports. Competition is the end all be all of that ideological universe. Peace, love, and understanding doesn’t put points on the board.
But Walton was the rare broadcaster who could approach sports with the understanding that, while it could feel important in the moment, it was a silly, low stakes excuse to bring people together, creating a productive outlet for otherwise destructive tendencies in the human spirit.
I’m not saying that every broadcaster thinks they’re doing hard hitting journalism. I’d argue guys like Reggie Miller, the Van Gundy brothers, Joel Klatt, and Devin Gardner are good color commentators in their respective sports because they are able to at play the role of self-serious analysts while also, at least partially, embracing their roles as unserious entertainers.
But there is still a detached irony Walton had which others either can’t or won’t embrace. Not fully. They want and need people to take them seriously as experts in their sport. I get that being the adult in the room is part of some people’s schtick, but it’s not a recipe for interesting television and, I’d argue, a commentary on the increasing teacher-I-did-my-homework-ification of the culture industries.
I guess what I’m saying is that ESPN needs to hire more hippies. If sports executives are interviewing someone for a spot on the color commentator roster their first question should be “how many Grateful Dead concerts have you been to?”