NBA legend Bill Walton was much more than just his hippie persona

Sports

By Phil Mushnick

Bill Walton, my frequent pen pal the past 15 years, was far more inclined to blame or credit kismet — fate, the cosmos — than coincidence.

Thus it would have come as spiritual affirmation to him that Monday, when I learned of his passing, I was reading Walter Issacson’s biography of Albert Einstein, the part about Einstein’s youth when he’d fantasize about riding the universe strapped to a beam of light.

That was Walton’s preferred mode of travel.

There was a lot to learn — and unlearn — about Walton after I came to know him.

We met at a CBS NCAA Basketball Tournament viewing party, a fabulous but defunct annual event that united media lured by free eats and booze. As late Post colleague Bernie Bard said, “If it isn’t catered, it isn’t journalism.”

Walton was seated on a couch in a corner when I introduced myself.

“I know who you are; I love your stuff,” he said. Suspecting he was being more gracious than honest, I replied, “You look familiar, but I don’t know who you are.”

And so a friendship formed. In fact, we swapped so many emails after that I stopped saving them as my “Walton” file grew fat.

But I came to know a lot about Walton, easily and reasonably recalled, and this week eulogized as a 6-foot-11 hippie covered in tie-dyed T-shirts and Grateful Dead tunes.

How’s this for a shock? Walton, at least from the time I came to know him, was a social conservative, an old-schooler easily explained as a flower child consumed in a haze caused by something stronger than incense.

One day he filled my head — and a good part of a column — with an angry overview of NBA and college players who walk through airport terminals and gather in hotel lobbies while wearing headphones playing music.

This infuriated Walton as he saw this as a “keep-away wall” to separate players from the public. This detachment, Walton claimed, “Created an Us vs. You atmosphere as basketball should create a lasting personal bond with the public.”

He also despised trash-talking and post-play showboating and their “ascent” to become acceptable forms of civilized communication. He said they’re “simply antisocial.”

He wasn’t preaching, teaching or reaching. It just bothered him.

Having previously known Walton for having played the greatest college game imaginable — his 21-for-22 against Memphis St. in the 1973 NCAA final (wasn’t his one miss disallowed for goaltending? I always meant to ask) — and his image as someone dizzied by the thin air that his height forced him to inhale, these were both surprising and welcomed words. He was not an unconditional son of Woodstock Nation.

He was, or became a (fully) grown 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 causes me to wince to recall Walton, his skeletal body broken from his profession and build, delicately rising from that couch at the CBS Broadcast Center. He didn’t stand, he slowly unfolded.

As an analyst on college telecasts, he was too often obligatorily silly, too eager to play the role of interplanetary character Bill Walton.

But he had his moments, those times when he couldn’t cloak his visceral, from-the-gut responses after witnessing his beloved basketball grow ugly.

Once, after a player was needlessly and viciously slammed to the floor, the victim lay writhing in agony while Walton’s play-by-play partner tried to excuse the unconcerned perpetrator’s act as not malicious, thus the injured opponent was the victim of nothing worse than an accident.

“That’s easy for you to say,” said Walton, “he’s not your kid.”

Now what am I going to do with all these emails from Walton, especially those that shared our view of sports in social decay. He was, in the end, like me — an early 1970s hippie who’d graduated to responsible reality, mortgage and taxes included.

Who’d a thunk it? Bill Walton, of all people, old-school social conservative.

MLB’s revisionist history an insult

The thoughtful can only marvel at MLB’s consistency under Rob Manfred. In the dawn of Artificial Intelligence, MLB has been way ahead in artificial additives, the kind that obscure rather than cure.

From the man who gave us devalued extra-inning games with a runner automatically placed on second rather than delay the start of the next rec league softball game, we now have revisionist history in the form of artificial integration by adding Negro League stats to MLB stats. Such an alteration will provide Manfred lasting Abraham Lincoln status as the “Second Great Emancipator.”

So Jackie Robinson no longer counts, Mr. Commissioner? Or was it you 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 emulsified, Robinson can take Larry Doby with him.

While Manfred’s at it, why not, in view of MLB’s increasing number of Japanese players, advocate the elimination of the attack on Pearl Harbor from history? Or make the intrepid WWII truck drivers and loaders of the trans-Europe Red Ball Express that carried fuel, food and ammo to the front white men when they were Army-segregated blacks?

Manfred’s latest artificial additive is so absurd as to be both transparently silly and insulting to those who suffered from MLB’s pre-Jackie Robinson racial exclusion.

It changes nothing. Rather, it vainly tries to legitimize and perpetuate pure nonsense among a diminishing total of know-better fans — diminishing because they can’t suffer what MLB has allowed MLB to become.

But it certainly serves to emphasize the wishful artificiality that both runs and ruins big-league baseball.

By the way, how’d you enjoy Wednesday’s Yanks-Angels representing the two largest TV markets? Missed it? It was on Amazon Prime. What’s in your wallet?

Concession speech: Feast your eyes when Mets losing

You can always tell when the Mets, on SNY or Ch. 11, are losing at home. Lots of shots from the food concessions.

So Rangers’ defenseman Jacob Trouba was hit with just two minutes for a flagrant elbow to the head in Game 3 vs. Florida, yet fined $5,000 for that minor penalty? Fascinating.

Tuesday’s Game 1 of Dodgers-Mets provided good examples of that all-time strike zone box as antithetical to reality. Several pitches just above the box were called strikes and the batters didn’t offer even a hint of dissent. That’s because the box was placed, again, below the prescribed strike zone.

It’s all a hustle: Fanatics sports gambling commercials pitch a return of “up to 5 percent” in credits on losing bets for Fanatics’ big leagues-licensed team apparel, thus 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, plus the NFL’s recent public “distancing” of Chiefs’ kicker Harrison Butker following his family-first advocacy before a Catholic college’s assembly, reader Art Paradis suggests that Roger Goodell replace, Butker with P. Diddy, a rapper and kicker.