Back from the Dead Page 3

  Later, when I got into high school and started experiencing expanded success of my own, I got to meet all my Charger idols, and they were even friendlier, kinder, gentler, nicer, and more interesting than I ever dreamed possible. What could be better in life than to dream of something fantastic and then discover down the road that the reality is even greater than the imagined? That’s what my life has been like—first in San Diego, then at UCLA, in Portland, in Boston, and beyond—but then, sadly, eventually, ultimately, and unrelentingly, everything would fall through each time.

  Things changed for me big-time when I became such a good basketball player in high school that everything I did was being publicly recognized, acknowledged, analyzed, and ultimately scrutinized. People wanted to know everything about me. But that was not my thing. I didn’t want to be impolite, but I just was never comfortable trying to give answers to people I didn’t know. My personal thoughts and values, even my “true” height, became constant, burning obsessions. The local newspaper reported, “Walton is somewhere between 6'101/2" and seven feet tall, depending on whom you ask.” So they asked my dad, who told the paper, “I don’t even know how tall he is for sure. All I know is we got him an eight-foot bed and when he’s in it there’s very little room at either end.”

  I made an early and conscious decision that I was not going to let all the attention and focus on me negatively impact my life, or define me. I have never liked to read about myself, from those first early years to this very day. Even when I couldn’t speak and was so self-conscious and embarrassed when strangers approached me, I never felt bothered, as their intentions were invariably good—or so I thought. Anyway, how can you ever get tired of people being nice to you?

  My parochial elementary school, Blessed Sacrament, was fantastic. The only drag there was the “Sisters of Perpetual Misery” who ran the joint. The nuns somehow had the misguided notion that suffering, deprivation, austerity, and repentance were the dominant themes by which to lead one’s life. That is not my idea of the world as it could be. I opted early on to have fun in this lifetime. Dressed in their long black habits, they were strange, strict, and dour—the absolute antithesis of everything that defined our California of the 1950s and ’60s. Here I was, little Billy, living in a place filled with sunshine, pretty girls in bikinis dancing in our daydreams and in the streets, endless summers on the beach, guys with surfboards, burgeoning tropical gardens, exotic flavors and smells, and rock ’n’ roll pounding out delicious rhythms everywhere. And I’m spending my school day in a beat-down world darkened by black-robed crones!

  Other than that, Blessed Sacrament had a lot of solid things going for it, but nothing better, more important, or longer lasting than Rocky. Rocky was my first coach. Like me, Rocky was born in San Diego—or National City, really, the seamless first suburb south of town. It started for Rocky in 1928. After he graduated from Sweetwater High, Rocky decided, “I’m going to be a fireman and take care of things when they all go wrong.”

  Rocky was our fireman, at Engine Company No. 10. He and his lifelong sweetheart, Bernice, had three children of their own, who were the same age as Bruce and me, and we all went to the same school. In 1956, when I was just four, Rocky was dissatisfied with the lack of opportunities for young children when school let out at three o’clock each day. So as a volunteer, he started an athletic program at Blessed Sacrament—every day, every sport, every grade, every student, all year long. I started playing for Rocky when I was eight, in 1960. Today, almost sixty years after he started, Rocky is still there at Blessed Sacrament, every day, every sport, every student. In all these years, Rocky never took a penny. He has to be the richest guy I’ve ever known.

  Rocky was everything to us. We couldn’t wait to get through the school day so we could go play with, and for, Rocky. We had flag football in the fall, basketball in the winter, baseball and track and field in the spring. Rocky kept everything moving, always in perfect order.

  This was all great, but it wasn’t enough for me. I wanted more, I wanted everything, and I wanted it all the time. You couldn’t play football and baseball without a lot of other guys. But basketball you could play all by yourself—shooting, dribbling, running, dreaming. Rocky taught me how to do all those things, and I was fantastically lucky to have him in my life as my first coach. How different my life would have played out if my first coach had been Bob Knight. I would have quit. There would have been nothing there to love.

  I first met Rocky because of my brother Bruce. I loved to follow Bruce around, much to his dismay. Every day at the end of school I would search him out and follow him to the bus that would take us home. One day after school Bruce was going someplace different. It wasn’t the bus. “Where are you going?” I asked him. He shrugged and said, “Come on.”

  He was going to a game—with Rocky. I didn’t even know what a basketball game was. Bruce was out there playing, and I sat down at the end of the bench and watched, fascinated by the intricate action and by Rocky, standing like a commanding general on the sideline: orchestrating, dictating, coaching the game of life. Rocky kept looking down at me and began asking everybody, “Who’s the little guy with the red hair, big nose, and freckles who can’t talk?”

  Somebody said, “Oh, that’s Billy—Bruce’s little brother.”

  Eventually Rocky came over to me and said, “Okay, Billy, get in there. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Immediately upon entering my very first game, I was standing, bewildered, at midcourt when somebody threw me the ball. The ball was bigger than my head. I looked up-court and saw a teammate wide open, far down under the basket. I wound up and threw that ball as hard, high, and far as an eight-year-old possibly could, and the ball, flying from half-court, swished through the basket. Yeah! I never looked back.

  As we walked off after that first game, Rocky came up to me, put a reassuring arm around my scrawny shoulder, and said, “Billy, you looked like you had some talent out there, but I never thought that the game would come quite that easily to you.”

  But it did. And it came very quickly. Basketball and school were always the easiest things in my life.

  * * *

  My dad was to sports what the Sisters of Perpetual Misery were to California cool. My parents are the most unathletic people ever. I never shot a basket with my dad. I saw him run one time at a church picnic, and I fell over laughing. The most spirited competition in our relationship was over who could get up earliest in the morning to get first crack at the freshly printed and delivered Los Angeles Times, my parents’ choice as our primary printed daily news source. My dad, a devoted humanitarian, was very particular, selective, proud, and protective.

  My basketball fever spiked when I learned that the family next door to our school was dismantling their backboard and basket—for reasons that I could not possibly fathom. I talked my dad into helping me go get it. We brought the pieces home and I found some scrap lumber lying around and we rebuilt the whole thing. I scrounged up a long support beam and dug a hole in the backyard, and we jammed it down in there, stabilizing it by nailing and wiring it to the side of a little playhouse we had.

  I was in heaven. I could now play whenever I wanted, and I did, for hours on end, winning every game I played—in my imagination. But, as always, I soon wanted more. I wanted to beat a real person. Fortunately there was a boy Bruce’s age a few houses up the hill. He thought himself a basketball player as well, so I eagerly invited him over. But I beat him so badly that after five or six thrashings he told me he was through and going home, unless we could play a game to 100 points by ones—and I would spot him 99. Which I did. And I’m not sure that I ever lost.

  When he finally gave up, I would beg Bruce to come out and play, which was not fun, nor a good idea. But I was bored. Bruce was nearly twice my size, and his game was not built on speed, quickness, or agility. Bruce was tough, big, and rugged—he would grow into a 6'6", 300-pound star offensive lineman for Helix High, UCLA, and the Dallas Cowboys. Big as he was, B
ruce didn’t like playing basketball against me, because I would torch him every time. But I would beg him to play, and eventually he’d come out.

  The games would always go the same way. Each time, as I would get further and further ahead, he would get madder and madder. He’d start using his hips, knees, and elbows to try to slow me down. He’d grab my shirt, or dig in even harder to get some flesh. But I’d keep scoring. On drives to the right he would lower a shoulder and smash me into the wall of the playhouse. But I kept coming, and the harder I came the harder he hit me. The violence would escalate into the inevitable climax. I would go to my favorite move—fake right and drive left for my bank shot—and Bruce would go to his favorite: grab me with both hands and, using my momentum, push and throw me into an enormous pampas grass bush that grew just off the left side of the court. That bush was like a medieval torture weapon, loaded with razor-sharp serrated fronds. It was no problem going in, but coming out, the thousands of tiny razors would tear the flesh off your bones. I would emerge dripping with blood and go running into the house crying to my mom, and she’d come out threatening to call the police on Bruce.

  This saga repeated itself endlessly. Ultimately Coach Wooden was right: Walton, you ARE the slowest learner I’ve ever had!

  The game that Rocky taught me became my life. When I wasn’t playing it, I was thinking it or dreaming it, until it became much more than a game to me. Growing up without a television, and never going to the movies—that cost money and it was indoors—my imagination was driven by books that my mom, our town’s librarian, would bring home. I loved Two Years Before the Mast, a young man’s fantastically dramatic sailing adventure on an 1830s voyage from Boston to California, around South America and Tierra del Fuego. I devoured John Steinbeck, Jack London, Leon Uris, Irving Stone, James Clavell, the Sinclairs—Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis—and couldn’t get enough about the Civil and Revolutionary Wars and the great explorers, adventurers, and naturalists. And then one day my mom brought home a book about a sports figure whom I had known of but not about. It was Bill Russell’s first book, Go Up for Glory, through which I went with Russell on the trip of a lifetime, as he battled the relentless racism that followed him from his childhood in 1930s Louisiana all the way into his days as the greatest winner in the history of sports. During an era of hopeless and depressing racism and segregation, Russell always stood tall and proud, demanding to be treated with dignity and respect. I just kept reading it over and over again. Bill Russell became my hero—but my mom was mad as can be because I wouldn’t let her return Go Up for Glory to the library.

  From the beginning I was never into stuff. But I did have a basketball, a bike, and a skateboard. And then there was my ticket to ride beyond all physical limits: my transistor AM radio. San Diego has always been about the opportunity of tomorrow, and tomorrow needs rest tonight. So when my parents insisted on early lights-out and doors closed shortly after dark, I willingly agreed, self-assured that once the coast was clear and I was safe at home under the covers of my nice long, warm bed, I could then turn to my little transistor. I love—and live—to be exhausted. School and play all day, dinner every night at precisely 6:15. And you’d better be on time. Or your big brother would eat all your food, and you would face the extremely serious but never explained repercussions of being late. Are you kidding—who would ever do that? Then homework and reading; and then early to bed—or so my parents thought.

  But that’s when the real action would begin for me, under the covers with my $9.95 transistor. I’d go tripping across the universe. I’d listen to talk-radio bullies like Joe Pyne screaming at peaceniks or telling UFO nuts to “go gargle with razor blades,” to Paul Harvey and Bishop Sheen, to Vin Scully calling Dodger baseball. But it all changed for me forever the first night I heard Chick Hearn.

  One night in 1962, when I was ten, I stumbled across this voice, the most interesting and exciting one I’d ever heard. At first I didn’t even realize that the subject was basketball. I was mesmerized by the sound of Chick, his intelligence, wit, energy, enunciation, tone, and perfect rapid-fire delivery. As I listened that first time, I couldn’t keep from smiling and laughing. There I was, little Billy, who couldn’t talk at all, listening to this guy who could talk faster than I could think. His brain and mouth were synced in perfect melody.

  And . . . he’s talking about a basketball game! This was the symphony orchestra come to life.

  “He did the bunny hop in the pea patch . . .”

  “If that shot goes in, I’m walking home . . .”

  “He jumped so high his head came down wet . . .”

  “If there’s really eighteen thousand here tonight, a lot of them are dressed like seats . . .”

  “This game’s in the refrigerator! The door’s closed, the lights are out, the eggs are cooling, the butter’s getting hard, and the Jell-O is jiggling . . .”

  Rocky had been the first to begin teaching me how to play basketball. But Chick taught me how to think about the game, ultimately showing me how to love a world that became my life. It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties and beginning to learn things I was so sure I already knew that I realized Chick had been teaching me the game of life the whole time. There was nothing better than growing up with the comforting solace that Chick was your best friend, knowing that at the end of the day, Chick would always be there with more. He never missed, and he never failed to deliver. The creativity, the excitement, the intensity, the exuberance, the vibrancy, the joy, the openness, the honesty, the personal touch. I always knew that he was speaking directly to me.

  There was nothing that Chick could not do with his voice. He was the perfect artist who could take the darkness out of nighttime or paint the daytime black. My stomach would clench when the game went badly and Chick would cry, “Oh, I’ve never seen the Lakers play worse!” And then three minutes later, after an Elgin Baylor–Jerry West scoring barrage, my heart would soar when he’d say, “The Lakers are on fire and nobody’s going to stop them tonight!”

  I ultimately scheduled my nights, weeks, years, heck, my life around Chick. He was the voice of the Lakers on radio and television from 1961 until a few months before his death from a head injury in 2002 at a reported age of eighty-five, working through a phenomenal string of 3,338 straight games without missing a one. He never held back, he never looked back. It seems like yesterday that I pressed that transistor to my ear under the pillow, hearing Chick’s message, the dream, the work ethic, the perfection, the difference, the persona, the life, the world, the universe.

  I’d spend hours back then, ten years old on my backyard court, with Chick’s voice in my head. Physically I was all alone, but spiritually I was out there playing on Bill Russell’s team against the iconic legends: Wilt and Elgin and Jerry and Oscar—with Chick Hearn calling the play-by-play.

  The best birthday present that I’ve ever received came early on, when my parents bought me a portable spotlight. I nailed it to the side of our house and plugged it in. And then I could play at night, too.

  Regularly—though not often enough for me—during the transition zone between my dad’s day job as a social worker and his night job as an adult educator, my mom would pack up the food and all of us into the family car and drive us down to Balboa Park, where we would meet my dad for a picnic dinner. We loved it. The four children would chase one another all over the park, playing, screaming, running, laughing, dreaming, believing. One day I was running wild—again—and came up out of one of the park’s magical canyons, only to stumble onto this huge rectangular stucco building that I had never seen before. What’s that over there? I stuck my head in the door and saw dozens of guys playing basketball. I had found San Diego’s Municipal Gym—Muni.

  Muni Gym was the Taj Mahal for people who loved basketball. Open all the time, three full courts side by side, and players playing endless pickup basketball all day and night. You could just walk right in, anytime, and immediately get in a game and play forever. Pure pickup basketba
ll is what you live for. New players, new teams, new challenges, new inventions, constantly in flux, changing all the time.

  It’s been lost in today’s world. There’s so very little pickup basketball left anymore. Everything is so organized, so structured. Too many coaches, too much interference from parents, officials, and scorekeepers. Young players thinking it’s about fancy gear and stuff instead of the joy of just walking in and starting to play, figuring it all out along the way. Win—you stay on. Lose—you’re off, and out. Then work your way back into the rotation. Or move to a side court and create your own new game. That was Muni. It was perfect. The games of our lives never stopped. We lived there.

  My dad didn’t share my love of basketball. Sports were not his thing; he liked reading, singing, music, and chess. My dad was not a spectator in the game of life. By the time I was in the seventh grade, about twelve years old, I had a game every day of the week, sometimes two, and on the weekends there would be as many as I could squeeze in, often up to six or seven games each day. I would spend all Friday night plotting them out on a map, like a military campaign. If I rode my bike I’d be lucky to make parts of two or three, but if I just had someone to drive me . . . I can play the first half of this game, the second half of that game, the middle part of the third, the whole fourth, the first half of the fifth, the second half of the sixth, and the whole seventh. So I’d beg my dad, who worked all the time, to give up his Saturdays and Sundays to drive me around to all of them, these endless and meaningless games that I never realized were endless and meaningless until I started driving my own children to their games. And my dad would do it. I had the greatest dad ever. We loved him so.