Bill Walton Retires

It is fitting that my copy of “The Breaks of the Game,” ordered off of Amazon last week in a fit of League Pass induced basketball euphoria, would arrive on the day that Bill Walton’s day in the basketball spotlight would be ended by the man himself. Walton announced today that he’d be leaving the broadcast booth after what he described as a “life threatening, life changing ordeal with back problems. I, like most fans, will miss Walton’s vague, hyperbolic adjectives and celestial metaphors.

Perhaps the reason we’ll miss Walton is not so much because he was good at calling a basketball game, but because he turned a basketball game into an experience. When you heard his voice at the start of a broadcast, you got the feeling that something awesome was about to happen; whether it was the action on the court or the often psychedelic musings of an enraptured observer who just happened to be one of the game’s greatest big men. His love for the game permeated everything he said, no matter how ridiculous it may seem. Half the fun was determining what it was that the man meant, and we were so interested in doing so because we knew the source so well.

In some ways he announced like he played, grabbing something only he could and giving it to us in a special way to digest and decipher.  Hubie Brown makes great points, Gus Johnson excites, and Jeff Van Gundy is astute. But none of them can make the observer think (or want to, really) the way Walton could.  Sure, sometimes they were just mumblings that belied a man who had dabbled in the cannabis. Maybe they were most of the time. But he could make a blowout interesting, even if he just made you examine ideas that had never occurred to you before. Because they couldn’t occur to you, they were unique to him, for better or worse.

These are just my quick thoughts; feel free to leave yours below.  I’m guessing many of you think he’s a rambling idiot, and to that I don’t have much of a defense if my thoughts above don’t change your mind. Just know that it’s rare to get access to a guy with such a genuine transparent and infectious love of the game. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some reading to do.