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By Alan Snel, LVSportsBiz.com Publisher-Writer
It was two hours before Oregon and Washington were about to play for the Pac-12 basketball championship at T-Mobile Arena in March 2019 and Bill Walton was focused on two things.
He was taking swigs from a bottle of Robitussin.
And Walton was also writing notes about the Oregon-Washington conference title game back in the good ol’ days when the Pac-12 was an actual college sports conference. At the time, Walton was well known for spicing TV broadcasts with his funny, off-the-wall quips about solar panels, world traveling and playing a man-to-man defense to stop the Ducks’ Payton Pritchard.
The tech guys at press row where Walton was preparing for the game on ESPN were chatting so loudly for the big redhead that I saw a side of the gregarious six-foot, 11-inch basketball great I’ve never seen.
Walton, 66 at the time, told the guys politely and firmly in serious tones to lower their voices so he could concentrate on his prep notes for the broadcast. No jokes. No Grateful Dead references. No travel tips.
It was Walton at his most serious and studious.
Walton’s no-nonsense demeanor juxtaposed that reputed Grateful Dead fanboy persona and his offbeat, hilarious verbal gems heard on TV broadcasts.
On this day more than five years ago, I was sitting a mere six feet behind Walton, working on my laptop in the empty arena.
And today, I — like millions of other folks — felt a wave of sadness from the news that the 71-year-old Walton had died of cancer.
Walton could be stunningly earnest and hilarious in the same time sentence. His laughter and bigger-than-life personality making his death seem so improbable and stunning. He was only 71.
Only four years earlier in Los Angeles in 2015, I rode my bicycle with Walton on the Tour of California’s Chairman’s Ride, a bike ride from the Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG)’s headquarters at LA Live in downtown to the Rose Bowl for the final day of the Amgen Tour of California.
It was fun to bike with the big man. And when we were on bikes, I didn’t see him as a UCLA basketball star who dropped 44 points on Memphis State on 21-for-22 shooting as the Bruins won easily, 87-66, for a seventh consecutive national championship March 26, 1973.
He was Bill Walton the bicyclist, who knew all about biking the Red Rock Scenic Loop when he visited Las Vegas.
During the AEG tour bike ride in 2015 when Walton was biking the event, I was curious about places to ride a bicycle in San Diego, so I asked Walton for a few tips.
His bike route ideas flowed. It was a kind of chat I’ve had hundreds of times on a bicycle with a buddy. Just one bicyclist sharing bike route intel with another.
In 2014, Walton was a participant in the AEG-MGM Resorts International groundbreaking for the arena next to the New York New York hotel-casino that would house the Vegas Golden Knights and UFC fight shows. When Walton returned for Pac-12 basketball tourneys in the same arena, it was kind of a homecoming because the big man was a groundbreaking speaker.
And I knew Walton loved bicycling from his appearances at Interbike, the former bicycle trade show in Las Vegas.
Here’s Walton talking about what bicycling means to him: Video
Walton was a pitchman for the Swiftwick sock company when I met him at the trade show in 2014. So, Walton knew Vegas.
I knew Walton loved bicycling, so on that March 2019 day at T-Mobile Arena I waited for him to complete his pregame notes and only when he left his seat did I offer him my first book, Long Road Back to Las Vegas.
I wrote the book in 2018 after a motorist drove his car into me while I bicycled in Florida in March 2017. The crash nearly took my life on the east coast of Florida and propelled me back to Las Vegas where I launched LVSportsBiz.com in June 2017.
Walton accepted the book and posed for a photo with me along with his tech guy, Jon.
I realize Walton’s wacky, out-of-this-world commentary was a source of amusement for many.
But don’t let Walton’s tie-dye shirts distract you from the fact the man was a premier basketball player. He was one of college basketball’s greatest players and a Hall of Fame NBA pro who won championships with the Portland Trailblazers (1977) and Boston Celtics (1986).
He celebrated life through basketball and through his love for bicycling.
Walton lived a wonderful life. And he was generous in the way he shared his life with others.