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Bill Walton’s eyes got misty. The smile — that million-watt smile that lit up every room, every gym, every Grateful Dead venue he ever walked into — dimmed. This was the one subject that could always harsh his mellow, no matter how good a mood he was in.
I’d asked him about his feet. When he was young, and when he was right, those feet made him a one-of-one marvel among big men in the history of basketball: quick, nimble, highly coordinated. But they were also his fatal flaw. In truth, if we ever wanted to modernize the term “Achilles’ heel,” we could do worse than “Walton’s Wheels.”
“Every game I had to sit out in my life because of injury,” he told me that day in 2004, “it felt like someone ripped my heart out, stomped on it, and handed it back to me.”
Walton won two NCAA championships at UCLA. He bookended those with two NBA titles, one in 1977 with the Blazers when he was among the five best basketball players on planet Earth, one in 1986 with the Celtics after he’d endured almost seven straight years of unimaginable pain and loss due to his weakening feet.
English (US)