RIP Bill Walton

Two Headlights.

 

Holy shit. Smoking hot isn't enough to describe her.

 

smoke show

 

Kareem wrote a great tribute to Walton.

Bill Walton was My Rival, My Brother, and My Close Friend

 

That was exceptional. Kareem wanted to be loved and Bill wanted to give love.

 

Damn, that was good.

 

Incredibly self aware and wonderful writing.

 

They struck me very much as fractious brothers during their NBA careers. Not above some shoving matches and bloody noses, but still brothers.

Kareem of course resented the great-white-hope mantle thrust on Walton, who to his credit vehemently rejected it his whole career.

Father John brought them together.

 

Kareem felt early on that Wooden had tolerated behavior from Walton nobody on his teams, let alone himself, could've gotten away with. In their first game in 1974, Kareem had 50 and held Bill to 7. But as I posted earlier, people change and sometimes, they grow as the change.

 

Walton seems to have been the rarest of elite competitors who could appropriately compartmentalize and leverage that spirit for on and off-court life.

 

Well, Wooden allowed Kareem to participate, and to some extent lead, the boycott by leading Black athletes against the 1968 Olympics, and also attend the Black athletes summit meeting that year which announced public support of Muhammad Ali in his legal battle against the draft. In 1967-68, those actions were certainly as controversial as anything Walton did in 1971-74. Ali's draft stance was wildly unpopular in White America until well after the Frazier fight.

I think Kareem may have thought to some extent that Walton's public activism was in part imitation of his own, and had some big-brother resentment of the young whippersnapper.

But after you're done dragging his ass up and down the court and meeting for regular breakfasts with Father John, that stuff fades away.