If you felt wetness on your shoulder or saw it on a windshield Monday, those were the tears of San Diego mourning the unimaginable and unshakable loss of a man who defied convention or explanation.
Bill Walton was a basketball player by the narrowest definition only, despite being one of the best to ever lace up sneakers.
Walton, who died Monday at 71 after a prolonged battle with cancer, was a tireless, unstoppable freight train of cosmic good. He gushed about his beloved San Diego, but also books … and music … and sunshine.
He taught us to celebrate the day, the hour and the minute. He was, as he reminded us over and again, the luckiest guy in the world.
The truth behind his truth: We were the lucky ones.
“There are no words,” said Lucky Duck Foundation co-founder Pat Kilkenny, the former Oregon athletic director who became a trusted friend. “He defied words. He defied characterization. There was one of him and there will never be another one. He was an absolute treasure.”
One of one.
Walton was as unexplainable as he was unguardable. How can someone be so humble? So inclusive? So giving? So kind? So … good? He was the big redhead with the exponentially bigger heart.
Kilkenny said Walton and his wife, Lori, supported more than 100 charities. In reality, it was impossible to count and track. When I asked Bill to come up with an exact figure one time, he shrugged.
It would have been more possible to count grains of sand along Pacific Beach. He just said yes. Again and again and again. It seemed as if he would say yes until the world’s problems were buttoned up, spit polished and basking in his cherished coastal rays.
Walton was San Diego’s 6-foot-11 chamber of commerce. He was the city’s champion, its cheerleader and, in many ways, its very soul.
“He wrote checks and checks and checks,” Kilkenny said. “His time was invaluable, but Lori and him brought the checkbook, too. Nobody does that. If the expectation to be at an event was 30 minutes, he would stay an hour and a half to make sure he was able to talk to everyone.
“We don’t have anyone who is a bellwether for humanity more than Bill Walton.”
When a bronze statue of Walton and his prized bike was unveiled in 2016, I wrote something that remains just as true today as it was then: “In many ways — with apologies to the world-class zoo and fish tacos — Bill Walton is the most San Diego thing about San Diego.”
When the ceremony ended, Walton jumped on that bike to lead a memorial ride to honor military veterans.
Because, of course, he did.
“His enthusiasm and energy is so unparalleled,” late broadcasting icon and friend Dick Enberg, who called many of Walton’s games on TV at UCLA, told me then. “Athletes usually aren’t very good about giving back, because they’re trained to take all their life. Few get it and realize that the real honor is to give back to your community. Bill relishes that.
“He was kind of a flower child at UCLA, and he’s blossomed into a beautiful man. It’s the real deal.”
Walton was unarguably one of the best to hold a basketball, appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated 14 times. He became a star at Helix High School, the mountain on the mountain.
He was a late cornerstone in UCLA’s dominant championship run of the 1960s and ’70s. On March 26, 1973, Walton scored an NCAA title game record 44 points as UCLA steamrolled Memphis State 87-66 for its seventh straight title and 75th win in a row.
Walton drained 21 of 22 shots and unofficially 25 of 26 because four were disallowed because of the no-dunking rule at the time. Sports Illustrated labeled it the No. 9 most impressive college sports feat of all time.
And he never watched it.
It was as telling a moment about Walton as you can mine.
“I don’t like to read about myself. I don’t like to watch myself,” Walton told me in his Balboa Park-adjacent home. “That’s just not me. I like to get on to what’s next.”
Though Walton was a two-time NBA champion — once with the Portland Trail Blazers, again with the Boston Celtics, the league’s 1978 MVP — he refused to let athletic greatness define him.
As a polarizing broadcaster, wandering into the weeds on a sea of topics that left the court far behind, he could not separate life from the games we play. He waxed, poetically and endlessly.
Basketball, though, never came close to approaching the depth of the man.
The son of a social worker and librarian became a beacon for education and empathy, decency and grace. He became a role model for untold people paralyzed by crippling stuttering.
Once he found his voice, he never let go of it. His late brother Bruce once told me with a laugh, “Once he started to talk, he never stopped.”
He also mastered the quiet kindnesses in the shadows. A friend of mine, Kevin McNamara, told me Monday that Walton, who did not know him at the time, had heard through acquaintances that he was suffering through horrific back pain.
Walton, who battled his own physical demons, called McNamara out of the blue to check on his health, his mental well-being and more. Not long after the conversation, the phone rang. It was Walton’s surgeon at UC San Diego, saying he would clear an immediate appointment if needed.
Bill had called him, too.
For months, Walton kept calling to check in.
“Just incredibly kind,” McNamara said. “He didn’t have to do that.”
That was Walton. That’s what San Diego and far beyond has lost. The world is bit less bright. A bit less warm. A whole lot less interesting.
Those tears? They’re ours. And they’re forever.
