Bill Walton stood out in a crowd. He sat out in a crowd, too.
The health issues that plagued Walton throughout his life led him at one point to begin bringing a chair with him wherever he went.
It was a tall chair, like a director’s chair, that was more accommodating for his 6-foot-11 frame and enabled him to get off his feet.
“At one point, someone created an Instagram with all the sightings of Bill’s chair at all the different places,” Walton’s wife Lori said. “When he did the Maui Invitational, he would check his chair in as luggage. He took his chair to China when he did a basketball tournament there for the Pac-12. His chair has all these different stickers from all the places it’s been.”
Walton went everywhere. But San Diego was always home.
A year has ed since Walton’s death last Memorial Day after battling colon cancer.
In some ways, Walton is still here. Given the oversized impact Walton made in the worlds of sports, music, education and philanthropy, he always will be.
“The outpouring of has been amazing,” Lori Walton said. “I still get so many text messages and emails or just people I see on the street will comment about how Bill really touched their lives. It’s nice. I feel like he will always be ed, and be ed in such a positive light in the way he impacted so many lives. It’s a nice thing to see his spirit live on in so many people.”
Walton has been honored in dozens and dozens of ways over the past 12 months.
Just last week, it was announced that former Pac-12 rivals UCLA and Arizona will honor Walton when they play Nov. 14 in a Hall of Fame Series game at the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles.
And on Tuesday, San Diego Sport Innovators, an organization where Walton served as executive chairman, will announce the formation of the Walton Innovation Network. WIN for short, it will be the first phase of a legacy project in his honor.
“The Walton Innovation Network will be an expansion of SDSI’s current mentoring programs —dear to Bill’s heart — into a network of programs dedicated to his legacy of uplifting others, hard work and giving back,” SDSI executive director Bob Rief said. “WIN will the entrepreneurs,innovators, athletes and dreamers — in all stages of business from ideation, scale, through funding — who are changing the future of our industry.”
‘Anything is possible’
Walton was given to hyperbole, that everything around him was amazing and anything in the world was possible.
“Probably because that was the life he lived,” Lori Walton said. “He grew up in La Mesa and both of his parents were hard-working. Both had to work. His dad was a social worker by day and he taught classes by night. His mom was a librarian. He didn’t grow up poor, but he definitely grew up in a working-class family.
“For him to reach the level of success that he did was really a testament that anybody could do that. You don’t have to come from a privileged background to succeed in the world.
“His success was at a high level, not just on the court but off the court. His impact off the court didn’t always get the attention, but I felt like the work he did off the court was harder and much more impactful in of changing people’s lives and giving people hope and helping people see that there really is a future for them.
“He was not only an interesting person but he was interested in other people’s lives. He liked to hear people’s stories and loved asking people questions.”
Walton’s inquisitiveness developed at an early age through his love of reading. His mother often brought books home for him from Oak Park Branch Library in East San Diego where she was the librarian.
“I am a product of the books that I’ve read throughout my life,” Walton once said.
“He was an avid reader,” Lori Walton said. “He primarily read nonfiction. He was a history major at UCLA and he loved history. He loved political books. He probably had about 1,000 books. And it wasn’t like he just put books on the shelf to look good. He read all of them.
“We’d go to a concert or he would have a late basketball (broadcast), it didn’t matter how late it was or how tired he was, he always read at least a couple pages in his book before he went to sleep.”
Interestingly enough, it was a basketball Hall of Famer’s memoir that sparked Walton as a young reader. Bill Russell’s “Go Up for Glory” was an early favorite.
“That cemented his love for reading as well as making him a lifelong Celtics fan,” Lori Walton said. ” … It was a dream come true for him to play for the Celtics (and win the 1986 NBA championship with Boston).”
Walton made appearances near and far in of libraries and reading programs. During an appearance at the downtown library in Charleston, W.Va., two years ago, Walton told MetroNews: “Libraries are like music, they’re like sports, they’re like riding a bike. It’s like going to a concert. You just open that book, and it takes you to places that you cannot get to by yourself.”
His message: “Anything is possible.”
“We have no excuses for the things that we don’t get done,” he said. “There’s a moral obligation that we all have to carry on and to enable and empower the next generation coming up because we are the result of other people’s sacrifices, their discipline and their lives of honor.”
The Helix gym
Walton called basketball his religion and the gym his church.
The Helix High School gym is the site where Walton rose to prominence. He ed the varsity late in his sophomore season following an injury. A growth spurt between his sophomore and junior years took Walton from 6-foot-1 to 6-7 (he would reach 6-11 late in his senior year), and that’s when he began to take over the game.
Walton led Helix to back-to-back CIF championships in 1969 and 1970, averaging 29.1 points and 25 rebounds a game his senior year. Both were section records at the time. Walton’s single-season rebounding mark of 825, which included games of 32, 33 and 34 rebounds, still stands.
Helix’s 49-game winning streak over Walton’s junior and senior seasons also remains a San Diego Section record. The Highlanders went 29-2 his junior year and 33-0 his senior year.
“There will never be another year like this one,” Helix coach Gordon Nash told The San Diego Union after the 1970 title game. “I don’t thing there will be another player like Billy for some time.”
Added Nash: “He proved a big man can make a team great if he sacrificed personal gains. Billy could have scored a lot more. Everyone knows that. But he sacrificed, and he did it without any second thought that I know of.”
Walton held more than the key to success for the Highlanders. He held the key to the gym.
That made him popular at the time with of the San Diego Rockets professional basketball team.
“We had the best gym in San Diego and all the Rockets players wanted to go there,” Walton told ESPN. “They had some great teams with Elvin Hayes and Calvin Murphy and future head coaches and broadcasters such as Pat Riley, Rick Adelman, Rudy Tomjanovich, Jim Barnett and Stu Lantz. All these guys treated me — little Billy — like I was part of the team. They couldn’t have been nicer, and I became their friends.”
Walton ed one time when Hayes called and his mom picked up the phone.
“Here’s this grown man calling she’s never talked to, and she said, ‘Who’s this?’” Walton said. “And Elvin says, ‘Is Billy there?’ And my mom says, ‘I’m Billy’s mother. Who is this?’ And Elvin says, ‘Tell Billy, Big E is calling and we need him to open the gym tonight.’
“I’m on the floor, and my mom puts her hand over the phone and says, ‘Billy, who is this guy Biggie? He sounds old. Is everything OK?’ I said, ‘Mom, that’s Big E! Give me the phone!’ ”
The gym was mostly unchanged for decades — though Walton paid for new plexiglass backboards to replace the old wood ones years ago — before it was refurbished in 2019.
A glass case in the hallway entrance highlights Helix history. Prominently displayed in the middle is a tribute to Walton that includes a jersey, basketball cards, school yearbooks and CIF championship trophy.
“People visiting, especially older people, their heads turn when they see Walton (on the jersey) and the football stuff,” Helix athletic director Damon Chase said. “People always talk about (Helix football alums) Reggie Bush and Alex Smith. No offense to those guys. Love them. But there’s no question Bill Walton is the best athlete to come out of this school and maybe the county.”
Chase said students now know Walton more for broadcasting games than playing in them.
“The gym at the La Mesa Boys & Girls Club (two blocks east of campus) has his name on it,” Chase said. “Every kid sees Bill Walton Gym. That’s how they know him more than anything.”
In January, Walton was honored during halftime of a Highlanders boys basketball game. Several of his former teammates, as well as the 90-year-old Nash, attended the event.
“Helix, and the people from Helix, really held a special place in his heart,” Chase said. “He would talk about teachers and Coach Nash and how instrumental they were in all the things that he did.”
Walton will be among notable alumni honored next year, when Helix celebrates the school’s 75th anniversary. One of the gym’s walls will be decorated with Walton’s No. 33.
‘The Y saved my life’
At the entrance to the Mission Valley YMCA is a statue of Walton, arms raised high to the sky, standing next to his bike.
A plaque adjacent to the piece includes this quote: “The Y saved my life.”
It is a fitting place. A fitting piece. And a fitting pose.
When he was standing, Walton was known for raising his arms high and wide above his head. It added emphasis, magnitude, for any moment.
“He started doing that after he recovered from back surgery (in 2008) because it felt good,” Lori Walton said, “and he also did it because he could, because when his back went out he couldn’t raise his hands above his head. It’s also a good stretch for your back.
“We went to a concert one time and he would get up after every song and put his arms up to stretch. We went backstage to speak to the artist afterwards and she was so sweet, saying ‘Bill, it was so nice of you to stand and applaud after every song. I was so touched.’
“I didn’t say anything about him stretching his back out.”
Raising his arms became Walton’s signature move, whether he was enjoying a concert, giving a speech or posing for a photo.
Walton held a special place in his heart for spine surgeon Dr. Steven Garfin at UC San Diego Health for the 2008 operation that Walton credited for giving him back his life. Recovery took the better part of the year.
“His brother Bruce literally dragged him out of bed, took him to the Mission Valley YMCA and put him in the pool and jacuzzi,” Lori Walton said. “Water has always been very important to healing for Bill. That completely changed his mindset for his recovery. I feel that was instrumental in him getting over that hump, where he was really in a bad space emotionally and physically, he was just frustrated, and that changed everything for him.
“He started going every single day. That was a key place for him in of his recovery. He loved it there. He was really a man of the people. He would be in the jacuzzi talking to everybody. We would constantly run into people he had met at the Y.”
Walton became an ambassador for the YMCA, which was among dozens and dozens of organizations and causes he and Lori ed through their philanthropy.
The bike
Why did the statue include a bike as opposed to a basketball?
“He was never happier than he was on his bike,” Lori Walton said. “Just the sense of freedom and the movement he loved. It was nice for him because it was the one exercise that he could still do, with two fused ankles, a fused spine.
“He rode his bike everywhere. He knew streets most San Diegans wouldn’t know. He had so many different routes.”
Walton’s bikes were made custom on a 70-centimeter frame by local cycle builder Bill Holland. Walton would leave his Hillcrest home on Myrtle Avenue, just north of Balboa Park, and head everywhere and anywhere on his bike. The joy he had for San Diego and exploring it on rides was expressed in the typical Walton way for a “Rider Spotlight” on the city’s website:
“My favorite places to ride are wherever and whenever I’m on my bike. I love my bike, I live to ride, and ride to live. We proudly live in Hillcrest, it’s simply the best of everything, it is the hub of the wheel, and you can go in any direction at any time, and find perfection, beauty, peace, solitude, and the wonders of nature, every time.”
“I ride everywhere in San Diego, always trying to connect all the places through our great system of public parks, whether it’s Balboa Park, Presidio, Mission Bay, Mission Trails, Lake Murray, Mt. Helix, Rohr and Sweetwater, Berry Park, International and Border Field, Otay Lakes, Torrey Pines, Mt. Soledad, Kate Sessions, Cabrillo, Harbor Island, Shelter Island, Liberty Station, Spanish Landing, Swami’s, Santee Lakes, Mast Park, and the endless series of the smaller city and county parks that make San Diego the greatest place on earth.
“These parks serve as gateways to the incredible diversity of our majestic San Diego with its fabulous neighborhoods, and spectacular natural scenery, where we can ride the North Coast, La Jolla, Point Loma, the South Bay and Coronado, the coastal plains, canyons, and mesas, the inland valleys and foothills, the Laguna Mountains, Mt. Palomar, all of East County, Pine Valley, Julian, Boulevard, Campo, Jacumba, and the spectacular Sonoran Desert with the Imperial Highway, Anza-Borrego State Park, Borrego Springs, and so much more.”
Lori Walton said, “His dream day was to get up early and ride his bike all day until it was dark and time to come home.”
Bill called home one afternoon to check in.
“We’re up at Mt Soledad,” he said.
“Who are you riding with?” Lori asked.
“It’s just me and my bike,” Bill told her.
Said Lori: “His bike was his friend.”
And he was ours.
