Bill Walton, the Hall of Fame basketball player turned television analyst for NBC Sports and later ESPN, has died at 71.
Walton’s death, which the NBA announced Monday, was due to a “prolonged battle” with cancer. It had not been publicly known that Walton was suffering from the disease, and he appeared to be in good health at All-Star Weekend in February, where he was a regular sight on all three days of festivities.
Shortly after the All-Star break, Walton began missing scheduled assignments and never returned to the air.
It would be difficult to put Walton’s public life in any sort of concise context. A recent documentary about his life for ESPN’s 30 For 30 franchise consisted of four hour-long parts. He was a superstar in college, where he played for UCLA under legendary coach John Wooden, and on pace for one of the great professional careers before being sidetracked by injury. He balanced his basketball career with political activism that made him, for a time, one of the most controversial figures in sports.
Following his playing career, which he salvaged toward the end with a run as a bench player for the Celtics, Walton emerged as one of the best known analysts in sports television history. Overcoming a stutter, he spent more than three decades calling pro and college games for multiple networks.
With NBC in the 1990s, Walton served as an NBA game and studio analyst — including calling the Finals from 1995-97 and again in 2002 — and was one half of an on-air odd couple with the late Steve “Snapper” Jones. He called another Finals for ABC in 2003 and worked the event for the final time as a studio analyst in 2005.
With ESPN and Pac-12 Network more recently, he was an attraction in and of himself on Pac-12 conference games, extolling the “conference of champions” and fully unleashing the stream-of-consciousness approach that he largely kept in check during his NBC days — with play-by-play partners such as Dave Pasch and Jason Benetti serving as his foils in what became one of the preeminent comedy acts in sports television. (His death comes on the heels of the final Pac-12 game ever played, Saturday’s baseball tournament final.)
Walton also served as a college analyst for CBS and worked NBA games for ESPN/ABC during his first stint with the network. In the final years of his career, as his eccentric college basketball broadcasts gained popularity on social media, he made guest appearances as an analyst on a Chicago White Sox game and ESPN College Football Playoff coverage.
Whether as a player, broadcaster or social commentator, Walton was not for everyone. During one of his his earliest broadcasting assignments — a Kansas NCAA tournament game for CBS in 1991 — local stations in Kansas “were flooded with calls from angry Jayhawk fans,” per The Salina Journal. (USA Today’s Rudy Martzke gave him an “A” for his performance.) Any search of social media during his more recent college assignments would reveal a similarly polarized response.
He did not shy away from criticizing players, sometimes harshly, and some held a grudge as a result (Shaquille O’Neal being a noted example). His politics engendered scorn from the right during his playing career, and from at least some on the left more recently.
There were those who never quite got Walton, or could not always abide his digressions, bluntness or beliefs, but they were outnumbered. For five decades, if Bill Walton spoke, people wanted to listen — and Bill Walton spoke, and spoke and spoke. So many times in an ultimately short lifespan, he was betrayed by his body. The aforementioned stutter, the foot issues that took him off of his all-time great trajectory, the back issues that temporarily ended his broadcasting career, and finally, cancer.
Yet his voice — that often-imitated baritone that entertained, informed and occasionally confused — never failed him.
