Bill Walton Won't You Please Play Ball?

His first test came soon enough in the form of Milwaukee's Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the man whose alltime UCLA rebounding record Walton had broken just a few months earlier. In a preseason game with Milwaukee, Abdul-Jabbar so completely dominated the rookie that the effects of the evening were perhaps more severe than most people suspected. One close friend of Bill's believes it was a major turning point. "Getting whipped by Kareem really depressed Bill. This was something he wasn't used to, playing fantastic centers night after night and then all of a sudden getting thoroughly trounced. After that, players started pushing him around like a sheet of paper and he hardly fought back. His desire started to fade fast."

Other problems, large and small, began to gnaw at Walton. In college he had always done the off-court kidding but here, as the youngest player on the team, he was the butt of most of the jokes. The Blazers laughed at his unorthodox dress and teased him for hoarding his millions and for smelling like a mountain man—a condition caused by his "not really leaning into the showers," as one player put it.

And there was the matter of team play, something that had never come naturally to the Blazers. Once after Petrie took what Walton considered a ridiculously long shot, Walton grabbed the rebound and without attempting a follow-up called a time-out. On the bench he announced that he couldn't play with such selfish people anymore.

Soon he began losing stamina and weight. From time to time he would fast. He began looking distracted, almost sickly. Within a month he was not playing.

Under the terms of his contract Walton was still expected to travel to games when able, and during a recent road trip to Los Angeles he seemed livelier than he had been in some time. Sitting on the grass in front of the Airport Hyatt House he kept his smiling face aimed at the sun while he pounded his knees to the beat of a tape deck. From a distance he resembled a bearded monk having a mild seizure. Little kids came by and sat down with him and together they read Mad magazine and chuckled at the gags. Suddenly Walton caught sight of the airport bus maneuvering in the hotel driveway. Thinking that it was leaving him behind, Walton rose and screamed a monstrous obscenity that startled the boys but not his teammates. "Old Dollar needs himself a personal valet just to follow him around," says John Johnson. "He gets a little lost."

On the plane Walton stared out the window. "See that mountain way over there? That is the most beautiful place in the world, my secret place—where I go when I'm down here to watch the sun rise. I can't tell you the name because somebody'd print it and then...." He grinned. "You know something, everything you need is in California. Everything."

He was served his specially prepared lunch but he ate only an apple and an avocado, while drinking several glasses of wine. The woman behind Walton began to complain that his seat was back too far, not realizing perhaps that his knees were already jammed up near his chin. Walton stood up, told her briefly what she could do with herself and found another seat. He flipped on a tape of a Dylan concert close to his head and, singing "everybody must get stoned," he shut out the rest of the plane and stared down at the unraveling coastline.

Later in the flight he pointed to a magazine article by Isaac Asimov on solar energy. "Read this," he said to his seatmate with a solemn nod. The article, about America's non-use of what is potentially its largest energy source, seemed to substantiate one of Walton's major beliefs—that the governing powers are influenced by the profit motive, not by people's welfare. Walton then offered that the two philosophers most in line with his own thinking were Bob Dylan and Joe McDonald, late of Country Joe & the Fish. Not because they're "special," he said, but because they have been able to "see things clearly." If he met them, he added, he would simply act normal. "People ought to understand that you always act like yourself. You see, positions are what ruin us, prevent us from dealing with each other as people rather than images. That's what people try to do to me, to everyone, to define us and limit us. I like people, not positions, and that's why I don't like the press."

Not surprisingly, Walton has a hard time talking with his Blazer teammates in this fashion—or in any other fashion, for that matter. It is another of the troubles that have developed in Portland for him.

Back at UCLA Walton always had Greg Lee to talk to. Lee, an excellent student, self-described beach bum and a fellow ballplayer, was in fact Walton's first guru, leading him through a variety of causes and beliefs. "They were like Lennie and George from Of Mice and Men," one classmate recalls. Even Wooden noted Bill's tendencies to adopt the beliefs of others. "Bill is a good person," says the coach, "but he's a follower, not a leader."