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Bill Walton, the red-headed Dead Head, didn’t want the championship party to end one June night in 1986.
Being the card-carrying free spirit he was, he showed up uninvited at the Brookline, Massachusetts house of his friend and teammate who had gone to bed, woken up, and seeing it was Dead Red, went back to bed.
Undeterred, Dead Red drank a bottle of Wild Turkey Bourbon grooving to the band that spoke to him like no other, a spiritual and often hallucinogenic musical 70s cult band – the Grateful Dead – that he had seen play live some 600 times (now over 850).
All through the night by himself, he savored the NBA championship he and his Boston Celtics teammates had just clinched the night before in one final glorious basketball season.
When his friend woke up, he looked in his kitchen and there he saw Bill. Still there.
It was Larry Bird’s house.
Bill drank in the glory of the championship night in the home of a guy whose basketball talents he revered and was so elated to get to play with that one sensational season.
“Larry went back to sleep and I didn’t want to wake him up, so I just sat there and listened to the Dead and I prayed,” said Walton according to the new book by Dan Shaughnessy titled Wish It Lasted Forever: Life with the Larry Bird Celtics.
“When you’re part of something that special, it changes you. You spend the rest of your life trying to get that back. When it ends, you realize how fragile, how tenuous, and how fleeting it all is.”
Until that night his NBA basketball career had been torturously tenuous with a few flings of fleeting fame. His NBA odyssey had been marred by chronic foot injuries that prevented him from reaching basketball mountains as a pro – except for one year with the Portland Trailblazers – after carrying the UCLA Bruins on his broad shoulders to two national titles.
But earlier that night in 1986 he and his Celtics had won the NBA title – and this was going to be his last game of pro basketball. With Walton and Bird playing leading roles, this is a book about this group of great players having more fun, winning more games, and playing basketball at higher stratospheric levels than perhaps any basketball squad ever assembled. Inarguably, that Celtics team ranks among the best ever assembled.
Passing with the unselfish beauty and accuracy of the Walt Frazier-led New York Knicks that won titles in 1970 and 1973, this team engaged in a never-ending daily prank fest, joking and heckling everywhere they went. Walton was the obvious easy target for most of the ribbing. Savoring all of it, he and his teammates drank beer often together at bars – and at Bill’s house.
The classic open thinker, Bill made sure that team became more culturally enriched. One night during the season Dead Red took it upon himself to teach his teammates about the indescribable and utterly unique spiritual experience of attending a Grateful Dead concert. If you’ve been to one, you know exactly what I mean.
This event went down in Worcester, Massachusetts. Minutes before the Grateful Dead was about to play another concert, Bill shepherded his teammates backstage. He and his soulmate/close friend, lead singer Jerry Garcia, loved on each other’s vibes thus delaying the start of the concert because Jerry wanted a few more minutes with Big Red as his teammates watched Dead Red in his glorious ecstasy.
Teammate Danny Ainge asked Bill which was his favorite Grateful Dead song: “When you’re a Grateful Dead fan, it’s all one song.”
Kind of makes sense, in a way.
Similarly, this 1986 team was all one song and one non-stop laugh fest.
Also a lap fest.
After practice one day on Dead Red’s 33rd birthday, coach K.C. Jones put a chair in the middle of the court where Dead Red sat as a woman belly dancer arrived holding her boom box.
She disrobed. Big Red’s face turned Dead Red.
“Obviously, I joined the right team,” he says in the book.
Walton was the original basketball freak before anyone of us knew who the Greek Freak was. A proud pot smoker, political activist, and commenter on all things meaning-of-life related, he was also, curiously, a maniacally driven basketball player.
All that complexity in one guy.
In the book he unpacks how he thought about his basketball career, one in which he was always chasing the achievements of another UCLA and NBA star, Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
“I raged in my work all the time, saying to myself, “Jabbar! Jabbar!” I’m going to get this guy. I’d be hiking the John Muir Trail. Jabbar! I’m riding my bike from Oregon to Mexico. Jabbar! Jabbar!”
In case you’re wondering, the John Muir Trail is a 211-mile hiking trail in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. John Muir? A naturalist and Sierra Club founder. Wikipedia says so.
Would any of us be surprised if JMuir drank Wild Turkey with Dead Red at a Grateful Dead concert 600 times joined by Jabbar!?
How bizarre you are, Billy Dead Head.
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