Invoice Walton, a basketball middle whose extraordinary passing and rebounding expertise helped him win two nationwide school championships with U.C.L.A. and one every with the Portland Path Blazers and the Boston Celtics of the N.B.A., and who overcame a stutter to grow to be a loquacious broadcast commentator, died on Monday at his house in San Diego. He was 71.
The N.B.A. mentioned the trigger was most cancers.
A redheaded hippie and devoted Grateful Useless fan, Walton was a 6-foot-11 acolyte of the famend U.C.L.A. coach John Wood and anchored the Bruins crew that gained N.C.A.A. championships in 1972 and 1973, alongside the way in which extending an 88-game successful streak that started in 1971. He was named the nationwide school participant of the 12 months thrice.
Walton’s best sport was the 1973 nationwide championship towards Memphis State, performed in St. Louis. He obtained into foul hassle within the first half, however went on to attain a report 44 factors on 21-for-22 taking pictures and had 11 rebounds in U.C.L.A.’s 87-66 victory. It was the varsity’s ninth title in 10 years.
Walton — not but identified for his typically hyperbolic, stream-of-consciousness talking method — refused to say a lot after the sport. As he left the locker room, he advised reporters: “Excuse me, I wish to go meet my pals. I’m splitting.”
He performed yet another 12 months at U.C.L.A. earlier than Portland chosen him first general within the 1974 N.B.A. draft. He weathered accidents, two shedding seasons underneath Coach Lenny Wilkens and criticism over his vegetarian weight-reduction plan and his purple ponytail and beard earlier than successful the 1977 championship underneath Coach Jack Ramsay.
“I believe Jack Ramsay reached Walton,” Eddie Donovan, the Knicks’ basic supervisor on the time, advised the New York Occasions columnist Dave Anderson. “Of all of the coaches in our league, Jack Ramsay is the closest to being the John Wood sort — scholarly, out there. I believe Walton responded to that.”
However the query that lingered all through Walton’s N.B.A. profession was how good he would have been if not for his many accidents. Higher than Invoice Russell? Wilt Chamberlain? Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, one in all his predecessors at U.C.L.A.?
Walton by no means performed greater than 70 video games in a season — even within the 1977-78 season, when he was named most respected participant, he performed in simply 58 video games — and he missed three full seasons (1978-79, 1980-81 and 1981-82).
“After I’m wholesome,” he mentioned early in his Portland profession, “I play actual good, I believe.”
He was requested whether or not anybody had seen the actual Invoice Walton.
“I don’t assume so,” he mentioned.
He had a knee harm as an adolescent throughout a playground sport. However, as he wrote in one in all his memoirs, “Again From the Useless: Trying to find the Sound, Shining the Gentle and Throwing It Down” (2016), it was “my malformed toes — my defective basis, which led to the countless string of stress fractures which finally introduced on the entire mess I’m in now.”
He underwent almost 40 orthopedic surgical procedures, totally on his toes and ankles.
“My toes weren’t constructed to final — or to play basketball,” he wrote. “My skeletal, structural basis — rigid and inflexible — couldn’t take up the countless stress and influence of operating, leaping, turning, twisting and pounding for 26 years.”
A full obituary will seem shortly.
