Skip to main content
Bill Walton, the 7-foot redhead who carried the Portland Trail Blazers to basketball nirvana in 1977 before the game broke his feet and his heart, died of cancer on Monday. He was 71.
Walton is one of the pivotal figures in Portland’s civic history. His exploits on the hardwood of Veterans Memorial Coliseum, culminating in the Blazers’ first and only NBA title, alone would ensure that place. It’s possible that this city never again felt a collective joy that matched the championship parade in 1977. But he was also such a distinctive character—he rode his bicycle across Oregon, enjoyed a vegetarian diet, and attended Grateful Dead shows at every opportunity—that he accelerated Portland’s graduation from a hidebound logging town into the refuge for outcasts that it became.
If Walton pioneered what would become a common Oregon type—the newcomer as catalyst—it wasn’t without pain. The bones in his feet shattered as the Blazers sought a second championship; he and his agents blamed team doctors for pushing painkilling injections. He demanded a trade—in that way, too, he charted the path Clyde Drexler and Damian Lillard would eventually follow. If Portland’s relationship with Walton felt like a moody, youthful romance, that was because just as the city fell in love with him, he wanted out.
But he returned from time to time: announcing ballgames in his hilariously garrulous style, reminiscing in postgame tributes in the Rose Garden that lasted longer than any paying attendees expected, even stumping for a tax measure to aid homeless people in 2020. There was a widespread feeling that Walton and Portland had chosen to forget the ugly incidents of their breakup, because they reminded each other too much of when they were young.