These days Bill Walton, the loquacious, Grateful Dead–loving basketball Hall of Famer, never stops smiling. Steve James, the documentary filmmaker who brought us Hoop Dreams, recently helmed a four-part documentary film series about Walton and fittingly called it The Luckiest Guy in the World, a phrase that Walton says so often it’s as if he’s trying to convince himself.
Walton, now 70, wants to be all things to all people: a source of light, love, and unity. But this has not always been true. In the 1970s, he was among the most radical and polarizing athletes in the United States. That smile, so ubiquitous today, was not often shown by the young man concerned about the state of the world. At UCLA, Walton led one of the greatest college basketball teams in history—and he was also arrested for protesting the Vietnam War. Then, as a Portland Trail Blazer with a scraggly red beard and long hair, he spoke with a political edge that has been largely forgotten about amid the day’s toothy grins, tie-dyed shirts, and enthusiastic color commentary.
When James asks about his politics in The Luckiest Guy in the World, Walton shuts down, saying repeatedly that he was and has always been “in the mainstream.” While being against the war in Vietnam would put him in the mainstream today, that was not the case in 1970, particularly during a period when the Nixon administration used athletes and coaches as symbols of patriotism and the war effort. For Walton, especially as a white athlete in the era of Muhammad Ali, to take such an anti-war stance was a big deal. But Vietnam was not the only issue that animated Walton. While Walton stymied James’s efforts to understand his radical politics of the 1970s, we should not forget what Walton stood for. The 1978 NBA MVP has a record of rebellion from which athletes—especially white athletes—can still learn.
It is hard to imagine a superstar basketball player calling for resistance to the US government during a press conference. But that is what Walton did in the spring of 1975, when he appeared with his friends Jack and Micki Scott at San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Church, the congregation pastored by the radical Black minister Cecil Williams. The Scotts had just resurfaced after going underground to avoid harassment from the FBI for harboring members of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), including Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. After Walton apologized to the Scotts for agreeing to be interviewed by the FBI, he called upon Americans to undertake “the practice of noncooperation with the existing government because of the inherent evil of that government.”