Bill Walton, Dr. J, Pistol Pete, and the Timberwolves

How one famous musician ties them together

Bill Walton in his Portland days. (Bettmann)

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Just hours before Bill Walton’s death was announced on a very sad Memorial Day, I worked on a piece about an unusual moment in Bill’s NBA career — a piece that will debut here at a later date.

Already, Bill had become a muse of sorts for this site — in a couple of articles with more to come — for both professional and personal reasons.

The workplace connections, while enjoyable, were mostly tangential and pure happenstance. At ESPN, I worked for Chris Ramsay, son of Dr. Jack Ramsay, and with Dr. Jack himself — as famously chronicled in The Breaks of the Game, Jack was Bill’s coach when the Portland Trail Blazers won the 1977 NBA championship. I also worked for John Papanek, who wrote two Sports Illustrated cover stories on Bill before moving to ESPN. And my time there coincided with Bill’s — in fact, at ESPN.com we published Bill’s stream-of-consciousness columns, though I met him only once, briefly.

There was also a more basic human connection, as Bill’s interests — spanning broadly from basketball to culture to politics to cycling to living a good life — overlapped with my own. That’s not unique, as this week’s tributes to Bill have shown. But when, as a kid, you are first learning about this countercultural basketball superstar — the MVP with an unselfish approach to the game and a ponytail — it makes a deep impression.

And while I’m no Deadhead, I did share Bill’s admiration for the music of Bob Dylan, admiration which led to a piece earlier this month in which I had fun noting the many ways Dylan has connected with basketball.

One of those “surprising connections” (which were surprising to me, too) came from an amazing soliloquy from Bill regarding Bob during a 2015 college basketball game on ESPN, which you can find at this YouTube link.

Other connections, as my headline above alludes to, include a famous Dylan poster inspiring a similar Dr. J portrait, the premature death of Pete Maravich spurring a Dylan song, and the Minnesota Timberwolves’ tribute to Dylan, a former resident of Minneapolis. Plus the hometown links between Dylan and Celtics superstar Kevin McHale.

So, if you haven’t seen it before, I hope you’ll enjoy this piece, which I’d like to think Bill would’ve appreciated:

Bob Dylan and Basketball: 17 Surprising Connections