WCS 36: A bone to pick with Bill

And the major boomer bug up my ass

Unless you turn back now, you are going to hear some critical words about the widely-adored Bill Walton. Please take my words as coming from The Departed Big Redhead’s tribe, and I don’t just mean because I used to have cat named Drexler and my favorite place to gather up a bunch of friends is Portland’s Spirit of ’77.

I offer them because in the summer of 1995 I slept out in Golden Gate Park with all of the most hardcore Grateful Dead fans, the day after Jerry Garcia died. Everyone was lovely and I tried to be lovely back at them. And the Dead crowd loves them some Bill Walton. There’s a mathematical property that might show how these facts position me within the Dead Head tribe, but math is not my forte and this is not the venue.

I come bearing no platitudes because announcer Bill Walton weaponized race in the time in and around the 1998-99 NBA labor strike, and I won’t ever forget it. The NBA on NBC’s broadcasts had never featured as many “thugs” as it did that season, unless you count when the commissioner decided hip hop overtones were grounds for a player dress code.

I remember asking a workforce question of and being dismissed by David Stern, in an ESPN conference room. This man was possibly the most in control, most masterful boss I’ve ever been around. He knew what Walton’s tugging at the character of “thugs” and “classless” players was worth in the court of public opinion.

If Stern didn’t commission this dog whistle bullshit, he certainly wasn’t doing shit to stop it. This was not a Jeff Van Gundy situation.

Let’s go back to this time: Allen Iverson is ascendant, as are wypipo-alarming tattoos. The popularity of baggy shorts have arena ticket buyers in a panic. Latrell Sprewell has just choked his coach. And the NBA is holding on to its precious salary cap/wage ceiling like a baby might her binky.

Walton had 1960s radical credentials, but that was some shit he did in his twenties; I’m talking about a grown-ass man with the privilege of knowing how to change the world. In that way, this athlete is top-tier representation of Boomer Betrayal. Feel me? He made some money, made a symbol of himself, and from comfort watched America start feeding on herself.

It bugged me that Walton would be ridiculously nice when we met. At UCLA for a feel-good piece that would never see the light of day, the giant and his freshman son Luke so provided such good content that I shifted the short piece’s focus from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and his kid to them. (Back then, Kareem still behaved like literally the largest asshole on the planet). Bill would come into the Manhattan office of ESPN The Magazine to hang out with his best bud, who happened to be my job’s top boss: A man with whom I did not hit it off even a little bit.

When Bill Walton charmed me anyhow, my ears would burn.

Because on TV dude would engage in this anti-edgy-player crusade, as would certain other big-name chroniclers. As I pointed out last week, coverage of our sports leagues tends to be a simulacrum of legitimate reporting; stuff that agents and owners don’t want out rarely gets out. When any late-1990s player got busted with weed, it was the stuff of handwringing. When Walton was clearly lit, that was just his day off.

Most of of the sports nation didn’t recognize the tensions at play. Too many of y’all still thought Bill Conlin was a viable sports writing icon. Motherfuckers dug Scott Raab.

By nearly every account Bill Walton was a beam of light to most everyone he came into contact with. Yet, when I think of all that the young Bill Walton might have been, I can’t get past seeing him as symbolic of wasted Boomer promise.

In another life, one in which his radicalism wasn’t burned or bought out so soon, he might have helped explain the conditions that made that “thug” style so attractive in the nineties,

I was sitting with a group of tutors in their twenties when my phone bleated with the Trump verdict. The news was far from reason to ignite fireworks, in the eyes of these young people.

10 New series dramatizes Indian abductions

It’s only upon the first fuck that you are going to get what’s interesting about The Green Veil, a free new show on The Network. The Green Veil has to be the first limited series or movie to take a pass at the 20th-century America phenomenon of kidnapping Native American children.
The Network

• John Leguizamo stars in this eight-part series on the minority-owned upstart network. Not sure yet about the quality of the storytelling, but sometimes the effort alone is worth noting.

• “Some of the storytelling in The Green Veil undercuts how intense this story really is. But the performances of Leguizamo and the rest of the cast are worth watching, as is the part of the story about the government abduction of Native and immigrant children, writes Joel Keller.

Lil Hits

• Artillery, “a profitable, valuable resource in the LA arts” is for sale, according to an email from editor Tulsa Kinney. “A dossier of facts, accounting figures and advertisers” is available to interested buyers.
  Artillery

• Armani on an NBA coach had always struck me as silly. Wesley Morris and Pablo Torre have me understanding what I was missing out on in the era before uniform comfort wear stalked the sidelines.

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Approach a protest crescendo

Down in my neck of the woods, this week you could see protesters turning the 101 freeway into a megaphone, edgy grown-folks protesting at UCLA and UC Davis. Together these outbursts—along with the IDF’s new batch of careless killings—have made even CNN ask the Biden Administration how long Israel’s streak of these my bad, “tragic-error” killings will be tolerated.

Keep protesting. That shit works, yo.

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9 Weed companies shutter as Americans use weed in record numbers

A new survey shows that cannabis has surpassed alcohol in popularity among Gen Z. The kids now join ageless cool kids and an increasing number of oldsters who ain’t got shit to do in this preference.

So, why is the legal weed business filled with broke-ass motherfuckers? This week we learned that the Golden State’s largest delivery service is facing foreclosure and one of the country’s biggest operations is facing layoffs.
High Times/Lost Coast Outpost