Never The Same

Reflecting on a death in the Pac-12 and the message for college sports as a whole.

I’ve avoided talking about the death of the Pac-12 Conference for the most part on Halves Not Quarters.

Maybe I didn’t feel like I had anything to say, maybe I didn’t want to admit that I had a lot to say. What I could muster on my preview of the league last year was coated in the protective, jaded cynicism of someone pretending to move on.

Perhaps the only time I’ve truly addressed death and the Pac-12 was when I threaded a few thoughts together to discuss a death in the Pac-12 as legendary and iconoclastic Washington State head coach Mike Leach passed in late 2022.

Unfortunately, death in the Pac-12 once again forces me to reflect upon the death of the Pac-12, and all that it represents across a wider college sports landscape.

On Monday, May 27^th, 2024, former UCLA center, three-time Naismith Player of the Year award winner, longtime Pac-12 commentator, champion of the American West and all the life within it, and soundtrack to many otherwise-meaningless Tuesday nights in my life, Bill Walton passed away at the age of 71.

Walton was a relentless force in the commentary booth, demanding partners to engage on all matters of spiritual, political, natural, and occasionally basketball-related topics, all while overpowering any dissent with an unstoppable optimism and genuine joy that smoothed the edges of the many uncomfortable moments his free associating and basing brought about. Bill Walton couldn’t promise an interesting basketball game, a Huskies win, or easy math homework, but he always provided two hours of transcendence set to the tune of squeaking shoes and animal impressions.

Bill Walton and Mike Leach share similar qualities that help define what the Pac-12 conference was as a whole. These leaders went their own way, bucking convention and popular trends, at times making a few enemies along the way. The Pac-12 attempted to forge it’s own path, chartering its own television network and championing all-around athletic success rather than zeroing in on revenue sports. Mike Leach’s “defiant act of insubordination” cost him his job at Texas Tech, and he found refuge in the rolling cereals of Washington’s agricultural heartland. Bill Walton’s all-encompassing journeys weren’t welcome amidst the neurotic focus of college basketball’s eastern cathedrals, leading him to seek refuge in the Lands of Good Rain and Valleys of Eternal Sun he loved so dearly.

In some ways, it’s fitting. Imagining a Pac-12 without Leach and Walton robs the league of the life and idiosyncrasy that defined it. In the place of these two dynamic figures lies an impersonal, homogenized product devoid of the magic that grew it larger than sports. Unfortunately, that’s the direction in which college sports plows ahead. USC, UCLA, Washington, and Oregon will now compete on a weekly basis with Indiana, Maryland, Ohio State, Minnesota, and Rutgers. Longtime rivals, allies, coworkers, and neighbors Washington State and Oregon State have been kicked to the curb. Pristine academic institutions and formidable Olympic sport foes California and Stanford have been relegated to cross-country flights in search of academic and athletic peers in the Atlantic Coast Conference. This doesn’t seem like a world fit for Bill Walton’s unbridled enthusiasm, rugged individualism, and remarkable geographic repository.

Tradition, innovation, and regionalism were some of the driving factors behind the enthusiasm for college football and basketball that eventually led me to start this blog on a whim. As a college freshman living 3000 miles away from home, I wasn’t sure if Washington football, the Pac-12 Conference, or the West Coast in general would continue to mean as much in my life. As I suffered through the most painful Husky football season I could remember, these things could’ve very easily slipped away from me. Had it not been for the opportunity to see Washington play Washington State in the Apple Cup that November, who knows whether I would’ve bothered to keep watching. I fear that the loss of these ties might send people in similar boats down different paths.

While Bill Walton incessantly referred to the Pac-12 by its otherwise unused tagline, The Conference of Champions, his life proved that the Pac-12 has always been about something more than national championships. Walton won two of them as a center at UCLA, but his memory within the Pac-12 extends far beyond what was done on the court. Whether it was interviewing Oregon’s football coach in a full helmet while eating peanut butter out of a jar, mauling a lit cupcake at an Arizona State game, or needling his straight man Dave Pasch by repeatedly asking what his name was, Walton gave the Pac-12 an identity. The conference wasn’t alone in this; the Big Ten had a certain feel and certain schools to it, as did the Big XII, the ACC, the Big East, and who could forget, the SEC. As the Pac-12, Big XII, and soon, the ACC, disperse into faceless conglomerates under the banners of their former rivals, college sports will lose the room to accommodate figures like Bill Walton that break the mold.

I want to say that college basketball won’t be the same without Bill Walton.

The problem is that it will be.

College basketball will be more of the same, more similar, and less individual without characters like Bill Walton and the league he championed with every boisterous breath.

For an ecosystem that thrives on difference, more of the same isn’t healthy. As Bill Walton would be likely to lecture with ten minutes to go in a two-possession game, college sports is becoming a monocultured lawn rather than a beautiful, layered redwood forest of unique sights. With so much disruption to the scene brought by increased transfer flexibility, shady NIL contracts, increased labor organization amongst players, conference realignment, lawsuits, urbanization, cultural homogenization, and now the loss of the sport’s greatest advocate, we must take time to plant the seeds that will grow into the next generation of giant sequoias, sword ferns, and redwood sorrels that fans will learn to revere. I’ll save the next eight minutes of this Walton impression for another time.

On March 18^th, 2023, UCLA defeated future Big Ten opponent Northwestern 68-63 in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. In the process, UCLA forward Jaime Jaquez Jr. passed Bill Walton on the all-time scoring list for the university. Jaquez Jr. had an entire extra season to do so, as freshman were prohibited from varsity teams in Walton’s era.

It’s easy to be humble when reveling in your own accolades. How did Bill Walton react, however, when his own achievement was trounced by someone with an easier path?

He beamed, he praised, he celebrated, and he definitely rambled for way too long.

It’s hard to encapsulate Walton any better.

No matter how rare they become, I’ll always think of Bill Walton in the crucial, defining moments when college basketball goes off-script. Everything would just be the same without them.