To put it politely, you're full of shit. Good find, Minstrel.
The writer's naturalistic metaphors are those of someone who has tried acid. He opens by comparing Walton to an old tree and a dinosaur. And Walton knows Oregon's geography. Excerpts:
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Bill Walton arrived at the San Diego Natural History Museum carrying a large black chair. I watched him walk with it, a little stiffly, past the Moreton Bay fig tree outside. The tree is one of the city’s grand natural treasures: more than 100 years old, nearly 100 feet tall, hugely spread, still standing despite a century of weather and air pollution and climbing children. It’s so large that it made even Walton, one of basketball’s dominating giants, look small...We were standing inside the building, near the skeleton of a dinosaur (Allosaurus fragilis, the sign said), watching him approach...His stride was deliberate, determined; each step seemed to cost him something...He is now 63, at least in regular human years, but his body has always operated on some other, more severe time scale. His injuries have been relentless; his life story reads like a jock Book of Job...
He tells that story in his new book, the amazingly subtitled “Back From the Dead: Searching for the Sound, Shining the Light and Throwing It Down.” For an athlete’s biography, the book is surprisingly fatalistic: It begins with Walton on the brink of suicide and ends with many of his friends dying...“I’m the luckiest guy in the world.” In what possible sense is Bill Walton the luckiest guy in the world?...luck, as everyone knows, is both good and bad: It streams down on us constantly, indifferently, with its mixed blessings, in the same way that sunlight pours down on us constantly with its visible and invisible light, its vitamin D and its radioactivity...
At 14, Walton blew out his knee in a pickup game. It was during his recovery from that injury, while he lay in bed for three months, that Walton hit his improbable growth spurt: He got in bed at 6-foot-1 and got out at 6-foot-7½...He went to one of the worst teams, and the smallest market, in the league: the Portland Trail Blazers. Walton’s long red hair flew behind him as he ran, and a scraggly red beard nested on the bottom of his face. (The only thing that Walton cared about in his first N.B.A. contract was control over his grooming.) In his prime, Walton was the human embodiment of the beauty of the sport. Watch the old footage: He looks like a basketball textbook come to life, crouching deep in his defensive stance, arms spread wide, leaping instantly to block a shot, then leaping up again to grab the rebound, then turning and firing a perfect pass up the floor to his guards...he was probably the best-passing big man in the history of the game. He blocked shots not out of bounds but directly to his teammates; he became famous for throwing outlet passes to start his team on a fast break before he had even come back down to the floor from getting a rebound. For a couple of magical years, the Blazers were a joyful unit, the epitome of unselfish teamwork...doctors told him they had abandoned hope of saving his basketball career — their new goal was to make sure they wouldn’t have to amputate his feet.
At the natural-history museum, Walton and I sat in a sun-drenched conference room up on the fourth floor. Its windows showed a panoramic view of the rugged landscape around San Diego: mountains and mesas that blend craggily into Mexico. Walton sat high in his special chair, his back turned to the view so he wouldn’t become distracted...He is self-conscious, and intensely self-conscious about his self-consciousness. The veins of irony and sincerity and pain and joy run very deep, and they cross and tangle. As a player, Walton was famously maniacal in his pursuit of winning. He was also famously miserable when he was hurt. This was a special agony of Walton’s injuries: the pain wasn’t just physical; it was existential...
One of the best conversations Walton and I had during our two days together consisted entirely of listing the rivers in Oregon.
“Willamette River,” I said, speculatively.
“Willamette River,” he confirmed. And then he added: “McKenzie River.”
“McKenzie River,” I said.
“Santiam River,” he said.
“Columbia River,” I said.
“Nestucca River,” he said, gaining momentum. “Little Nestucca River.”
“Illinois River,” I said.
“Metolius River,” he said. “John Day River. Deschutes River.”
