The Reeducation of Bill Walton

Scholarship and popular commentary on the basketball player Bill Walton tend to focus on his remarkable tenure at UCLA, his countercultural lifestyle, his role as a ‘Great White Hope’ while basketball was becoming increasingly Black, and the unrelenting string of injuries that cut short his professional career. A lesser-known aspect of Walton’s story is his dramatic transformation from a ‘revolutionary’ who once partnered with the notorious sports activist Jack Scott and was monitored by the FBI into a ‘born again capitalist’ when he left the Portland Trail Blazers for the San Diego Clippers in 1979. Walton’s metamorphosis mirrored a broader drift of the counterculture into the mainstream as the 1970s turned into the 1980s, and, as the story goes, the anti-materialist hippies became acquisitive yuppies. Moreover, Walton’s whiteness enabled him to traverse such divergent cultural and political spheres. Walton’s bankable racial identity, which he perceptively criticized in the 1970s, protected him when he was an activist and eased his reintegration back into the mainstream once he abandoned his radicalism

Economics · Political science · Race, History, and American Society