Free spirit

 This one's for the granola-eaters, the tie-dye wearers, the Deadheads, and also for an appreciation for the deft pass out of the pivot. It's for everyone who grew his hair out and wore a headband when he hooped. It's for the 1970s, dammit, a wild and crazy time if ever there was one.

Speaking of which, here's some crazy for you this morning: Bill Walton is dead.

Passed to his reward yesterday at 71, and may his reward be great. Cancer got him. May it be cast into outer darkness forever for that offense, and for all others.

What it took from us Monday was maybe the greatest college basketball player of all time -- hoops analyst Jay Bilas thinks so, anyway -- and of course so much more than that. It  took a child of the counterculture '70s who protested the Vietnam War at UCLA, but who also loved and revered his coach, an old-timey disciplinarian named John Wooden.

It took a hoops genius who played with pure joy but who was undone by pure human torment, his pro career wrecked by perhaps the most fragile feet in America. And it took a confirmed Deadhead who hung with Jerry Garcia, and who decades later was still quoting the Dead as a network basketball analyst.

Some people found that weird and annoying. Others, who actually knew Bill and thought him one of the kindest souls who ever breathed air, thought it was just Bill being Bill: A free spirit no one could ever fence in.

What I know is one Monday night in 1973 I watched him play the greatest national championship game anyone ever played. Walton scored 44 points that night as the UCLA machine took down Memphis State. He grabbed 13 rebounds and blocked seven shots. And he made 21 of 22 shots, which looks like a misprint but isn't.

Twenty-two shots. One miss. In a national championship game. Perfection isn't possible in basketball, everyone knows that, but for one magic night Bill Walton made a hell of a run at it.

He went on to grow a beard and let his hair go and don a headband, and lead the Portland Trail Blazers to the 1977 NBA title in six games over Julius Erving, George McGinnis and the favored Philadelphia 76ers. They were some team, those Blazers. Played beautiful basketball, sharing the rock in Jack Ramsay's intricate motion offense, and it all started with Bill Walton, the best passer out of the post who ever lived.

Maybe someone was better, back in the day and up until this one. But I haven't seen him yet.

In any event, those Blazers seemed the perfect metaphor for Walton himself, a delightful amalgam of structure and improvisation. Wooden more than anyone else was able to balance those two with Walton; if he was so obsessively autocratic he even taught his players how to properly put on their socks to prevent blisters, he was tolerant enough to recognize his players had their own convictions as college students.

Which is why Walton was present and accounted for at those aforementioned protests. And why he always put his athletic socks on exactly as Wooden taught him, and taught his children to do the same.

Rest easy, Big Bill, man of your time.  Perhaps we'll all don a headband today, just for you.