Father's Day Is Cringe (A Father's Rant)

Bill Walton was a one-man Venn diagram. He was a two-time NCAA champion at UCLA under the legendary John Wooden. A two-time NBA champion. A Basketball Hall of Famer. An inveterate winner whose high school and college teams, at one point, won an absurd 142 consecutive games. The six-foot-eleven redhead was also an unlikely Deadhead who attended over 850 Grateful Dead shows and frequently showed up to call nationally televised basketball games in tie-dye. As an undergrad, he was arrested for protesting Nixon's bombing of Cambodia, after which his famously buttoned-up coach bailed him out and made him write a letter of apology to the President. Walton wrote it. What almost no one knows about Walton the broadcaster is that until he was 28 years old, he stuttered so badly he could barely say hello. He described himself in those years as "a very shy, reserved player and a very shy, reserved person." And then, somehow, he worked his way out of it, becoming one of the most uninhibited,…