Aug 29th, 2007
Bill Walton, master commentator
Does Bill Walton know everything? He sure seems to think he does.
I am a basketball fan. One of my favorite things to watch is the national team. I’ve just always been interested in it, all the way back to the original Dream Team. I am especially interested now that Satan is coaching our team (Mike Krshewzzskkizdiklyzii).
Anyway, our beloved Americans are fighting it out in a qualifying tournament in Vegas right now. We played Puerto Rico last night, winning our 4th game last night, and we need to be one of the top 2 teams to have a guaranteed place in the Olympics next Summer. And, here’s the real tidbit of interest - Bill Walton is announcing these games.
I like Bill. I really do - he seems like a likeable enough guy. He sure was a great basketball player (or so the old cronies tell me). But the thing about Bill is, he sure likes the sound of his own voice. Many people do (I probably am one, I’m a preacher), but it manifests in all of us in different ways. Bill’s love of his own vocal frequencies shows up in the form of fantastical exaggeration and obscure historical facts. His real genius is his ability to wind these two elements together in such a seamless way that even his co-announcer is dumbstruck, literally silenced before the rhetorical skills of Bill Walton - literally rendered awestruck and beyond comment by this master of all things verbal!
Just for kicks, I thought I would chart Bill’s exaggeration index in the game against Puerto Rico last night, and come up with a “average per game exaggeration index.” International games have 10 minute quarters, which makes a 40 minute game. My studies show that Bill averages about 2 exaggerations per minute, which adds up to approximately 80 exaggerations per game. Fascinatingly, they ALL follow the same pattern:
1) Bill slowly begins meandering a conversation about something. His topics are quite diverse: last night he was reading sections of Phil Jackson’s book.
2) After a few seconds of such aimless wandering, he’ll start firing out facts about his topic. When he’s really on his game, he’ll get excited at this point, and start piling up fact after fact in rapid-fire succession, his voice slowly escalating, like a pressure cooker preparing tonights pork chops.
3) You know how your pressure cooker lets off steam? It whistles: a loud, screeching sound that gathers you into the kitchen before your ears explode. With Bill, this happens in the form of exaggeration. You can feel it coming, and if you listen to him a while and practice, you can predict the very sentence in which it will come.
The other funny thing about Walton is his seques. They are incredible. Last night, Lebron James had a thunderous dunk, very entertaining, in which took off from the right side of the lane, cranked the ball way back over his head, and tomahawed it. Walton would later comment, “Lebron took off as if from the cliffs of [some Puerto Rican cliff] towards the island of [some Puerto Rican island], where the US in [some year] went there and [historical details]”.
Anyway, I like Bill. He’s just nuts.