NBA History Break: Where Bill Walton Drinks Alone In Your Kitchen

If you wake in the middle of the night and find a seven foot tall man sitting in your kitchen drinking Wild Turkey, do not be afraid. You are merely being visited by Bill Walton, most likely in a moment of victory when Walton wants to be alone with his thoughts. Please, don’t stay up. He doesn’t need you, or even Larry Bird, to keep him company. The hum of the cosmos whirling around his lofty forehead is more than enough to stave off loneliness.

This is how Bill Walton celebrated his NBA championship in 1986, per a 2009 Boston.com interview with Larry Bird.

Bill came over. It was late. Doorbell rang and Dinah answered and she was like, ‘Hey, Bill. Larry’s in bed.’ I heard him, so I go out and I said, ‘Hey, man I ain’t doing this tonight. I can’t.’ He goes, ‘Don’t worry about it. I don’t even need you. I’m just going to sit down here at the table.’ He had a bottle of whiskey. And he said, ‘I’ll be here when you wake up.’ And he was.”

And thus it was how two greats of the game celebrated victory: one with sleep, and the other by soaring the rise and fall of his own effervescent mindwaves while getting cranked on Wild Turkey and staring at the floor in someone else’s dark kitchen while unspooling the entire catalog of the Grateful Dead from memory through his ears. I love you so much right now Bill Walton, and I am not even kidding in the least. (Via the fabulous Chitwood and Hobbs and Adam Jacobi.)