“When I was lying on that floor—and I had nothing—I was going to kill myself if I had a gun,” Walton said in an interview with Sports Illustrated's Maggie Gray.
Walton, who did the interview as part of the publicity tour for his book, Back from the Dead, has undergone 38 operations in his life. Most of them were on his feet and back, balky body parts that derailed a player who could have been the greatest center in NBA history.
Walton, the No. 1 pick in the 1974 draft, never played a full 82-game season. He missed fewer than 15 games just once, in 1985-86 as a 33-year-old backup for the Boston Celtics. Foot injuries cost him three full seasons and parts of many more, making him one of the league's greatest "what if?" cases.
He was an ahead-of-his-time center, gifted with athleticism, a transcendent passing ability and two-way skills. Despite playing only 468 game ...
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Article written by Tyler Conway