Starting at the Top, Walton Will Help CBS at Tournament

The cast of characters responsible for televising the entire NCAA basketball tournament on CBS this season will gather in New York for a two-day basketball-broadcasting seminar Monday morning. Subjects will range from the nuances of switching from blowout to barn-burner to the care and feeding of a golden throat rubbed raw from calling the play-by-play on four games in a single day during the tournament’s first round.

One of the participants in this annual excercise will stand head and shoulders above the crowd of announcers, producers and directors, a position he also hopes to achieve in his fledgling broadcasting career. Some people learn their craft by paying dues in high school gyms working with antiquated equipment hooked up to the closest available phone. Bill Walton, the former center for the UCLA Bruins and three NBA teams, is getting his education during the showcase event of the college basketball season.

Walton, who retired in 1987, surely was the most surprising name announced by the network this week on its list of eight broadcast crews assigned to the first two rounds of the tournament. He’ll probably be working in the west, paired with Sean McDonough, the play-by-play voice of the Boston Red Sox and clearly a rising network star.

Walton was in another galaxy as a player at UCLA under John Wooden, but a young man who loathed the attention and literally ran the other way at the approach of reporters and camera crews as a collegian in the early 1970s. Not much changed when he turned pro, often making life difficult for the poor wretches assigned to cover him for a good portion of his injury-plagued NBA career.

“When I was a younger player, I didn’t realize the role the media had in basketball, sports and life,” he said this week from his home in San Diego. “I learned that later. I felt more comfortable (with the media) later on. ... I don’t know who holds what against me; I’m just working hard and trying to do a good job.”

The man responsible for bringing Walton to CBS, at least for one very long weekend, is executive producer Ted Shaker, who heard about his work as a color commentator on UCLA games this season for Prime Ticket, a Southern California-based cable network. Walton did an audition tape with CBS announcer Jim Nantz a few weeks ago during a UCLA-USC game, and Shaker clearly liked what he saw and heard.

“If he can apply the same sort of discipline to this that he did to (playing) basketball, he could be very good,” Shaker said this week. “He is the least experienced (on CBS’s NCAA crew), but he is as knowledgeable on the game as anyone. The quality of his voice is not the highest, but as a viewer myself I’m more interested in substance than style. I’m willing to go beyond the polished presentation.

“There’s no guarantee here. Am I going to sit here and say, ‘This guy will redefine the role of the analyst?’ No. But it’s worth a try. TV falls in love with people real fast. If he’s sensational, we’ll use him more, just like anyone else. We haven’t made any decisions beyond the first two rounds.”

This is supposed to be the new, mature Bill Walton, 38, a divorced, single father of four making all the right moves to carve out a new career. But who will ever forget the hippy-dippy hero of UCLA’s championship seasons, the Grateful Dead enthusiast, anti-war protester of the Vietnam era, the bearded “Mountain Man” who led Portland to an NBA title in 1977, then helped the Celtics win again in 1986, playing on two chronically sore legs and feet that kept orthopedic surgeons busy for years.

Now, this counterculture figure is back in the culture, proving once again there is life after sports for ex-jocks, no matter how many bridges they may have burned along the way. Never mind the countless professional broadcasters out there with just as much basketball knowledge, men and women who wait years for a chance to get this kind of opportunity, if they ever get the call at all.

For example, when Washington’s James Brown makes it big, we have every reason to applaud. A basketball star at DeMatha and Harvard not quite talented enough to play in the NBA, he learned his craft the hard way, working nights and weekends in local television for years before his network break. Now he’s doing football play-by-play at CBS, and will also do NCAA play-by-play for the first two rounds, and most likely the regionals as well. That’s the way it ought to work.

People who have heard Walton say he’s had some interesting comments on the air, that he speaks his mind and offers strong opinions. To his credit, he also seems to be working at the craft with his mentor and San Diego neighbor, Charlie Jones, a veteran NBC announcer who has helped Walton since last spring when Walton told him of his interest in broadcasting. Jones has spent considerable time reviewing and critiquing his tapes. Now they even have the same agent.

“What we work on is mechanics,” Jones told the Los Angeles Times. “The content is all Bill’s. We talk about all kinds of things -- his on-camera presence, his appearance, his clothes, his makeup.”

The lumberjack look is definitely gone, and so too apparently is another potential broadcasting liability. Walton grew up with a stuttering problem but overcame it, with considerable help from Marty Glickman, a longtime New York sportscaster and NBC broadcasting coach who worked with him 10 years ago.