Walton Suddenly Back on the NBA’s Most-Wanted List

Bill Walton was sitting with some Prime Ticket colleagues at a restaurant in Sherman Oaks the other night when someone mentioned USC’s Labor Day loss to Memphis State.

“Hey, since it was Memphis State, maybe they could have used my help,” Walton quipped.

Wrong sport, but still a pretty good idea.

In the 1973 NCAA championship game against Memphis State, Walton, UCLA’s All-American center, had possibly the best individual performance ever in college basketball--44 points on 21-of-22 shooting.

These days Walton is on another hot streak. He seems to be the country’s most sought-after basketball commentator.

Walton is close to signing with Channel 13 as a Clipper commentator, and he already has a deal to work 27 Maverick telecasts for the team’s flagship station in Dallas. He also will be back on Prime Ticket’s UCLA telecasts, do Pacific 10 games for Raycom Productions, and fit in a few telecasts for ESPN. He also figures to be back with CBS for the NCAA tournament.

Eat your heart out, Dick Vitale.

Channel 13, for its first season of Clipper telecasts, is bringing back Mike Fratello, the Clipper commentator last season when the games were on Channel 5, and wants to team him with Walton.

Channel 13 and Walton at one point Thursday had a deal, but then the final question came up: If the Clippers and Mavericks both make the playoffs, who gets Walton?

This hardly seems worth haggling over. What are the odds on both the Clippers and Mavericks making the playoffs?

Anyway, this snag no doubt will be worked out, and Walton and Fratello, when not obligated to NBC, will work with play-by-play man Ralph Lawlor.

This could be the best three-man basketball announcing team since Dick Enberg, Al McGuire and Billy Packer did college basketball for NBC.

It definitely will be a busy fall and winter for Walton, but it also has been a busy summer.

He spent a lot of time participating in fantasy and instructional basketball camps, was at Lake Tahoe a few weeks ago for a reunion of the 1977 Portland Trail Blazer team that won an NBA championship and last weekend he was in Hawaii, doing promotional work for a Japanese company.

Tuesday, he was at the Dana Point Resort to tape a “Greatest Sports Legends” segment that will be shown next year, and Wednesday he was at Prime Ticket in Century City to take part in an “It’s Your Call” program, along with most of Prime Ticket’s other announcers.

There is some bad news, though. He suffered another stress fracture in his right foot seven weeks ago and spent six weeks on crutches. He is limping badly.

“Just overexerted myself at some of those basketball camps,” Walton said.

Stress fractures hampered Walton throughout his NBA career. Over a 15-year span, Walton missed 762 games, or the equivalent of 9 1/2 seasons.

“I was born with bad feet,” he said. “The arches are too high to take the constant pounding of playing basketball.”

First, the stress fractures were in the left foot, then he had most of the problems in his right foot. In April of last year, he had his right ankle fused.

He no longer can play basketball, not even recreationally, but at least the constant pain is gone, and so are the sleepless nights.

“It was after I had my ankle fused that I decided to devote all my energy into a broadcasting career,” Walton said.

The competitive drive that made him such an outstanding basketball player also is helping make him an outstanding broadcaster.

Walton, who lives in San Diego, is the single parent of four boys, ages 15, 13, 11 and 9.

Any wild hairstyles among the group?

“Oh yeah,” Walton said. “They’ve all done that.”

Walton’s reaction?

“I just make sure I get pictures.”

Walton, although well-barbered when he played for John Wooden at UCLA, had it put in his contract with the Trail Blazers that he could wear his hair any way he wanted.

His long red locks and beard contributed to his image of being a radical.

What the public sees now is a totally different Bill Walton.

“I’ve lived and learned,” he said.

Add Clippers: The team is still without a cable deal for next season, and reportedly negotiations are not going well.

“We want to at least be able to break even,” Prime Ticket President John Severino said.

Tennis snafu: The Jimmy Connors-Aaron Krickstein match on Labor Day, shown out of sequence, was one of the darndest things since the Heidi Bowl in 1968.

It was like watching the third quarter of the football game, then suddenly switching to the final minute, then going back to the third quarter.

The operations division of CBS, apologizing for the error, explained that the taping device feeding the West Coast malfunctioned, so it had to be operated manually and the wrong reel was used.

Just another example of viewers on the West Coast getting short shrift. The match was live in the East.

Audition: Roy Firestone gets a tryout as the host of ABC’s “Into the Night” next Monday through Thursday.

If Firestone gets the job, and ABC is high on him, he will still continue doing his “Up Close” show for ESPN.

Firestone will be going head to head against himself, because both “Into the Night” and “Up Close” are on at midnight.

TV-Radio Notes

Channel 11 will join tonight’s Dodger-Pittsburgh Pirate doubleheader in progress at 4 p.m. because the first game is a make-up and wasn’t part of the 50-game schedule. However, Channel 11 was able to add next Friday’s game at Atlanta to the schedule, meaning the entire three-game series will be televised. . . . NBC’s first Notre Dame telecast is Saturday, when the Irish play Indiana at 10:30 a.m. Dick Enberg and Bill Walsh report. . . . SportsChannel will have its own Notre Dame-Indiana telecast Sunday at 8:30 p.m. . . . With Pat Summerall still working the U.S. Open, Verne Lundquist will be paired with John Madden on Sunday’s Ram-New York Giant game on CBS. The NBC game at 1 p.m. is the San Diego Chargers at San Francisco, with Charlie Jones and Todd Christensen reporting.

Jones is beginning his 32nd season as a network announcer for NBC. His first pro football telecast was the Los Angeles Chargers against the Dallas Texans at the Coliseum in 1960. . . . Christensen was back at his new home in Alpine, Utah, this week after returning from track and field’s World Championships in Tokyo. Christensen, wife Kathy and their four sons, ages 4 through 12, moved out of Los Angeles at the end of July after selling their El Segundo home to Raider executive assistant Al LoCasale. “We got lucky,” said Christensen. “We were able to sell our El Segundo home, buy a new home and move, all within a six-week period.”

NBC’s track coverage was technically very good overall, but it hit a low point after Mike Powell’s record jump last Friday. It was bad enough that NBC didn’t let other TV outlets show the jump, then the network made matters worse by dragging out tape-delayed coverage and not showing the jump until the end of the show. Perhaps worst of all were the commercial breaks. Powell would jump, Lewis would jump and then came a ton of commercials. . . . Hustle award to Channel 7’s Jim Hill for getting Powell in the studio Sunday night.

Recommended viewing: Randi Hall has an interesting and revealing interview with Darryl Strawberry, which airs tonight on Prime Ticket’s “Press Box.” This is the first of a series of one-on-one interviews Hall will be doing. . . . Prime Ticket’s Larry Burnett will fill in for Gabe Kaplan on KLAC’s “Sportsnuts” Monday. . . . XTRA’s Lee Hamilton will pull an unusual double Sunday. He will announce the Chargers’ game at San Francisco, then catch a plane to work San Diego State’s opener at home against Cal State Long Beach at 6 p.m. Hamilton will have a police escort from Candlestick Park to the San Francisco airport, and then will travel by helicopter from Lindbergh Field to Jack Murphy Stadium.

NFL Films is putting out a series of home videos to mark the 25th year of its existence. The first one, “Silver Celebration,” is typically well produced, but two segments warrant some kind of bad-taste award. One has a muscular Lyle Alzado saying, “I don’t think there’s a person on earth who can kick my. . . . “ The other has George Allen saying he died a little with each loss.