This is John Batchelor, conversation with my colleague Bill Whelan of the Hoover Institution

about a basketball player who dominated his time at UCLA and afterwards, certainly as a voice of college basketball, Bill Walton, he's

leftist at the age of 71 and Bill writes a tribute to him also reminding me that Bill Walton was much more than a man who could play

basketball ferociously and win championships and endure the rigors of fame, also got involved in the Vietnam War protests,

also got involved in the Patty Hearst kidnapping case, a colourful and one of a kind, Bill Walton and the Pac-8 gone too.

Bill has much more to say about all these things later in the show.

Enjoy.

It was, well, very interesting interesting there's just a social divide at

UCLA at the time between establishment and rebellious but UCLA basketball

John was a point of convergence where everybody could come to to a

Poly pavilion and root on the Bruins and one thing people could get along with

Walton was very much in the protest camp he was arrested once in a Vietnam

protest you mentioned his voice John he had a terrible stuttering problem in

his youth in his 20s. It wasn't until his late 20s and he actually kicked it and the

joke was and he wouldn't stop talking after that so he's making up for lost time. So just a very

interesting complex guy I would also point out that when he played basketball in the

1970s for Portland he ended up getting tied into the symbius of the SLA and Patty Hurst of all things because he was friends with a guy named

Jack Scott who was a radical lawyer who was friends with the Simi's Liberation Army.

So Walton's just kind of this great snapshot into a

California in the 60s and 70s job but also America very divided in the early

70s as well.