Bill Walton was perhaps never so lucky as he was in his very first game of organized basketball, when he was but a fourth grader riding the bench on the sixth-grade squad at the Blessed Sacrament Parish School in San Diego, California. He sat for nearly all four periods, entering only once it had become a certifiable blowout. In the final moments of the game, he caught a soon-to-be-familiar vision that would come to define his style as one of basketball’s all-time great centers: out on the perimeter, the young Walton saw a wide-open teammate directly under the rim and rocketed a pass toward the basket. “But I misjudged the distance,” Walton wrote in his 1994 autobiography. “And instead heaved the ball directly through the hoop, nothing but net.”
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