March 22, 2004
Bill Walton, pundit
Last night, in a game vs. the Sacramento Kings, Steve Francis reamed out an official after a no-call that left the Houston Rocket playmaker gasping on the floor, having taken an elbow to the groin. ESPN analyst Bill Walton indicated that profanity was part of Francis's outburst and that he will be fined or suspended.
Then Walton put in a bizarre plug for us to read the latest Frank Rich column in the New York Times.
I have no doubt that 99 percent of the viewers had no idea what Walton was talking about. I barely know anything more than that Frank Rich is a darling of my one liberal friend who reads him and that Rich receives a fair share of criticism on conservative Web sites. Imagine then a Venn diagram (those intersecting circles from math, or logic class) showing the universe of NBA TV viewers and those who also read Frank Rich. Maybe a handful of Knicks fans are in both camps?
So thanks to Walton, just now I read Frank Rich for the first time. He ties in Sept. 11, Janet Jackson's breast-baring and Bono's dropping of the adjectival form of the F-bomb. Rich provides usual tired liberal hyperbole and de rigueur Taliban analogy: "Washington's latest crew of Puritan enforcers — in the administration, Congress and the Federal Communications Commission — are all pandering to a censorious Republican political base that is the closest thing America has to its own Taliban."
Apparently Walton meant to indicate that creeping Puritanism would ensnare Steve Francis as well? Who knows?
If you Google on "Bill Walton" and "Frank Rich," you will come up with four instances of Walton praising Rich in his columns for Espn.com and NBA.com.
We all know Walton's a crunchy granola type, but he might be better off keeping his endorsements of a partisan columnist to Walton's own opinion columns rather than his broadcast persona.
