Basketball great Bill Walton, who died Monday at age 71, was a noted Deadhead who attended hundreds of Grateful Dead shows and was friends with members of the band.
Bill Walton was a proud Deadhead. The basketball great, who died Monday at age 71 following a prolonged cancer battle, was famously a huge fan of the Grateful Dead . A fixture at the band's shows — he was hard to miss at nearly 7 feet — Walton reportedly had attended more than 850 shows since 1967, including when the Dead played in front of the Great Pyramids in Egypt in 1978. As a broadcaster for ESPN, Walton often inserted references to the band in his color commentary during games.
Walton even peppered his 2016 memoir, 'Back From the Dead,' with his love of the band. Among the anecdotes that Walton shared is how he got his Boston Celtics teammates into a Grateful Dead concert in 1985. His teammates had never seen the band perform and gathered at Larry Bird's house before the show. 'I had to explain to everybody in the Grateful Dead that ...
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