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Last week, ESPN debuted a four-hour documentary on the Portland Trail Blazers’ champion center, Bill Walton. The Luckiest Guy in the World, directed by Hoop Dreams helmer Steve James, tracks Walton’s arrival in Portland from UCLA, his swerving between transcendence and injuries, and his indefatigable sunniness. The first two episodes are streaming on ESPN+; the second two air on basic cable Tuesday, June 13.
Along with a chronicle of Walton’s career, the series is also a close look at the rise of the Blazers’ title team and a tour of Portland in the 1970s. As such, it overlaps with the salad days of Willamette Week, which printed its first issue in 1974.
Several of the supporting players in Luckiest Guy are people who regularly contributed to this newspaper or were the subjects of our coverage (or both). Here are three:
Jack Scott
Scott was, in David Halberstam’s words, “a classic radical of the sixties.” Balding and bespectacled, Scott was also Walton’s roommate, living in the Alphabet District with one of the most famous athletes in the world.
Emerging out of Berkeley, Calif., Scott was essentially a labor organizer for professional athletes, writing a book on “jock liberation” and organizing campus rallies. Scott and Walton found common cause in Portland when the Blazers drafted the longhaired 7-footer out of UCLA. Scott’s fierce opposition to painkilling shots resonated with Walton as he endured a series of stress fractures in his feet.
In The Breaks of the Game, his book on the Blazers, Halberstam writes: “Everything with Scott was potentially political.” That was reflected in Scott’s occasional contributions to a fledgling WW. In 1976, he wrote a cover story on an FBI undercover informant named Alan Selling. “At the heart of the story,” it begins, “are Selling’s charges that local FBI agents instructed him to break into the residence of Portland lawyer David Spiegel, whose son Mike is a member of the Weather Underground, an activist radical political organization.”
It was a subject on which Scott was well versed. In 1974, he drove kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst across the country in between her robbing banks at the behest of the Symbionese Liberation Army. (That brought the FBI to Walton’s door, as the new documentary shows.)
Scott would also play a key role in Walton’s getaway from Portland. After the Blazers won the championship in 1977, the stress fractures in Walton’s feet returned. Both Scott and WW sports columnist-turned-agent John Bassett were in the room when Walton read his demand that the Blazers trade him. As this WW story recounts, a trade soon followed, but Walton and Scott had different visions of where he should go, and their friendship crumbled along with the Blazers.
Jack Scott died in Oakland in 2000.
Larry Colton
Colton is one of Portland’s literary lions. You might call him a pillar of Portland—except he already used that title for his 1980s WW column that recounted the soap-opera exploits of characters named Wes Hills and Al Ameda. (Pillars of Portland got a television pilot in 1983. It was not well received.)
Colton played baseball for the Philadelphia Phillies before wrecking his pitching shoulder in a bar fight. Later, he trained writing teachers for Portland Public Schools and founded Wordstock (now known as the Portland Book Festival). In between, he rode bicycles down the Oregon Coast with Walton.
Luckiest Guy liberally borrows footage of that bike trip from Fast Break, a 1977 movie that Colton later termed “an arty-farty sports documentary.” Why was Colton on that tour de Oregon? He was writing a book about the Blazers, and the director of Fast Break wanted another character on the trip who would speak more often than Walton (who was made shy by a stammer).
Ten years ago, Colton recounted the coastal pedaling to WW—not fondly.
“Walton was going with a buddy from UCLA, who at the last minute canceled,” Colton said. “The night before the trip, the film crew called me. The farthest I’d ever ridden my bike was to the grocery store. I had a three-speed with a baby seat on the back. Walton had this fancy English racing bike. He’d take off, and a couple minutes later he was out of sight. I basically rode down the entire coast by myself. He’d wait for me, and I’d catch up, out of breath—every part of my body was hurting, especially my butt—and he’d say, ‘Let’s hit it!’ It was almost 100 degrees. It was ridiculous.”
Colton later inherited the WW sports column from John Bassett—who had become Walton’s agent. Colton’s first column was a spirited interview with Bassett about how Walton’s medical treatment had soured him to the Blazers franchise.
Paul Knauls
Knauls makes several appearances in Luckiest Guy, recounting the atmosphere of Memorial Coliseum during Blazermania. Wearing his trademark captain’s hat, Knauls tells how the arrival of his wife, Geneva, would bring the arena to a halt. The story has nothing to do with Bill Walton, and it’s the high point of the second episode.
Knauls is popularly known as “the mayor of Northeast Portland,” in part because he outlived so much of the neighborhood he loves. He founded the Cotton Club, a jazz nightclub on North Williams Avenue. Later, he and Geneva oversaw a hair salon called Geneva’s Shear Perfection. As Portland’s Black population was displaced from Albina by rising prices and racist policies, Knauls stuck around. He can regularly be found at Dawson Park.
In 2021, WW placed Knauls on the cover of our “Reasons to Love Portland” issue. Read his story here.
Episodes 3 and 4 of The Luckiest Guy in the World premiere Tuesday, June 13, at 5 pm on ESPN. Alberta Abbey will host a free watch party, featuring three subjects of the documentary: Paul Knauls; longtime season ticket-holder Curley Fuller; and David Lucas, son of Maurice Lucas. Tickets are available here.