College basketball is back, and so is Bill Walton. The basketball legend and Grateful Dead aficionado made his ESPN season debut at the Maui Invitational on Monday night alongside (very patient) play-by-play man Dave Pasch.
It didn’t take long for Walton to mix things that have nothing to do with basketball into his one-of-a-kind basketball analysis. Before Kansas and Chaminade tipped off, Walton compared the Jayhawks to a volcano, a waterfall, and a breaching whale. Naturally.
That’s a hell of a way to start a broadcast. And when the game actually started…
https://twitter.com/Jifhawk/status/1199177100235878400
The Maui nightcap featured Walton’s UCLA Bruins against the BYU Cougars, and it featured many more wacky Walton moments, such as this segment of Walton on the beach terrifying children (and also calling Jay Bilas “Jake,” a bit that went on all night):
It only got weirder when they returned to the broadcast:
There was this hilarious exchange between Walton and Pasch about Chandler, AZ:
Walton: … from Chandler, Arizona. You ever been there?
Pasch: I live there.
Walton: Hmm. You live there? I thought you lived on the airplane like me.
Pasch: You’ve been to my house!
Walton: Was that in Chandler? I thought that was in Phoenix.
And this exchange about BYU star guard Jake Toolson, Danny Ainge’s nephew:
After more Ainge talk, a 27-second sequence that perfectly shows how a Walton broadcast usually sounds:
And a couple more gems:
Much more of this to come in the 2019-2020 college basketball season. Hang in there, Dave Pasch.