Chet Walker, one of the N.B.A.’s most understated stars of its developmental decades, who was a vital member of the 1966-67 champion Philadelphia 76ers and who later became an Emmy Award-winning movie producer, has died. He was 84.
The National Basketball Players Association confirmed the death on Saturday night. No other details were provided.
Walker, who played in seven All-Star games during a 13-year professional career, was a starting forward on the 76ers’ title team, which won 68 regular-season games and broke the Boston Celtics’ championship stranglehold.
On a team often included in discussions of the N.B.A.’s greatest, Walker was the third-leading scorer, averaging 19.3 points per game and 8.1 rebounds, while fitting seamlessly with the future and fellow Hall of Famers Wilt Chamberlain, Hal Greer and Billy Cunningham.
Walker, a 6-foot-7 inch forward, was known for pump-faking defenders into a vulnerable position for his patented jump shots and drives along the base line, where, he calculated, it was difficult to double-team him.
A prideful but publicly modest man, Walker asked Cunningham, one of his presenters at his 2012 Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame induction ceremony, to speak of his career exploits.
“He was slow — you were slow, Chet — but you just couldn’t stop the man,” Cunningham said. “He just took you to the spot on the court, faked you, went up over you, took it to the hole, or someone was open and he’d find the open man.”
In 1969, one season after the 76ers broke up their championship team by sending Chamberlain to the Los Angeles Lakers, Walker was traded to the Chicago Bulls under unusual circumstances.
When Pat Williams, the 76ers’ business manager, was offered the Bulls’ general manager’s position, Jack Ramsay, the 76ers’ coach and general manager, told him he would be released from the two years remaining on his contract, on one condition: that Williams agree to take Walker with him to Chicago in a multiplayer trade that included the Bulls’ forward Jim Washington going to Philadelphia.
“Jack had developed this thing for Washington, thought he’d be a better fit with Billy C. than Chet,” Williams said in an interview for this obituary in 2022. “Of course we wanted to make that trade. Chet was a great player but when you’ve been on the floor with Wilt, Greer and Billy C., you’re going to sacrifice.”
In Chicago, Walker was a focal point of a Bulls unit that featured the forward Bob Love and the guards Norm Van Lier and Jerry Sloan. He began a six-year run with the Bulls by averaging over 20 points his first three seasons. In February 1972, he scored a career-high 56 points against the Cincinnati Royals — a team record that lasted until Michael Jordan scored 57 points in February 1987.
More significant, Williams said, was Walker’s contribution to establishing Chicago as a viable city for professional basketball. “The sport hadn’t made it in Chicago going back decades and they were again looking to move the team,” he said. “But when Chet got there, everything changed.”
Within two seasons, the Bulls’ regular-season victory total grew from 33 to 51, and the team, known for its rugged style, roughly tripled its average home attendance. But they typically fell short in the playoffs, most conspicuously failing to close out the Golden State Warriors after taking a 3-2 series lead in the 1975 Western Conference final.
Walker scored just 10 points in Game 6, though, and he was hospitalized after the Bulls lost Game 7 in Oakland, Calif., with the recurrence of a kidney infection that would later cause scarring and require ongoing medication.
In the 2022 interview, Williams said he still regularly heard from Walker, adding: “One thing that eats at him is why the Bulls never retired his number, 25. He’ll say, ‘You and I helped save basketball in Chicago.’ And they did retire Bob Love’s number and Jerry Sloan’s, so why wouldn’t they retire Chet’s?”
Chester Walker was born on Feb. 22, 1940, in Bethlehem, Miss., the youngest of John and Regenia Walker’s 10 children. His family owned a small cotton farm, on which Walker worked until his mother, after losing a daughter in 1950 to tuberculosis and suffering from her husband’s physical abuse, moved with her youngest children to Benton Harbor, Mich.
Experiencing integration for the first time, Walker starred at Benton Harbor High School and earned a scholarship to Bradley University, where he was a two-time consensus All-America, averaging 24.4 points and 12.8 rebounds over three seasons. Nicknamed “Chet the Jet,” he was drafted by the Syracuse Nationals in the second round, made the N.B.A.’s All-Rookie team and moved to Philadelphia with the franchise in 1963. He finished with career averages of 18.2 points and 7.1 rebounds.
Walker’s mentor in the film industry and connection to Hollywood was the producer Zev Braun, a neighbor in Chicago. Braun was executive producer of Walker’s debut 1979 production, “Freedom Road,” a television mini-series about a former slave who rose to the United States Senate during Reconstruction. The series, based on a 1944 novel by Howard Fast, starred Muhammad Ali and Kris Kristofferson.
Walker’s 1989 television series, “A Mother’s Courage,” co-produced with Richard L. O’Connor, won an Emmy in the Outstanding Children’s Program category. Starring Alfre Woodard, it was based on the life of Mary Thomas, a single mother who fought to protect her nine children on Chicago’s impoverished West Side and whose youngest, Isiah, became one of the N.B.A.’s most prolific point guards.
“It’s a difficult transition from the athletic to the so-called normal world,” Walker told The Los Angeles Times in 1995. “There’s an image that goes along with being an athlete, an image of not being intelligent, of being a dumb jock. Not dependable. It follows you out into the world. You have to prove yourself all over again.”
In his 1995 memoir, “Long Time Coming: A Black Athlete’s Coming-of-Age in America,” Walker wrote that he never married for fear that he might harbor his father’s rage. And as his basketball career progressed, he became increasingly mindful of youthful degradations.
His first chapter began with a directive he most recalled from childhood: “Boy, you’d better learn to stay in your place.” He added: “This growing awareness of ‘my place,’ of these outside limitations and constraints upon freedom of movement, came over me gradually, sadly, inevitably, as it would for most Black children.”
During a decade dominated by Michael Jordan, a commercial groundbreaker, Walker also wrote that “today’s Black athletes have lost the ability to see their lives in any frame larger than the court.”
As the Bulls’ representative to the N.B.A. Players’ Association, he was a plaintiff in a class-action, antitrust federal lawsuit filed in 1970 by the players’ union against the league and its 14 teams in the Southern District of New York. Oscar Robertson, the union’s president, was lead plaintiff in the case, which was settled in 1976, establishing the earliest form of free movement for players.
Believing it did not go far enough, Walker refused to support the settlement and filed an appeal and an unsuccessful separate lawsuit against the Bulls’ owner Arthur Wirtz and the team, which he had left over a salary dispute before the 1975-76 season.
Upon returning from a two-month stay in the Virgin Islands, Walker met with Wirtz, who informed him that the N.B.A., through a statement from David Stern, then a league attorney, asserted that if Walker chose to play again, he was “legally Bulls’ property.”
“I sat there reflecting on the word — property,” Walker wrote. “Making $200,000 a year, I knew that millions of people would love to be in my shoes. Yet with Mr. Wirtz’s claim to own me, I felt that two hundred years of my family’s history in America had suddenly become real to me. I never said another word to him but turned and walked out the office door.”
He never played again. After five winning seasons, the 1975-76 Bulls tumbled to a 24-58 regular-season, a showing that put them out of playoff contention.
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