Bill Walton has tried to make it easy for his four sons to play in the shadow of ...

One evening in mid-January, the phone rang at Luke Walton's apartment at the University of Arizona. It was his father, Bill, basketball star for the UCLA Bruins in the early 1970s. Luke declined a chance to play for UCLA and now starts as a redshirt freshman for the Wildcats, a Pac-10 rival and a national power with hopes of winning this season's NCAA championship.

Arizona would play at UCLA that week. Walton had called to give his son some good-natured grief.

"UCLA was the greatest in the history of the sport," he reminded Luke.

Luke suggested that was history.

Sure enough, Arizona won handily, 76-61. Afterward, Bill bought dinner.

"He didn't have any comments then," Luke said with a laugh recently in Tucson. "I let him off the hook."

Luke, 19, is one of Bill's four basketball-playing sons: There's also Adam, 24, who completed his college career and now helps coach a high-school junior varsity team in San Diego; Nate, 22, a junior who plays for Princeton; and Chris, 18, a high-school senior bound for San Diego State. They're all at least 6 feet 7, but none is as tall as their 6-foot-11 father.

Walton's sons seem to have an admirable relationship with him - and he seems to have made it possible by not trying to relive his playing days through them or attempting to set their courses in life.

"He was always stressing the rest of the world besides basketball," Nate said during a phone conversation from Princeton. "He made a point of emphasizing the importance of education.

"My brothers talk a lot of trash about the Pac-10 being better in basketball than the Ivy League," Nate said, and Bill might join in. But Bill also has hung in his rec room a framed sports page with a headline marking a significant Princeton victory in an NCAA tournament game: "Brains Beat Bruins."

Bill's upbringing is responsible in part for his interests outside of basketball, at which he still makes a living, as a television commentator. It was an easy segue after an injury-ridden pro career highlighted by his leading the Portland Trail Blazers to the 1977 NBA championship and chipping in as a happy reserve on the Boston Celtics' 1986 title team.

Growing up in San Diego, the son of a librarian and a music teacher, young Bill read and studied music - and listened to UCLA games on the radio.

"I could not have had a better childhood," Bill, now 47, said recently at his home only blocks from where he grew up. "I had a basketball. I had a bicycle to get to where I needed to go. We had this endless supply of books. And we had music. As a kid I played the horns - when you know how to play one horn, you know how to play them all. I took up the drums in the '80s. In the mid-'90s, I started playing classical piano. I have a teacher who has the patience of a saint."

It's a jolly house that Bill shares with his second wife, Lori. A huge, first-floor room is a combination Grateful Dead shrine - with posters, photographs and assorted memorabilia - library and a music conservatory. His drums fit easily into one corner, but it's the Steinway next to them that he plays more now. His books reflect his passions: Native Americans, environmental issues and public speaking.

Life on the home front was enjoyable. Bill and the boys spent many an hour together hiking, playing volleyball, passing time on the beach and playing basketball on the court in their yard.

"It was good having an older brother to show you things about the game, and you being able to show your younger brother," Nate said. "It was almost unique to be told growing up, basically, to make as much noise as you wanted and have fun."

And the boys absorbed their father's court presence and unselfish play.

"Luke has a feel for the game that you don't teach," Arizona Coach Lute Olson said. "He just knows how to play. He's the best passer on our team. Defensively you look at him and you say he's not quick enough to keep up with people on the perimeter, but people don't get around him. He doesn't pick up silly fouls because of his knowledge of the game."

"They all have such incredible court sense. They know all the fundamentals," said the boys' mother, Susan Walton. She recalled of her ex-husband, "In college, watching him on the court was like watching a dancer."

Bill's time with the Celtics was a satisfying finish to his pro career, she said - and a memorable time for all the Waltons. "Boston was really family," she said. "That Christmas before winning the the championship, there were 48 kids at a Christmas party."

"When Dad played for the Celtics, we used to terrorize the dressing room," Nate recalled. "We'd try on shoes. Put Larry Bird's jersey on.

"After we left, the Celtics never allowed kids in the dressing room. We called it the Walton rule."

True, the boys have been unable to escape the comparisons as players.

"People would always say, `You're not your dad,' " Adam said. "If I scored 27 points in a game, they would say, `You played like your dad tonight.' I had to learn to answer all the questions."

But Bill said: "As a parent, I've tried just to create opportunities where the kids can have a chance to find something in their lives. It doesn't matter whether they play basketball, whether they're involved in business, whether they're involved in entertainment, whatever it is. I've encouraged the boys to play sports only for health, for fun, and I have not pushed them into sports and particularly not basketball.

"I've always told the kids: `It's your life, you have to make this decision. I'm more than happy to talk to you about it. . . . But you're not living your life for me.' "