Drafted in Kareem’s shadow, grounded in his Jewish identity, and carried through a career marked by detours, scandal, and reinvention
In 1969, the Phoenix Suns lost a coin flip.
It is one of those NBA moments repeated so often that the shorthand has nearly replaced the story itself. Two expansion teams, Phoenix and Milwaukee, both at the bottom of their divisions, both waiting for the same prize. Lew Alcindor, later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the most dominant college player in the country. The toss decides everything: Milwaukee wins, Phoenix adjusts.
The Suns still needed a center, and a few weeks later they selected Neal Walk out of Florida with the second pick. From that moment on, Walk would be measured against Alcindor whether he wanted to be or not.
The comparison followed him long after draft night, eventually reducing much of his career to the player Phoenix selected after Alcindor.
Walk died in 2015 at the age of 67.
Florida, before the label
Before entering the NBA, Walk had already built a remarkable career at Florida.
At Florida, he was not a consolation prize: he was the program. When he arrived in Gainesville in the mid-1960s, the Gators were still a secondary basketball school. Within three seasons, they had put together the most successful stretch in program history to that point, going 54–23 and consistently finishing near the top of the SEC.
Individually, Walk’s production was overwhelming. Over his three varsity seasons, he averaged 20.8 points and 15.3 rebounds per game. As a junior, he led the nation with 26.5 points and 19.8 rebounds per game, a level of dominance that included a 31-rebound performance against Alabama. He followed that with 24 points and 17.8 rebounds per game as a senior, remaining one of the most productive players in the country on both ends.
The outbursts were not isolated. He had games of 33 points and 28 rebounds, regularly controlled the glass against top SEC competition, and finished his career with 1,181 rebounds, still one of the highest totals in school history. Against programs like Kentucky, he consistently produced at an elite level, averaging well over twenty points and twenty rebounds per game across multiple matchups.
As a senior, he was the only player in the country ranked among the national leaders in both scoring and rebounding, a rare combination that reflected both volume and consistency.
Phoenix, and a role that was more than expected
Walk stepped into an expansion team still searching for structure. Phoenix needed a reliable center, and Walk quickly became one.
As a rookie, he played all 82 games, the only Suns player to do so, and finished seventh on the team in scoring while holding his own physically against established centers. A first playoff appearance followed, with five games played out of seven in a series loss to Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain’s Lakers.
“I might not have been able to block shots like Jabbar, but I could take a charge. I might not have been able to score 30 points a game, but I could set a pick or grab a rebound.”
Walk settled into a steady role and earned regular minutes without becoming one of the faces of the team. The starting center that season, chosen by Red Kerr and later Jerry Colangelo as the franchise went through its first coaching transition, was Jim Fox, a seasoned veteran, a league journeyman trusted to anchor the position during the Suns’ first playoff run.
He played five seasons with the Suns, started consistently, and carved out a role as a productive center in a league that was not short on elite big men. The names he faced on a regular basis give a sense of the environment. Kareem of course, but also Wilt Chamberlain, Wes Unseld, Bob Lanier, Nate Thurmond… Centers who defined the position physically and statistically. Walk held his ground.
Walk became a productive NBA center, rebounding at a high level and giving a young Phoenix team some stability. For an expansion team still trying to establish itself, that kind of reliability had real value:
“Through many hours of hard work and dedication, Neal Walk became a fine NBA center, but unfortunately, he lived in the shadow of that infamous coin flip, which took away from the many great things he did on the court. Neal never really got his due as a player, but I’ve never seen another person with the work ethic that Neal had coming into the league.”
Jerry Colangelo
Contemporary scouting language could be unforgiving. One handbook described Walk as a solid but unspectacular center, a capable shooter without great mobility, and even questioned his rebounding impact despite his college résumé. The handbook’s language also shows how quickly expectations could harden around a player like Walk.
January 11, 1972: Neal Walk’s night against Kareem
One night in Milwaukee offered a rare reversal of the comparison that had followed Walk since draft day.
On January 11, 1972, Phoenix traveled to Milwaukee to face the Bucks. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was on the other side, now fully established as the dominant force everyone had expected him to be.
Walk scored 42 points, the highest total of his NBA career, in a game that turned chaotic in its final seconds. A disputed ending, confusion around the clock, free throws taken after time had apparently expired, and a Bucks protest that followed. In the middle of it, Phoenix escaped with a win in a season that was largely positive overall (49 wins), yet not enough to reach the playoffs, despite a strong duo in Connie Hawkins and Paul Silas.
It remains his career scoring peak, and it came against the one team that had defined his place in the draft.
Identity, background, and a different lens
Walk’s Jewish identity was another part of his career that rarely entered the usual basketball version of his story.
Neal Walk was born in 1948 in Brooklyn, New York, to a family of Russian Jewish descent. The family soon relocated to Florida, where he would grow up and eventually emerge as one of the program’s defining players. He grew up in what he would later describe as a mix of communities, largely Jewish, but also Puerto Rican and Cuban, where identities coexisted more than they clashed.
He spoke openly about being Jewish, about encountering anti-Semitism during his college years in the Southeastern Conference, and about choosing not to internalize it. He framed it as ignorance rather than hostility, something to acknowledge without letting it shape his trajectory.
There is a long tradition of Jewish players in basketball, often associated with guards and playmakers, players defined by craft and intelligence. Walk did not fit that mold. He was a center, a rebounder, someone whose impact came from physical positioning and repetition.
Later reflections from within that community would place him alongside players like Dolph Schayes as one of the few who dominated the glass at the highest level.
After his playing career, that connection to identity took a more personal and sometimes unpredictable turn. Following his years in Europe, Walk struggled to find stability, drifting between jobs and directions. During that period, he legally changed his name to Joshua Hawk, part of a broader spiritual search that reflected his evolving relationship to both basketball and himself. He would also later acknowledge drug use during his playing days, a factor that, in part, had contributed to the uneven trajectory of his career.
And yet, despite those detours, his place within Jewish sports history remained recognized. In 2006, he was inducted into the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.
The long detour
After Phoenix, his career moved in pieces.
He was traded before the 1974 season, spent time with the New Orleans Jazz, then with the New York Knicks, where he played sparingly before being released in 1976. The Knicks were no longer the powerhouse they had been at the start of the decade, and Walk’s role within that roster reflected that shift. Known to have used both hard and soft drugs, he adopted a vegetarian lifestyle, and his professionalism increasingly came into question.
“I think in retrospect, Jerry (Colangelo) made the right move in trading me. “When your center is quoting Lao Tzu and ‘The Book of Changes’ and is eating sprouts for breakfast instead of furniture, it’s time to make a change.”
By the mid-1970s, the perception had changed. Some profiles openly questioned his edge, portraying him as a player who had lost part of his competitive drive despite a proven résumé that included a 20-point season and a 1,000-rebound year in Phoenix. The shooting touch, passing and rebounding instincts had not disappeared, but by then the league’s view of him had changed.
He continued his career overseas, playing in Israel and Italy, extending his time in the game beyond the NBA.
The Phoenix scandal
Questions about Walk’s drug use during the 1970s surfaced publicly only years after his NBA career had ended.
In the late 1980s, as investigations into drug use within the Phoenix Suns organization revisited that earlier period, Walk’s name appeared in reports built on grand jury testimonies and accounts from former dealers. The material was uneven, often based on second-hand statements, but it pointed to an environment where drug use had been present and, at times, normalized.
Most of the allegations concerned the early 1970s and became public only much later.
One dealer claimed to have sold him cocaine regularly during the 1973–74 season, describing repeated transactions and identifying him as one of the players with the most consistent demand. Other testimonies placed him within a broader circle of players exposed to drugs, mentioning shared spaces and casual usage.
There were also documented incidents. In 1977, while playing in Europe, Walk was arrested in Venice in connection with the possession of hashish. He denied knowledge of the substance and was not charged in connection with the larger Phoenix investigation, but the episode reinforced the perception that his career had drifted into something less controlled.
The sources themselves require caution.
The 1970s NBA was not insulated from the wider culture, and drug use was neither rare nor hidden. The way those stories were reported often blurred the line between confirmed facts and testimonial claims.
The second life
A spinal condition, likely present since birth, developed gradually before forcing a series of medical interventions. What initially appeared to be neurological issues led to the discovery of a tumor affecting his spinal cord. Surgery removed the growth, but the damage was already done.
Walk lost the use of his legs.
He now had to navigate daily life in a wheelchair, rehabilitation, accessibility, and a system that did not always know how to categorize him.
Colangelo’s role, and the Suns’ presence, became central in that phase of Walk’s life. Living in Phoenix after the surgery, he was brought back into the organization by Jerry Colangelo, the same figure who had drafted him and later coached him during key stretches of his early career. Colangelo created a position for him in community relations, providing both structure and continuity at a moment when much of his life had been reset. Walk gave talks, worked with disabled athletes, and remained connected to the game in a different capacity. The franchise also supported him in practical ways, including access to a wheelchair-adapted vehicle. He would stay within the organization for years, later transitioning to a role as an assistant photo archivist, extending a relationship that had begun on draft night into something far more lasting.
“Neal was a guy who was fighting against the odds since Day 1. He didn’t have a lot of athletic ability, but he had a big heart, a great work ethic and he had some skills. He could shoot, rebound and pass. He was made for the triple-post offense. When he, Hawk (Connie Hawkins) and (Paul) Silas were on the front line for Cotton (Fitzsimmons), he was a perfect fit.
He was underrated in so many ways as a player. He went against big-time centers every night and more than held his own. I had a real soft spot in my heart for him. He deserves to get credit for being one of our early icons on the Suns. He was never appreciated as much as he should have been appreciated.”
Jerry Colangelo for The Arizona Republic, 2015
What remains
The coin flip remained attached to Walk long after his career ended, but it explains very little about the player Phoenix actually drafted. He became a productive NBA center in an era crowded with great ones, scored 42 points against Milwaukee on the night of his career, and lasted 568 games despite a career that rarely followed a straight line.
After spinal surgery cost him the use of his legs in 1987, basketball returned to his life in another form. The Suns brought him back into the organization, where he worked in community relations, supported disabled athletes, and later became an assistant photo archivist.
When Walk died in 2015 at 67, the old descriptions returned: Florida’s first great basketball star, an early Phoenix Sun, the second pick after Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. All of them were true. None of them told the whole story.
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