COLUMN | Remembering Lenny Wilkens: The Bigger Man Behind Seattle's Basketball Legacy

The underground parking level at Madison Square Garden in New York is where my mind went immediately after learning of Lenny Wilkens' death on Sunday. It is not the most positive memory for me of him and, I'd guess, during his lifetime, for him of me, either. How his life and my recollections of Wilkens flowed from that moment in 1985 speak to his greatness and grace, and the sadness I feel at his passing, which is why I fixed upon that long-ago interaction in Midtown Manhattan.

At the time, Wilkens was near the end of his second stint as head coach of what was then a very much unraveling Seattle SuperSonics. He'd lost the locker room, the team's front office had lost faith, and his coaching colleagues had lost some regard. I wrote an analysis of the situation for The Seattle Times that was published as a series when the team, with me in tow, grinded through a long, six-game Eastern Conference road trip.

Early in the trip, the players were passing around photocopies of my stories on the team bus. Someone's wife or friend was faxing (look up the term if you are, say, 30 years old or younger) each story as they appeared. Every day, players asked me, "Has Lenny said anything to you yet?"

He hadn't. "Maybe he's not going to say anything," I'd said, wishfully. The first two stops of the trip were in cities where he'd played — Atlanta and Cleveland. Maybe Wilkens was distracted by the reunions. The third stop was New York, his hometown, and after the Sonics lost, 92-90, Wilkens summoned me off the team bus.

Wilkens had his back to the bus, so I had a clear view of all the players pressing their noses into windows to watch what they assumed was a showdown. But Wilkens didn't yell at or belittle me, like so many other coaches have treated so many other sports writers. Later in my career, one coach mandated that he and I could not be alone in a room together. Wilkens on that day folded his arms and pursed his lips — instantly recognizable signs that he was not pleased. He asked, "Who are you to criticize me?" The question sounds harsher than the way it was posed. I was 20-something, in my third year as a sports writer, all covering the Sonics, all with Wilkens as coach. I explained that I was too young and too supposedly "objective" to have my own opinions. So I'd spoken to his players, players on other teams, and coaches and general managers of other teams. It was their opinions that I analyzed and wrote, I said. He seemed hurt.

I told Wilkens that the collection of opinions, coupled with the team's lack of success, pained me. I'd idolized him, as a player, when I was a kid. His leading the Sonics to the 1979-80 NBA championship was one of the highlights of my life. I don't remember what was said next, but I recall clearly that we shook hands, and he said, "Talk to me." So I did, and he talked back, and that's how it went for as long as I knew him.

I'm grateful for all of that, complicated as it was. If not for Lenny Wilkens, I don't know what I'd be today. And I'm certain I'm one of countless Seattleites who can say that, whether inspired by his basketball exploits or influenced by his decades of devotion to the Odessa Brown Children's Clinic, which has dispensed affordable health care in the Central District and Rainier Valley. Now old enough to have my own opinions, I believe Wilkens to be the most influential sports figure in Seattle's history. You'd have to have a memory as long as mine to realize the truth in that.

Lenny Wilkens, who was 88 at his passing, marks every significant milestone in my developmental arc as a sports fan in this once-podunk city. The Sonics were Seattle's first modern, major-league professional team — if you don't count Husky football, that is. And Wilkens was its first true star. He became the Sonics' player/coach, won the NBA All-Star Game MVP, and led the league in assists his second year here. I was hooked. That season, my brother Mike, our friend Jim, and I were at a game in which the Sonics trailed the Cincinnati Royals by four points with only seconds left to play. Wilkens diagrammed a play that led to a dunk, had his team pressure the inbound pass, which was stolen, and Seattle scored to tie and eventually won in overtime. Ever since, whenever a hometown team reached dire straits, we'd vow to stay to the bitter end, uttering in unison, "Remember Cincinnati."

Along with the rest of the city, I was furious when the Sonics traded Wilkens and Barry Clemens to Cleveland, of all places, in 1972 for Butch Beard. I attended Wilkens' return as a player with the Cavs that November, gave him a standing ovation along with everyone else, and booed the Sonics, whom I loved anyway. I think that's when I learned about heartbreak. But my heart would soar when Wilkens made a triumphal return, taking over a 5-17 Sonics team as head coach and guiding them to the seventh game of the 1978 NBA Finals against Washington. They lost that series, but beat the Bullets for the championship the next year. I can still hear the horns that honked in what seemed like every car in Seattle right afterward.

Not long after, I was covering the remnants of that title team. Wilkens was not derailed by my 1985 series about his coaching. He couldn't have been. He was, after all, the third Black head coach in NBA history, at a time when that wasn't universally considered a positive development. He spoke of his experiences with racism on occasion over lunches, never on the record but without any trace of bitterness. He was too kind-hearted, too regal, really, to carry a grudge. I learned that when he helped me confirm a big story, just five months after my critical pieces about him. Kicked upstairs to general manager after a 31-51 finish in 1984-85, he confirmed to me that he was hiring Bernie Bickerstaff as his replacement head coach. My copyrighted story appeared on the front page of The Times on the day the Sonics would take Xavier McDaniel, the "X-Man," with the fourth pick in the NBA Draft. The late Sonics owner, Barry Ackerley, was furious that their big draft move was upstaged and ordered me to return to my newspaper and tell my editors to "stop the presses."

That wasn't the first time Wilkens had been a primary source on a big scoop for me. Before I'd even covered my first game as a beat writer, I went to Wilkens with information uncovered by a Times colleague and me. Wilkens confirmed that the team knew about a relationship between Lonnie Shelton, a starting forward on the championship team, and a convicted prostitute. He then explained on the record that it was the reason they had just traded Shelton to Cleveland.

I had not been right — or wrong, really — about Wilkens in 1985. He empowered players, and the players on that Sonics team couldn't find their way. Wilkens coached four other teams over 19 more years after leaving the Sonics. Those teams made the playoffs 14 times, and he retired from coaching with 1,332 victories, the most at the time in NBA history. He's been enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame three times — as a player, coach, and member of the 1992 Olympic "Dream Team." He's immortalized in a statue along Lenny Wilkens Way in front of Climate Pledge Arena.

Lenny Wilkens is Seattle and bigger than Seattle at the same time. He's a bigger man, that's for sure. I wondered for a time why, after the hubbub in 1985, he continued to treat me so … professionally. A few years later, when he was coaching — very successfully — in Cleveland, I invited him to breakfast and posed a question: Why wasn't he upset with me? Wilkens did a familiar thing in which he smirked and chuckled silently. He then replied, "For what?"

Editors' Note: This piece was updated with additional information about the history of the Seattle SuperSonics.

Glenn Nelson covered the Sonics and the NBA at The Seattle Times for 17 years. He was a founding executive at Rivals.com, a co-founder at Scout.com, and the founder of ESPN HoopGurlz, a national website about women's and girls' basketball. He has won regional awards for his columns about race for the South Seattle Emerald.