Slick Watts Earns La. Hall Honor

It's not the Basketball Hall of Fame, but Slick Watts will take it.

On June 25, the famous former Sonic and Xavier University standout will be inducted into the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame, (via thetowntalk.com).

And while I enjoyed reading about Watts' honor, I chuckled a bit when I came across this paragraph:

After 4½ seasons, Watts had an opportunity to return to the city where he made a name for himself as a college player. He finished the 1977-78 season as a member of the Jazz.

Well, if by "Watts had an opportunity" you mean "Watts got forced out by Lenny Wilkens and was bitter as hell about it," then, yeah, he "had an opportunity."

Here's how Watts described the events surrounding his trade to New Orleans in his book Slick Watts's Tales from the Seattle Supersonics:

I was so upset that I left the game against Kansas City that night at halftime. I caught a flight the next day. It was painful flying over the city, looking down. Tears came over my eyes, and I said, "I'm gone."

Obviously, things weren't quite so seamless as it might seem from reading the story in today's paper. The Slick Watts/Lenny Wilkens/Bill Russell/Bob Hopkins quadrangle is a bizarre and poorly understood aspect of Sonic history. Watts went from being the most famous athlete in Seattle (seriously; the guy opened the Kingdome, for crying out loud) to being persona non grata in the span of a few months, a fall from grace that was completely unpredictable and utterly shocking in hindsight.

Watts deserves credit for not harboring grudges against Wilkens and the Sonics, and for continuing to throw his support behind Sonic fans despite the way he was treated in the 1970s, but to pretend that he left for New Orleans out of his own volition is far, far from the truth.

Edit: While we're on the subject of Slick, please enjoy this dope video from the Sonicsgate crew, featuring the man himself and other local legends. SHEER DOPENESS. --chunk

Name That Sonic

On a Degree of Difficulty scale, I'd put this one at about a 4. First Clue: Not a player (Playah? Yes. Player? No.)

Gurg

 Tim Grgurich is an NBA champion, and while I'd love to offer this basketball lifer the heartiest of congratulations upon reaching the apex of basketball achievement, it's possible ... no, not just possible, completely likely that he could care not one whit.

To know what Gurgs thinks of the league, listen only to what he told author Curt Sampson Full Court Pressure, the seminal book on mid-90s Sonic basketball:

"The NBA is bullshit."

If you followed the Sonics in the 90s, you knew Bob Kloppenburg handled the team's intense defense, George Karl handled the media and the overall tone, and Grgurich handled the offense and the intensity. To give you just a taste of that intensity, here's another quote lifted from Sampson's book:

As always, Gurg's voice was hoarse. ... He ran through every part of every drill, working as hard as any player, the sweat dripping off his nose and chin. He'd been here since six-thirty: he watched a mile or two of videotape, ate a bran muffin, worked out Ricky [Pierce], worked out himself, then practice, more tape, weight lifting, another workout. He might get home by 7 p.m.

There were a number of reasons why I pulled for Dallas in the Finals: Because they weren't the Big 3, because of Jason Kidd, because the way my 2-year-old daughter would imitate Jason Terry's airplane move and how she fell in love with JJ Barea, because of Dirk's greatness ... all of that.

But more than anything else, it was because of Gurg. To see James, Wade, and Bosh be rewarded for, as Joe Posnanski put it today, "cutting in line," would be sad and pathetic. To see Tim Grgurich be rewarded would be the complete oppposite: A reward for hard work, intensity, commitment, and, above all, sacrifice.

Congratulations, Gurg.