Donald “Slick” Watts, an unheralded, undersized, patchy-haired point guard who turned his obstacles into springboards, endearing himself to fans of the Seattle SuperSonics long past the team’s existence and helping to invent the headband as a basketball fashion signature, has died. He was 73.
His son Donald announced the death on social media on Saturday in a statement that did not provide further details. In 2021, Watts had a major stroke, and he spent recent years dealing with lung sarcoidosis, an inflammatory condition.
Watts played for the SuperSonics for just four and a half seasons, from 1973-78. Though he helped lead the team to its first playoff berth, he was not around in 1979 for the team’s first and only finals victory.
Still, fans and fellow players held him in a singular regard.
In 2012, decades after his retirement — and four years after the team moved and became the Oklahoma City Thunder — a Seattle rap duo called the Blue Scholars made Watts’s name the title of a song about the Sonics. James Donaldson, a Sonics center in the 1980s, told The Seattle Times after Watts’s death, “He epitomized the Seattle SuperSonics.”
That reputation came from a combination of pluck and generosity.
Watts’s basketball origins were modest. He was an impressive collegiate shooter, averaging 22.8 points per game and shooting 49 percent from the field. But he was just 6-foot-1 and played for Xavier University of Louisiana, a little-known historically Black Catholic university in New Orleans (not Xavier University of Cincinnati). He went undrafted in 1973.
That might have been the end of his basketball career, except for the fact that Watts’s college coach, Bob Hopkins, was a cousin of Bill Russell, the Celtics great then coaching the Sonics. He secured Watts a professional tryout. The team was already loaded with shooting talent, so Watts devoted himself to passing. Russell offered him a $19,000-a-year contract, paltry by N.B.A. standards.
Watts wound up leading the team in his first season with 5.7 assists per game, even though he averaged only 22.9 minutes a contest.
The next year, the franchise’s eighth season, he helped lead the team to its first playoff appearance. He was rewarded with a three-year contract for more than $100,000 a year. In the 1975-76 season, he averaged 8.1 assists and 3.2 steals per game, becoming the first player to lead the league in both categories. He was also named to the N.B.A. all-defensive first team.
He physically embodied his moxie in the way he styled his head.
A childhood football injury had left his hair growing only in patches. He shaved his head and gave it gleam with baby oil. Now, many Black players embrace baldness; back then, it was enough to make Watts ubiquitously known as Slick.
“In this day of long hair, Watts is a very unusual person,” The News Tribune of Tacoma, Wash., commented in 1974.
And he went further, wearing a band around his head cocked to the side at a jaunty angle. In high school, Watts had experimented with using tape; ultimately, he found a head-sized sweatband in the women’s section of a sporting goods store.
“Most basketball players wear sweatbands on their wrist — he wears one on his head,” The News Tribune wrote in surprise. The New York Times reporter George Vecsey said the combination of the bald pate and the headband made Watts look like “the planet Saturn in sneakers.”
Hustle on the court and eccentricity off it inspired affection from fans. Watts showed an insatiable appetite for signing autographs, telling The Arizona Republic in 1976, “No scrap of paper is too small to autograph, because there’s a person at the other end.”
Then the honeymoon ended. Watts demanded more money and a no-trade clause in his contract. The dispute spilled into the media, damaging his image. After Seattle had a losing start to the 1977-78 season, a new coach, Lenny Wilkens, took over and found success giving other guards more playing time. Watts bridled at his reduced role.
“I had put too much of myself into the city to sit down on the bench,” he told The Associated Press in 1979.
In January 1978, Watts was traded to the New Orleans Jazz for a 1981 first-round draft pick. He later compared the trade to a divorce or the death of a family member.
“Thanks for the good times, thanks for the sweat, thanks for the optimism,” Bill Schey, a sports columnist for The News Tribune, wrote after the trade.
Watts did not find a consistent role with the Jazz or, later, with the Houston Rockets. Still in his late 20s, he waited to be called up by another team. No calls came.
The Sonics unexpectedly made it to the finals in 1978. They lost to the Washington Bullets but the next season, in a championship rematch, the Sonics won.
Watts said he did not watch those games. In the 1980s, he took a job making $16,000 a year as a physical education teacher at a Seattle elementary school. He stayed for nearly 20 years.
He often spoke about his disbelief that his career did not last longer, but he never questioned settling in Seattle.
“They can trade me, but they can’t make me move,” he told The Bellingham Herald, a Washington State paper, in 1975.
Donald Earl Watts was born on July 22, 1951, in Rolling Fork, Miss. His father was a mechanic, and his mother was a teacher. There was only one television in his neighborhood, and he got his earliest training in basketball by shooting spitballs into a trash can.
His sons, Donald and Tony, were successful college basketball players. A grandson, Isaiah Watts, and a granddaughter, Jadyn Watts, currently play college basketball in Washington State. Complete information about survivors was not immediately available.
In 2007, The New York Times asked Watts what he thought about how common it had become for players to wear headbands for the style.
“Don’t make a statement,” he advised, “unless you’re bringing your game.”
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