How the 1978-79 Sonics united Seattle — and revealed political divides

Editor’s note: This is an edited excerpt from Shaun Scott’s book “Heartbreak City: Seattle Sports and the Unmet Promise of Urban Progress,” published by the University of Washington Press (November 2023, $29.95).

AS THE PORTLAND Trail Blazers hoisted the 1977 NBA championship trophy, Lenny Wilkens watched with disgust. Wilkens had just been named the Sonics’ director of player personnel. From 1974 to 1976, he was the Blazers’ coach (1974-75 as player-coach, in his final season as a Hall of Fame player).

Wilkens had mentored Portland center Bill Walton during his rookie and second seasons, helping mold the young hippie into the NBA Finals MVP he became in 1977. Wilkens crafted the Blazers nucleus that won the championship. Portland management fired Wilkens after the 1975-76 season, replacing him with coach Jack Ramsay. The very next year, the Trail Blazers were champs. That was Wilkens’ team. Only it wasn’t anymore.

The 1977 NBA Finals between the Philadelphia 76ers and the Blazers modeled the demographic tensions that tugged at the league. Led by Julius Erving and his Afro and spectacular dunks, the 76ers were the squad of highflying hoopers with bombastic, individual styles of play. Portland was the establishment favorite, with Walton, the star white center, and its team-first approach. It wasn’t just white media and fans who saw it that way. Roy Brownell II, in a 2019 presentation to the North American Society for Sports History conference, cited Black 76ers center Darryl Dawkins. In his autobiography, “Chocolate Thunder,” Dawkins said the 76ers “played black basketball,” and the Blazers “played white basketball.” That was an oversimplification, perhaps — Philadelphia had nine Black players on its roster for the Finals, Portland seven. But it was seen as a “Black vs. white” series, and it produced the largest television rating to that point for an NBA Finals (determined by “share,” the percentage of TVs in use that were tuned into games).

After Philly blew a 2-0 series lead and lost the next four games, an article in the Philadelphia Daily News predicted, in crude, jarring language, that the city’s white fans would turn on Black players. Among the writer’s conclusions was the idea that white Philadelphia fans would accuse 76ers players of having a lack of heart, of choking, a racist stereotype.

Meanwhile, in Seattle, beneath a calm demeanor, Wilkens simmered after the Blazers won the title.

Born Oct. 28, 1937, Wilkens was raised in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. After a stint with the St. Louis Hawks, he was traded to Seattle in 1968. After Wilkens took on the role of player-coach in his second season with the Sonics, just the second Black coach in the NBA since the league began play in 1949, Seattle fans sent the team racially motivated hate mail. But the Sonics improved under Wilkens, posting their first winning record in 1971-72.

Wilkens was sent to Cleveland in an unpopular trade before the 1972-73 season. One of his teammates in Seattle during the 1970-71 and 1971-72 seasons was young Black star Spencer Haywood. Wilkens saw his struggle as one of the few Black NBA coaches as intertwined with that of Haywood, who had sued the NBA to be able to join the Sonics before he was four years removed from high school. Black men in managerial positions in the NBA were as rare as empowered Black players. Like Haywood, Wilkens was a pioneer of post-civil rights professional sports, navigating the world of white elites with few road maps for doing so.

Author Events for ‘Heartbreak City’

Jan. 17: Museum of History & Industry, History Café, 6:30 p.m.
March 10: Seattle Public Library, Central Library, 3 p.m.

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WHEN THE SONICS got off to a 5-17 start under coach Bob Hopkins in 1977, they fired Hopkins and turned to Wilkens to take over. Wilkens noticed something about Seattle’s roster: They were talented but top-heavy. Much of the offense centered on 7-foot-1 center Marvin Webster and 6-8 forward Bruce Seals. Soon, Wilkens altered the look of the team. Seattle had a brilliant trio of Black guards in Dennis Johnson, Fred Brown and Gus Williams. Under Wilkens, Johnson, in particular, was given a larger role. Another guard, Slick Watts, was soon traded to the New Orleans Jazz. Seals saw his playing time and scoring opportunities decrease, as John Johnson was elevated to the starting lineup.

In basketball, guards play much the same role as quarterbacks on the football field. Usually the smallest players on the court, guards need to show sound decision-making and a coolness under pressure. A 1968 Sports Illustrated series highlighted the racist notion that Black players weren’t suited for such positions, reporting that some white coaches and white sports managers reserved quarterback and point guard positions for white players. (At the time of the 1968 SI stories, there had never been a Black starting quarterback in the Super Bowl era of the NFL. The first was Marlin Briscoe of the Denver Broncos, an AFL team, in October 1968.) Wilkens would have none of this typecasting. Wilkens, a former all-star point guard, gave the car keys to Williams, Dennis Johnson and Brown, allowing them to control more of the action. The Sonics started winning.

Seattle finished the 1977-78 regular season by going 42-18 after Wilkens replaced Hopkins, ending the season 47-35. In the first round of the playoffs, the Sonics knocked off Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Los Angeles Lakers, then took on Portland — the team that had discarded Wilkens two years earlier. To Wilkens, the series was so personal that his assistant coaches had to beg him to stop seeing the games in terms of a pursuit of revenge.

The Sonics struggled to defend Portland’s intricate high-post offense. The Sonics took the first game in Portland, then caught a fortuitous break — specifically, in Walton’s foot, which fractured during Portland’s Game 2 victory. The Sonics won three of the next four games to advance to the Western Conference Finals, where they dumped the Denver Nuggets. A league laughingstock at the start of the season, the Sonics were representing the NBA’s Western Conference in the 1978 NBA Finals. By making serious noise, the Sonics added to the national clamor about Seattle.

AS OTHER CITIES suffered the loss of jobs, tax revenue and stability during the 1970s, Seattle was relatively steady. Boeing bounced back; the local economy rebounded. Seen from afar, the city’s progressive-seeming way of smoothing over its conflicts — its image of unperturbed urban cool — stood out. City cops expected a June 1978 neighborhood meeting about pollution in West Seattle to become contentious; hardly anybody showed up. Everybody was watching the Sonics, who added to Seattle’s utopian gloss. In 1972, author Nard Jones wrote a trade hardcover for Doubleday Books called “Seattle.” Its New York-based publisher called it “a fresh look at one of America’s most exciting cities.” Jones lauded the local sporting culture and the outdoor climes that inspired Seattleites to ski, play golf, frolic in parks.

In 1975, Harper’s Magazine ranked Seattle the “least-worst city” in the country. In May 1978, Sports Illustrated described “Sonicsteria” among Seattle residents: “If you’ve been near a floating bridge or an aircraft plant, [you’ve heard] the good people of Seattle blow their lungs out over the SuperSonics.”

If we’re being honest, Seattle didn’t deserve this team. Its sporting establishment couldn’t be bothered to celebrate the arrival of the NBA in 1967. Most sports fans were enchanted with the idea of attracting pro football and baseball, but a funny thing happened on the road to big-league recognition: The Sonics got there first.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say the Sonics helped lay the groundwork for modern men’s professional basketball. Haywood readied the league for young Black talent with his pathbreaking lawsuit in 1971. Hired as coach of the Sonics in 1973, Bill Russell had been the first Black coach in the league when Boston hired him in 1966; in Seattle in 1969, Wilkens became the second. Years before the exploits of Isiah Thomas, Michael Jordan and Stephen Curry, Wilkens had turned the 1977-78 Sonics into the first truly guard-led team in NBA history to make a real run at the championship. Sonics public relations staffer Rick Welts sold this mostly Black team to a mostly white city, pitching stories to area media about players’ charitable exploits for human-interest appeal, while offering discounted game tickets to readers of the Seattle Medium newspaper for Black History Month. In the process, Seattle became the first petri dish for the coming viral explosion of the NBA’s commerciality.

Though the Sonics fell short to the Washington Bullets after losing a Game 7 heartbreaker at home in 1978, Seattle embraced pro basketball to an extent that seemed extremely unlikely a decade earlier, when many didn’t care about its arrival in Seattle. The city was on the doorstep of something special: its first major league championship since the Seattle Metropolitans won the Stanley Cup in 1917. A Sonics title would mean big-league triumph the city had coveted for decades.

BEFORE MOVING THERE from the Coliseum for the 1978-79 season, the Sonics played a 1978 playoff game at the Kingdome, the multipurpose stadium located on a plot of land where mounds of soil were dredged in the late 19th century to make way for a railroad. Seattle’s sports were a new path to respect and recognition, like the railroad that helped put the city on the map.

The Sonics represented a city of audacious settlers. At a pep rally after their Finals loss in June 1978, team management promised Seattle fans they’d win the NBA championship in 1979. Seattle wanted an NBA title. The Sonics had managed to do what few politicians or elections could: unite Seattle in pursuit of the same goal.

After the 1978 NBA Finals, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer had tried to pivot away from sports: “The party’s over. This community must turn its attention to schools and unemployment. Maybe those problems will be easier to face now that we’ve had time off, a time when throwing a ball through a hoop was of world-shaking importance.”

Whatever. Sports were exciting. Sports made people happy. Sports brought them together. A Central Area kid later known to the world as Sir Mix-a-Lot went to Sonics rallies in the late 1970s. Basketball gave Seattleites another way to lay claim to the city, and gave Black and brown people pride and a sense of belonging.

Sports were civic dopamine, the pleasure hormone released when watching a beautiful sunset. Politics were civic cortisol, the stress hormone released while sitting in traffic. Calls to get the city to “refocus” on civic affairs had it all wrong. Seattleites weren’t watching the Sonics to forget about their politics; they were watching the Sonics to feel better about them.

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THE SONICS STARTED the 1978-79 season winning seven straight games. They set a franchise record for wins at 52-30, capturing the NBA’s Pacific Division. Seattle drowned the Lakers, 4-1, in the first round of the playoffs, then eclipsed the Phoenix Suns in a seven-game classic in the Western Conference Finals. They were back in the NBA Finals, where a familiar foe awaited them: the Washington Bullets.

The Sonics lost the first game but won the next three, leaving the defending champs on the ropes. Bullets coach Dick Motta resorted to psychological warfare, telling reporters that Sonics guard Dennis Johnson was susceptible to pressure because he was 0 for 14 shooting in Game 7 the year before. Whether he knew it or not, Motta was trafficking in a racist stereotype, resurrecting the notion that Black players lacked the “clutch gene” to succeed under pressure.

Wilkens stuck up for Johnson: “Dick has to use any psychology he can to motivate his team,” Wilkens said. “Tell him don’t hold his breath.”

Motta would eat his words.

Game 5 was played on June 1, 1979, in Landover, Md. Seattle’s guards were a revelation in the game. Though it later became commonplace, a guard-oriented team led by an all-Black backcourt never had won an NBA championship. The Sonics were on the verge.

Up two with a minute to play, Seattle needed a basket to seal the title. Bullets assistant coach Bernie Bickerstaff beckoned Washington to double-team Seattle’s point guard, Williams, as he crossed midcourt; they were a step late. Williams drove, drew three Bullets defenders, then dished to Dennis Johnson. The target of Motta’s trash talk, Johnson leapt into a balletic fadeaway shot.

Shot over three Bullets, Johnson’s fadeaway rolled around the rim and found the bottom of the net: 95-91, Seattle. Williams hit two free throws to put the game out of reach. Final score: Seattle 97, Washington 93. Wilkens and others on the bench raised their arms in jubilation.

The Sonics had done it. The city had done it. In the 1978-79 championship season, Seattle’s average home attendance, after moving into the Kingdome, increased a whopping 48% from the year before, vaulting Seattle to first place in the league in that category.

In a city with 493,000 people at the time, 300,000 Sonics fans crowded downtown Seattle for the championship parade on June 4. This was civic connection. The kind that contrasted with the polarizing 1978 busing mandate, that contrasted with the collective trauma of deindustrialization and baseless claims of “reverse racism.” In the afterglow of the city’s championship, a Seattle psychologist opined: “We were brothers under the skin because our team won.”

Bright goldenrod Sonics T-shirts sold in Seattle department stores. Sonics baseball caps, bumper stickers, water bottles, ashtrays, key chains and hand puppets hit shelves. Luther Rabb’s commemorative disco cut, “Seattle Sonics Do It,” played in area nightclubs. A $575 gold Sonics pendant went on sale; a grinning Wilkens appeared next to it in Seattle newspapers.

ON ONE LEVEL, an August 1978 Jet magazine write-up announcing Wilkens’ entry into the ranks of NBA upper management in 1977 had been a sign of racial progress. After Russell accomplished the feat as player-coach in 1968, Wilkens was the second Black coach ever to win an NBA title. But sports triumph was easily tokenized. Law professor Mehrsa Baradaran’s “The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap” details how the Nixon administration sabotaged civil rights pleas with market-based solutions. Throughout the 1970s, the pursuit of public aid, affirmative action and political enfranchisement was funneled by federal policymakers into private enterprise. The celebration of personal minority achievement silenced dissent. Demands for desegregation were defanged. In the fetishization of Black athletes who made it out of destitute urban areas, materialism had become the de facto response to racial inequity.

To criticize Black capitalism is to walk a fine line. It’s true that Black leaders in the mid-20th century believed economic empowerment was a prerequisite for equality; in 1964, Malcolm X described “Black Nationalism” as his “social, political and economic philosophy.” Black people in redlined urban areas such as Seattle’s Central District owned fewer homes and fewer businesses, and had less capital than their white counterparts. The Sonics gave Seattleites in the margins representation. Black urbanites took pride in well-to-do Black athletes who blazed trails in sports.

Yet as a strategy for collective liberation, Black capitalism was filled with empty calories. Although they were enmeshed in the civic fabric of the city, only one Sonics player lived in Seattle; the rest commuted in from the suburbs. The economic impact of the Sonics’ playoff run was $9.8 million in revenue for the City of Seattle; the revenue went almost everywhere — to bars, to parking stalls, to the same city government that allowed segregation to endure into the 1970s — except to the direct betterment of Black Seattle.

Sports in Seattle were a largely hollow spectacle of social harmony. Not everyone was a fan.

Washington Gov. Dixy Lee Ray expressed disappointment that the Sonics distracted from the 1979 state legislative session. County officials complained when community meetings for its Growth Management Plan were depopulated by Sonics games. Was the city valuing symbolism over substance? A June 10, 1979, letter to The Seattle Times begged the question: “Wouldn’t it be incredible if energy expended for the Sonics (screaming, cheering, drinking, media coverage) was spent teaching our children, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick? The energy is there, but it needs to be channeled into other areas.”

After the “Great Society” failed to materialize in the 1960s, a rightward movement coalesced in the United States. Private gain diffused calls for greater public action. Commercialism became a facsimile for community. Sports stars such as Spencer Haywood and Lenny Wilkens were tokens of integration, providing audiences a figment of progress on the field of play. Under pressure, progressivism faded away.