Living history: Henry Akin, original Sonic

Published 1:30 pm Thursday, July 31, 2008

Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part series. The Enterprise sat down with original Sonic Henry Akin.

When Don Richman, the general manager of the Sonics, called Henry Akin to tell him he would be part of an expansion team, Akin looked at it as an opportunity to continue his NBA dream.

First off, the Seattle brain trust of Los Angeles transplants, business manager Dick Vertlieb, Richman, and owners Sam Schulman and Eugene Klein, gave Akin a small boost in salary.

“When I came to Seattle, I thought I’d gone to heaven, they gave me $12,000. They gave me a $2,000 raise,” Akin said. “I said gosh, that’s great. Thank you. I just wanted an opportunity to continue playing. The biggest obstacle I had going for myself at that point in time was the injury that I was trying to work through. As it turned out that pretty much took me down – that was the end of my career, after I had that injury.”

The injury happened after Akin’s rookie season with the Knicks during a pickup game with some friends back in Michigan. Akin thought he sprained his ankle but it turned out to be more serious. He chipped the base of his tibia, one of the lower leg bones, and the bone fragment lodged in his ankle and had started to fuse. He had surgery in Los Angeles but never was the same.

Akin managed to play in 36 games that memorable first year in Seattle. They gave him weekly cortisone shots to ease the pain in his ankle, but didn’t tell him of the harmful side effect that it suppresses the immune system.

Some of his best games were against his old team, the Knicks.

“Every time we’d play New York I’d go for 12 or 15 points, because when I got in the game, the game was over with,” Akin said. “One of the guys I used to play against all the time was (current Lakers coach) Phil Jackson. The first time we went back in New York, they were beating us by 25 or something. In the middle of the fourth quarter, I made a move and Phil blocked the shot. OK, fine. I start looking down the floor, I look at Willis (Reed) and I say ‘Help!’, Willis turned around and told Phil, ‘let him go.’ Who’s going to get hurt? Nobody’s going to get hurt. It was the famous garbage time. For a lot of guys who didn’t get a lot of playing time, when you got into the game, you were going to put the ball up.”

The 1967-68 Sonics included a group of guys like Walt Hazzard, the former UCLA star who hadn’t played much with the Lakers the year before, that were looking for camaraderie and a chance to shine.

“One of the most unique things about that team the first year was no matter what happened or what somebody was doing, if I had a party, if Dorie (Murrey, a forward who now sells real estate in Mill Creek) had a party, if (star guard Walt) Hazzard had a party everybody was invited,” Akin said. “There were no cliques, there was none of this. To me it was a really good experience because it gave me an opportunity to understand what a lot of things are about. That’s one of the things, I have a very hard time with in today’s world with the game of basketball, it’s all about money. (Back then) you went to work and you had to produce, you had to make things happen. To me that was the most challenging part of it is you got to basically write your own future. You know in today’s world these kids come out, they’re a lottery pick or they’re taken in the first round or something, you got a lot of money coming your way.”

Akin has only been to three games over the past few years, although he still followed the games on television. The last game he went to was at the Sonics 40th anniversary celebration in November 2006 when he, Murrey, Al Hairston and John Tresvant, some of the early Sonics were honored. He finds most of the entertainment from the dance teams, to the T-shirts being shot into the crowd, to the blimps floating around the arena to be distractions from the game itself.

“I don’t like crowds,” he said. “It’s not a comfortable thing for me to do any more. From the time the game starts to the finish you’ve watched a three-ring circus. If I go to a basketball game, I go to watch basketball.”

Akin, of course, has followed what’s happened in recent years since Starbucks’ founder Howard Schultz bought the team to its eventual sale to Clay Bennett and his crew from Oklahoma City.

“To be honest with you I was extremely excited when (Howard) Schultz bought the team, because the first day he had a press conference and he made the comment that he was going to do what he could to build a winning franchise,” Akin said. “And being the ignorant country boy that I am, I sat there, and said you know, he’s got the money, maybe he’s got the heart and he’s going to go out and do it. And the only free agent he ever signed was Danny Fortson and Danny Fortson used him like a dang old watch.”

“At that point in time, when Clay Bennett came along and offered him $120 or $150 million more than what the team was worth. You know, all that Schultz cared about was the money,” Akin opined. “The Bennetts and all those other people, they had money and they were willing to spend it and they did. Yeah, they gave the city $45 million (to settle the city’s suit against them and the two remaining years on the Key Arena lease), the city probably would have settled for $35, who knows. All they wanted was money and that’s what Bennett threw out in front of them was money.”

The thing Akin said he will miss most is not being able to share Sonics basketball with his family. At the 40th anniversary celebration in 2006, the Sonics told him he could get tickets to any games he wanted as long as he let them know in advance. He didn’t use the tickets but his daughters did.

“Out of the whole situation where I feel cheated more than anything are my six grandkids,” he said. “My kids understood that I played for the Sonics, they never saw me play, because they all came later, but they understood that I was involved and stuff. To try to explain this to the grandkids when there’s not a Sonic basketball team here, Grandpa used to do that. That bothers me more than anything. I just feel they’ve cheated me out of part of my life. But again, it’s a business, and those things happen in business. People have to learn to accept it.”

Akin has worked as an inventory planner at Boeing for the last 19 years. He purchases hazardous materials, such as paint, primer, greases and oils and the like for the Defense and Space Group at Boeing Field.

But one of his true passions has become high school girls basketball.

One of Akin’s daughters, Shannon, who played at Shorecrest, was hired by former Shorecrest girls coach Don Dalziel as an assistant and Dalziel asked him to help out with the team. “As years went on I regarded him as a role model and mentor if I was stuck he was someone I could lean on,” Dalziel said. “My (two) kids call him Grandpa Henry.”

Often if a player needed to come to terms with a realistic assessment of their playing ability, when it was it delivered by Akin, he had a way of softening the blow, Dalziel said.

“He was just a huge support and continued to be as I coached,” Dalziel said. “You can’t miss the man on a Wednesday and Friday night. On a Wednesday or Friday night you can find him in a gymnasium watching girls hoops. “He’d have a story a day about playing in the NBA,” Dalziel added.

Akin pulled out a Shorecrest girls basketball program filled with personal messages from the girls on the team.

“These kids it’s a really hard to explain what each one of these kids have meant to me over the years,” Akin said. “The respect that they’ve given me plus what I see them achieve in life is what totally blows me away.”

Former player Roxanne Sharkey did her senior project on Akin while teammate Sarah Berg wrote her letter to get into Santa Clara University about her relationship with Akin.

“People ask me: ‘Why do you go watch Shorecrest basketball?’ This is the reason because they’re human beings,” Akin said. “I’m not giving them the tools to become a great basketball player, I try to give them the great tools for life. I’ve had kids call me from college when they’ve gotten in trouble and my first question is, ‘Why in the hell are you calling me?’ You need to call your mom and dad. (They say): ‘Dad’s going to mad.’ Dad’s going to be madder if you don’t call him and tell him what’s going on.”

Akin and his wife, Diana, who works in the office at Lake Forest Park Elementary School, have no plans to leave the Seattle area. He has three daughters that live nearby: Erin, 34, who is married with a child, and Shannon, 33, who is married with five children and his Amanda, 28, a University of Washington grad, who works as a nanny.

And he’ll always remember what brought him here, although it may be a history that’s fading from the collective memory.

“If you were to go in somewhere and start talking about the Sonics, you’re going to talk about the ‘78 season, the ‘79 season maybe the ‘96 season,” Akin said. “The first thing everybody’s going to say is Slick Watts was one of the original Sonics, Lenny Wilkins is one of the original Sonics. Don’t know and don’t care. My feeling on the situation is that’s something that nobody can ever take away from me. Whether I was the worst player in the NBA, I was a member of the original Sonic team.”