When Henry Akin came to Seattle with his wife, Diana, to play for the SuperSonics 41 years ago, he arrived hoping to continue a dream in a city he had never been to and where he knew no one.
Akin, who turns 64 on July 31 and lives in Lake Forest Park today, has never left. He’s helped out with the Shorecrest girls basketball program over the years and still is a regular at Western Conference South Division girls basketball games.
The NBA team that brought him here is gone, but lodged in Akin’s mind are countless stories of the personalities and events that made up that original Sonics team, the first experiment with professional sports in the Northwest corner of the country.
Nine days after the Sonics’ fate was sealed, Akin, one of the original 12 players, sat down with a mug of beer in a corner table at Canyons Restaurant in Mountlake Terrace to tell the story of how he became a Seattle SuperSonic and ended up settling here and raising his family.
“Forty-one years ago, when I walked into the first practice we had, it was an opportunity to be part of something. I had no idea what it was going to be,” he said. “I think to a lot of us, it was something really special.”
A rookie forward with the New York Knicks in the 1966-67 season, Akin was picked by the Sonics in the expansion draft. He played 36 games for the Sonics in 1967-68, averaging 3.1 points per game.
“That team the first year, I think, was an opportunity for 12 people that had been like role players on other teams. It gave them an opportunity to advance and expand their careers,” Akin said.
Akin got waived after the season because of a debilitating injury to his left ankle that still hobbles him today. Akin played two games with the Kentucky Colonels of the American Basketball Association before calling it quits.
“I came back to Seattle and I was in Seattle for a week to 10 days and that’s when (Sonics business manager) Dick Vertlieb and (Sonics coach Al) Bianchi called me and offered me to do the job to do the scouting for them,” Akin said. “That’s where things really fell into place for me. I really enjoyed it. The opportunity was unbelievable.
“That they would have enough faith in a 24-year-old guy to go out there and look for talent.”
Akin worked as a scout until 1974, when Erin, his first daughter, was born. Among the players he was responsible for scouting was “Downtown” Freddie Brown, who the Sonics drafted out of Iowa with the sixth overall pick in the 1971 draft.
“We didn’t have the resources that they have in today’s world,” he said. “I traveled about a quarter-million miles a year and I would see inbetween 200 and 250 basketball games a year. That’s what scouting was about. There was no computers, there was none of this. I was on the road 10 months out of the year and I was on the road between 25 to 28 days (a month).”
Akin grew up in Troy, Mich., a small farming town 20 miles north of Detroit. He played mostly guard at Troy High School, growing from 6-1 his sophomore year to 6-9 and 190 pounds his senior year.
Akin went to Morehead State, a Division I school in Morehead, Ky., on a full scholarship and played on the freshman team his first year, as NCAA rules required. Akin played on the varsity and started his sophomore year, scoring 22.5 points per game and averaged 12.5 rebounds a game. His junior year he scored 18.5 points per game and averaged 12.5 rebounds a game. He made first-team Ohio Valley Conference both years.
“The two attributes I had (were) I could run and I could shoot the ball,” Akin said. “That’s what we did at Morehead; we were a very high scoring team.”
Akin didn’t finish at Morehead State, however. He soon met his future wife, Diana, a cheerleader at the local high school in Morehead.
“Then I fell madly in love. I quit school, got married. Went to Detroit and started working with Dover Elevator Company and started installing elevators,” he said.
After a year, Akin, through a family connection, moved with Diana to Hattiesburg, Miss., to attend a small Baptist school, William Carey College, to play basketball. After he got there he played on a traveling AAU basketball team that dominated opponents throughout Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.
“About the middle of May, I got a phone call one day. I was in the gym shooting,” Akin recalled. “The coach said ‘you got a phone call.’ So I go in and I answer the phone and it’s a guy by the name of Eddie Donovan who is the general manager of the New York Knicks at that time. He explained who he was, he explained that Red Holzman (then a scout, but who later coached the Knicks) had seen me play a couple times at Morehead and they were interested in me. I had no idea, nothing. These thoughts have never entered my mind. He said the day after tomorrow we’ll have a plane ticket for you at Jackson Airport in Jackson, Miss., and you’ll fly to New York. I go ‘OK.’ So I go back home and tell the wife, I’m going to New York.”
“Playing in the NBA had never entered my mind since I left school and got married; it was like it’s not going to happen,” he said.
When he arrived in New York, a limousine picked Akin up and he was taken to the old Madison Square Garden to meet Donovan, coach Dick McGuire and Holzman. They agreed to draft Akin and he went back to Mississippi.
True to their word, the Knicks made Akin the first pick of the second round, the 11th pick overall.
Akin flew back to New York and ended up negotiating a contract with a little advice from his dad for $10,000 a year, plus a $2,000 signing bonus. None of it was guaranteed, but Donovan guaranteed Akin that he would make the team, and Akin did.
Akin played as a reserve during the 1966-67 season and averaged 3.8 points and 2.4 rebounds per game.
“To have that play out the way that it did was wonderful,” Akin said. “I got to spend a year in New York, I got to play with Willis Reed and Walt Bellamy, Dave Stallworth, Dick Barnett, Emmett Bryant and Howard Comize, Dick Van Arsdale.”
But the next year, the NBA was expanding to 12 teams, with the Seattle SuperSonics and San Diego Rockets joining the league.
Each team could initially protect seven players in the expansion draft. Akin was unprotected by the Knicks and he was the first Knick taken by the Sonics.
“I got a phone call from (Sonics general manager) Don Richman telling me I’d been selected by Washington, he called it Washington back then,” Akin said. “I’m thinking ‘Washington, that’s only 90 miles down the road from New York, that’s not bad.’ He said, ‘No, no, no. Seattle, Washington.’ Then we get the map out and my wife and I look and see where Seattle is and we say we’ll never get there. But it’s the greatest thing that ever happened to us. It’s the most fortunate thing that ever happened to us. We’ve been here 41 years, raised three good kids, got six grandkids. Wouldn’t leave for nothing. Absolutely love it here.”
See next week’s Enterprise for part two of the interview with Akin.
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