Frank Thomas

Notable Sports Figures
Lenny Wilkens
1937-
American basketball coach
With 1,268 victories in his first twenty-nine seasons
as an National Basketball Association (NBA)
coach, Lenny Wilkens is clearly the winningest coach in
professional basketball history. Wilkens began his
coaching career more than three decades ago in Seattle
where he served as player-coach for the SuperSonics
from 1969 until 1972. He pulled the same double duty
with the Portland Trail Blazers during the 1974-1975
season but hung up his uniform at season’s end and
stuck to coaching the following season with Portland. In
the years since, he has served as head coach for the Supersonics
(1977-1985), Cleveland Cavaliers (1986-
1993), Atlanta Hawks (1993-2000), and Toronto Raptors
(2000—). During his years as player and coach in the
NBA, Wilkens has collected one Coach of the Year
Award, an NBA championship ring, two Olympic gold
medals, and been named one of the fifty top players and
ten top coaches in NBA history.
Born in Brooklyn
He was born Leonard Randolph Wilkens Jr. in Brooklyn,
New York, on October 28, 1937, son of an African
American father and white mother. His father, Leonard
Sr., worked as a chauffeur, while his mother, Henrietta
(Cross) Wilkens, worked in a candy factory. His father
died suddenly when Wilkens was still a preschooler, and
he suddenly found himself “the man of the house” at the
tender age of five. Making life even more difficult for the
young Wilkens were the taunts of schoolmates about his
interracial origins. Ignoring the taunts as best he could,
Wilkens worked hard in school and stayed out of trouble.
He took his first after-school job—delivering groceries—
at the age of seven. Of the pressures he felt as a child, he
later told Sports Illustrated: “I couldn’t have sympathy. I
couldn’t trust. I couldn’t get involved with people because
then I’d have to feel. What scared me so much was
seeing no one going out of their way to help my mother
and my family after my father died. Seeing people look
down their noses at us. You realize that no one really
cares. So how do you get through? You start building the
wall. You never let anyone know what’s inside. It sounds
awful now to say I’d never cry.”
In his spare time, Wilkens began playing basketball
with local youth leagues and found he had a real talent
for the game. He was encouraged by a priest named
Tom Mannion to play basketball for Boys High School
as a senior and made so positive an impression that he
was offered an athletic scholarship to Providence College,
a catholic school in Rhode Island. In his senior
year at Providence, the school’s basketball team made it
Lenny Wilkens
into the finals of the National Invitational Tournament
(NIT), where Wilkens was named Most Valuable Player
of the NIT. Although he received offers to play professionally
for a number of basketball leagues, he chose to
enter the NBA draft in 1960. There he was picked sixth
in the first round by the St. Louis Hawks, whose general
manager, Marty Blake, had first spotted Wilkens at the
NIT finals. Wilkens wasted no time in firmly establishing
himself as an invaluable team player. In the ten years
between 1963 and 1973, he was voted to nine All-Star
teams. In 1968 he finished second to Wilt Chamberlain in
voting for the NBA’s MVP Award.
Player-Coach
Wilkens
In July 1962, two years into his stint with the Hawks,
Wilkens married Marilyn J. Reed. The couple has three
children: Leesha, Randy, and Jamee. When the Hawks
moved to Atlanta in 1968, Wilkens was unable to negotiate
an acceptable contract with the new owners, so he
was traded to the Seattle SuperSonics. It turned out to be
the start of a whole new career for Wilkens, who was
asked to be player-coach of the struggling team at the
beginning of the 1969-1970 season. Although he had
never coach basketball before, Wilkens drew on the
same fundamentals that had served him so well as a
player. These fundamentals emphasized defense, passing,
and the proper execution of all assignments. In
1971-1972, Wilkens coached the SuperSonics to a
record of 47-35, their first winning season ever. During
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