Spencer Haywood’s journey from poverty to SuperSonics legend

Seattle SuperSonics legend Spencer Haywood had a profound impact on the sport, and is someone Dori loved watching while growing up. His new book is called “The Spencer Haywood Rule: Battles, Basketball, and the Making of an American Iconoclast” and he joined the Dori Monson Show to discuss his journey.

“Seattle has so many great memories for me. But the most important memory and I talk about it in the book is when I arrived into Seattle coming from Denver after my first year — it would be in the ABA — we were landing, and I touched Sam Schulman, the owner of the Sonics, and said, ‘It looks like we’re flying into a postcard,'” he said.

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“It was so beautiful, it was just so magnificent … the water, the greenery, everything. I was like, ‘Wow, I’m gonna really love this place.'”

Haywood says that he grew up picking cotton as a child in Mississippi, and thought that was going to be his life.

“That was my life and my career. I was going to be the best cotton picker, not in my county, but my state had ever witnessed. I was really practicing. I was like a kid that was, you know, getting ready for this journey, because I enjoyed hard work and we were doing hard work,” he said.

“It gave me hand eye coordination, it gave me delicate hands, and it developed my body. And also, it developed a work ethic that was just unparalleled because when I would play basketball, people would say, ‘Well, we worked out for two hours.’ I was like, ‘What about the other eight?'”

To listen to the rest of the interview, including his journey from abject poverty in Mississippi to NBA legend, head here.

Listen to the Dori Monson Show weekday afternoons from noon – 3 p.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.