DC Legend Sid Catlett Dies at 80
DC Pipelines:
Many college basketball programs have had success creating pipelines from the pool ofDC Basketball Talent. There is Mike Kryskeski and Duke university, they jumped started the most success college program in the country by recruiting Johnny Dawkins, Tommie Amaker and Danny Ferry. Then there is NC State they started a pipe line with Kenny Carr , Hawkeye Whitney, and Kenny Mathews. Later they recruited Dirk Whittenberg. Sidey Lowe, and Thur Bailey and that group was part of greatest upset in NCAA basketball history when they upset University of Houston.
That being said , I think the strongest pipeline in DC Basketball history is the Notre Dame College pipeline from DC, for three decades from 1966 to1994. DC Basketball keep Notre Dame in the national spotlight for years. It started with Brian Kelly. Bob Whitmore, Sid Catlett, Collis Jones, Austin Carr, Adrian Dantley. Duck Williams, Tracey Jackson, Cecil Rucker and Monte Williams.
Sid Catlett was part of the great DC basketball history and the great Notre Dame pipeline from DC.
Sid Catlett, a former NCAA star and ex-NBA player was regarded a high school hoop legend is dead. Catlett was 69 years old.
Catlett played for Notre Dame from 1968-1971, then spent one injury-riddled season with the Cincinnati Royals of the NBA. But before those stints, Catlett was a member of the storied DeMatha squad that beat Lew Alcindor's powerhouse Power Memorial High in 1965. Alcindor's only lose in high school That game, played before a packed house at Cole Field House on the campus of the University of Maryland, has long been hailed as the greatest high school game ever played. Schoolboy hoops had never gotten such attention: All 12,500 tickets for the game sold out weeks in advance, and newspapers in the nation's capital put previews of the contest on the front page.
The front page of the Washington Daily News. Courtesy DeMatha Catholic High School. Catlett, a sophomore forward and the youngest player on the floor, scored a team-high 13 points, including seven of his squad's final nine points, in DeMatha's 46-43 win, which ended the New York school's 71-game winning streak. He also helped guard Alcindor (who by the end of the decade would change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and go on to be the top scorer in NBA history) holding him to just 16 points, and giving the acclaimed best prep player in the land the only loss of his high school career.
The game also brought national renown to DeMatha coach Morgan Wootten, now a member of the Naismith Hall of Fame. In workouts leading up to the game, DeMatha coaches had Catlett hold a tennis racket over his head to simulate what they'd face on offense playing against somebody with the wingspan of the 7-foot-1 Alcindor. "I can remember [DeMatha guard] Mickey Wiles hitting a high jump hook over Lew Alcindor, so the tennis racket kind of paid off," Wootten told the Washington Post in a 2014 retrospective on the game.
Catlett, in a 2011 interview, told me it was the game of his life. "Nothing I was involved in was bigger," he said.
For Catlett, its importance transcended hoops. That contest also was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between Catlett and Abdul-Jabbar. They would go on to face each other again in college, as Jabbar's defending national champion UCLA squad whupped the Fighting Irish, 88-75, in December 1968, the first game at Notre Dame's Athletic and Convocation Center, which is still the team's home arena.
"I'm 12 years old and I'm 6-foot-2," he said, "and there was no way I'd survive in the community without playing basketball. I couldn't serve two masters."He grew to 6-foot-8, and after mastering hoops on the same D.C. playgrounds—Turkey Thicket and Edgewood—that produced such local legends as Elgin Baylor and Dave Bing, and Carroll Hs basketball star Monk Malloy, he caught the eye of DeMatha's Wootten. As his star rose on the court, his nickname graduated to Big Sid, just like his dad. He is one of at least 18 DeMatha players to reach the NBA, an alumni group that also includes all star Victor Oladipo and this top draft, Markelle Fultz of the Philadelphia 76ers.
