Power House Designs Newfoundland
“Depending on area he was, there were consistently two bodies on him,” Catlett told capitalofbasketball.com, a blog about basketball in Washington, in 2015. “We’d exhausted him to a spot, booty him out of his abundance zones and abroad from the accurate places on the attic he liked.”
["630.5"]The plan worked. Afore 12,500 admirers at sold-out Cole Field House at the University of Maryland in Academy Park — which accommodated a far beyond army than DeMatha’s gym could — DeMatha won, 46-43. Alcindor denticulate alone 16 points, able-bodied beneath his average.
And Catlett led the Stags with 13 points, seven during the aftermost four minutes.
Catlett, who went on to comedy academy and pro ball, died on Nov. 3 in Atlanta. He was 69. His wife, Tahira Hughes Catlett, said the account was complications of a academician bleed.
DeMatha’s achievement over Power Memorial has been alleged by some the greatest aerial academy basketball bold anytime played. It was the aerial point in Catlett’s basketball life, which connected at the University of Notre Dame and briefly in the Civic Basketball Association.
“Nothing I was complex in was bigger,” he told The Washington City Paper in 2011.
["1134.9"]Abdul-Jabbar, whose ablaze career connected at U.C.L.A. and in the N.B.A. over 20 seasons with the Milwaukee Bucks and Los Angeles Lakers, recalled the after-effects of the bold in his autobiography, “Giant Steps” (with Peter Knobler, 1983).
“I was a little dazed,” he wrote, abandoning that he had been afraid to bark off his uniform. “I’d gotten alone 16 points; it had been a adamantine afternoon, and I acquainted like I’d alone absent it.”
Sidney Leon Catlett was built-in in Washington on April 8, 1948. His father, additionally alleged Sidney (but best accepted as Big Sid), was a acclaimed applesauce bagman who played with Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman and abounding others. The ancient Catlett died in 1951, anon afore his son’s third birthday. His mother, the above Florence Elizabeth Jackson, was an authoritative abettor at the federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
As a child, Catlett played the drums, battling what he heard of his ancestor from his records.
But, he said, “I’m 12 years old and I’m 6-foot-2 and there is no way I’d survive in the association after arena basketball,” he told The Washington City Paper. “I couldn’t serve two masters.”
["630.5"]James Brown, the CBS sportscaster who was Catlett’s abettor for two years at DeMatha, said that he had “prodigious talent.”
In a blast interview, Mr. Brown said, “He was cottony smooth, with a anatomy like LeBron James’s and a feathery-soft jump shot.”
After averaging 16 credibility and 14 rebounds a bold in his chief year at DeMatha, Catlett played three years at Notre Dame, averaging 7.9 credibility and 8.3 rebounds and admission with a amount in business communication.
In 1971, he was drafted by the Cincinnati Royals, but an appendectomy afore the division and consecutive injuries bound his arena time. Worried that he did not fit into the Royals drillmaster Bob Cousy’s plans, Catlett told The Cincinnati Enquirer in aboriginal 1972, “I’ve appear too far in basketball to anticipate of accepting down, giving up.”
But two weeks later, the Royals cut him. He never played in the N.B.A. again.
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In accession to his wife, Catlett is survived by his son, Sidney II; his daughter, Sadjah Catlett Echols; a stepson, Mahmoud Hylton, and a stepdaughter, Hasaani Hylton; 12 grandchildren; and his sisters, Cheryl Lewis and Denise Hodges. His alliance to Sharon Johnson concluded in divorce.
Catlett formed over the years as an controlling at Converse and Motorola and an authoritative abettor for the Peace Corps in Kenya. He was additionally an abettor to Representative Dan Lungren, Republican of California, who accustomed him in a blast account with actuality “my point man” in his efforts to canyon the legislation in the House of Representatives in 1983 authoritative the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s altogether a civic holiday.
Catlett hosted allocution radio shows in Washington and for Harambee Radio Online. And he organized basketball clinics for youngsters in Atlanta, which brought him to the absorption of the N.B.A.’s Atlanta Hawks, for whom he had formed the aftermost bristles years at camps and clinics as allotment of the team’s association basketball development staff.
DeMatha’s achievement over Power Memorial bore an abrupt allotment for Catlett about 40 years later. Abdul-Jabbar, a applesauce aficionado, alleged Catlett one day to say he had begin a DVD with a blur blow of a applesauce achievement that showed Big Sid speaking to the camera — a complete his son had never heard.
“We went to Tower Annal in Rockville,” Ms. Hughes Catlett said in an interview. “And back he got home and watched it, he access into tears — blessed tears.”
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An beforehand adaptation of this obituary misstated the accustomed name of one of Catlett’s aerial academy teammates. He is Bob Whitmore, not George.
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