smile in the room,” says Kerr. “He had that all the way back in high school. It made him impossible to scout for. He was so mature on the floor, you could never rattle him.” Asked about Kerr’s observation, Terry smiles. “That comes from being one of 10 [children], you know. My mother was a single parent. I was the second oldest. So I had a lot of personal responsibility to make sure the others had food, to make sure they got to school every day. And for me, basketball was a relief, because I was the leader of my team. I was never, growing up, the best player, or the one that they said, ‘He’s going to make it one day.’ I had to work. And that work came from my mother.” Even then, he craved the pressure of a big shot in an important game. “That’s another thing coming from my mother. You know, month to month we didn’t know if we were going to have food on the table, if the lights were going to be on or not. I can recall my sixth-grade school year—we moved eight times in one school year within the city limits. Making a shot at the end of the game in front of 30,000 people is nothing compared to moving your kids eight times while trying to make sure food is on the table. That is real-life pressure.” A “It was my mother’s idea to change my commitment and go to the University of Arizona, and I thank her to this day.” learning that he’d changed his mind. Did he remember what he said to Terry? “Man, I thought we had this.” Slick admits that he too was disappointed. “I was upset with him for a minute. I wanted him to be a Husky so bad I could taste it,” he says. “I still have a picture over my fireplace, him and Donald and me at the press conference.” Donald then had to decide what to do. “So now, do I back out? No, I felt Washington was best for me,” he remembers thinking. “I talked to Jason after he made his commitment to Arizona. I said there were no hard feelings about it, and I wished him the best.” Donald excelled at Washington, which turned around its fortunes after his arrival and went to the NCAA tournament in his junior and senior years. (Today Donald runs basketball camps with Slick, and recently left his position as coach at West Seattle High School.) He’s asked if he remembers whether, when the Arizona Wildcats came to play in Seattle against his team, Terry was booed for his betrayal. » CONTINUED ON PAGE 12 S E AT T L E W E E K LY • D E C E M B E R 2 6 , 2 0 1 2 − J A N U A RY 1 , 2 0 1 3 s her son played on AAU teams and in high school, Andrea Cheatham started to wonder if basketball really could take Terry someplace. “By the time he had won his first championship as a junior, he and I both thought this could be a way he could go to college,” she recalls. “Without financial aid, that wasn’t going to happen.” After winning the first of two state highschool championships with Franklin in 1994, Terry began to be inundated with calls from college coaches. “I knew he’d be able to get a good scholarship and a degree, but we never once thought it would lead to the NBA. We were just thinking about getting to college,” Cheatham says. Then her son caught her by surprise. Going into their senior year, Donald Watts and Terry had become the two top basketball prospects in the state, and interest in their choice of colleges was high. It was Terry who first decided that he would stay local and help prop up a struggling Washington Huskies basketball team. “When he made that commitment, it was pretty simple for me,” Donald says. “We had played together and done some really great things in the AAU in the summertime. I felt that one day we could be the best backcourt in the NCAA.” Slick arranged a press conference in September 1994 to announce that his son Donald and his former student, Terry, were committing to the Huskies. The two shy, young basketball players visibly cringed as the elder Watts worked the press with his characteristic outspoken style. One reporter noted that Donald could be heard apologizing to Terry for the commotion. But just a few days later, everything changed. Cheatham says she was in the hospital, experiencing premature labor during another pregnancy, when she saw Slick Watts on television announce that the two young men had committed to the University of Washington. She was stunned: She had no idea her son had made up his mind. “He said, ‘Mom, it’s going to work out,’ ” she says. But she was shocked that he had turned down the opportunity to play at the University of Arizona for Lute Olson. Olson was pretty surprised, too. “Once he had made that commitment to U-Dub, I did as I do with any kid that does that—I sent a letter thanking him for considering us, and wished him the best of luck at Washington and we looked forward to the competition,” Olson says. “Then his mom called me and asked, ‘Did you ever offer Jason a scholarship?’ Of course we did.” Now that it was clear there was a scholarship waiting for Terry in Tucson, Cheatham talked her son into making a visit. “She was eight months pregnant! He came down here, he loved it here and the guys he was going to be playing with,” Olson says. “His mom, from the get-go, we hit it off.” Actually, she was so pregnant that she’d already been hospitalized for premature labor, Cheatham points out. But she went anyway. “Jason realized when he got there that it was a lot better,” she says. They flew back, and within days of their return she gave birth. “We really took a risk,” she laughs. “It was my mother’s idea to change my commitment and go to the University of Arizona, and I thank her to this day,” Terry says. But in the past, he has expressed some second thoughts. “It’s not that I regret it, but you always think about what-if. The state of [the Huskies] program at that time, you know, I probably would have been a difference-maker. But I don’t know if I would have made the NBA, because when I went to Arizona there was Sean Elliott, Steve Kerr, Damon Stoudamire, Khalid Reeves. These guys would come back in the summer. They’d be competing against us, and that’s what gave us our confidence.” Donald Watts remembers waiting to hear from Jason after his trip to Tucson, and then 11