Retired La Conner teacher and coach Steff Steinhorst reflects on his 50-year friendship with Wilkens, whose legacy reached far beyond the basketball court.
The Pacific Northwest and pro basketball community are mourning the recent death of former Seattle Sonics star player and championship coach Lenny Wilkens, who was also revered for his philanthropy and unwavering role as a civil rights crusader.
Nowhere has the mood been more somber than the Shelter Bay home of Steff and Charlotte Steinhorst.
Steff Steinhorst, a retired La Conner Schools teacher, coach, and administrator, was a valued friend of Wilkens for more than a half-century.
Their bond was forged in the early 1970s when Steinhorst and fellow Seattle Pacific University alum Dave Wortman worked summers at the Bob Houbregs All Star Basketball Camp at Fort Casey on Whidbey Island.
Steff Steinhorst holds a photo of his lifelong friend, Lenny Wilkens, in his Shelter Bay home. BILL REYNOLDS/LA CONNER COMMUNITY NEWSAt the time, Wilkens was at the peak of his brilliant hoops career, a crafty left-handed guard with multiple NBA All-Star game appearances on his resume along with a successful stint as Seattle’s player-coach.
“We brought Lenny in (to the camp) as our guest pro,” Steinhorst, now 86, recalled last week.
Ironically — and unfortunately — Wilkens would be dealt from Seattle to Cleveland in late 1972. Houbregs, at whose camp Wilkens was the main attraction and himself a legendary University of Washington basketball player, was then the Sonics’ general manager responsible for making the unpopular trade.
Wilkens, however, would continue to make the Seattle area his home.
“Lenny came up to Dave and me and said, ‘I want to start my own camp and have you guys run it,’” Steinhorst recounted.
Thus, the Lenny Wilkens Basketball Camp was born. Located in Issaquah, it became a magnet for countless youth players — boys and girls — and drew the area’s top high school and college coaches as instructors.
You could be anywhere and meet someone who went to Lenny’s camp.
Steff Steinhorst
Steinhorst wrote and edited the camp’s handbook, staffed its store, barbecued hamburgers and did whatever else it took to further enhance the camp experience.
Wilkens was a constant presence, too.
He and Steinhorst teamed up for a hilarious comedy routine on the camp’s skit nights, a banter highlighted in a later Sports Illustrated feature story on Wilkens written when he passed Boston’s Red Auerbach on the NBA’s all-time coaching wins list.
“I always wanted to be in Sports Illustrated, so I was able to check that one off, thanks to Lenny,” Steinhorst said.
For many years afterward, Steinhorst would be hailed by passersby who had been campers.
“I could be in Alaska and someone would come up to me and ask, ‘aren’t you Steff?’” he recalled. “You could be anywhere and meet someone who went to Lenny’s camp.”
Steinhorst and Wilkens shared several common interests, including tennis, a sport in which they often formed a formidable doubles team. There were also salmon fishing and river rafting outings.
When Steinhorst was teaching special needs students in Seattle, he called upon Wilkens to be a guest speaker. The sports icon didn’t hesitate to accept.
“He was all about kids,” Steinhorst said. “It was one of the highlights of our lives, working with kids and teaching them sports.”
When he was coaching at La Conner High School in the late 1980s, Steinhorst would occasionally invoke Wilkens’ name during team chalk talks. One of his anecdotes, though, apparently got garbled in translation between coach and teens.
“I have to go on record after all these years that I didn’t block Lenny Wilkens’ layup,” chuckled Steinhorst, who played for Olympic College in Bremerton.
Steinhorst pointed out that when Wilkens grew up in Brooklyn he was a big Dodgers fan and boyhood friend of Tommy Davis, who would be a superb outfielder for the team in the 1960s after it moved to Los Angeles.
“Lenny said he almost became a baseball player,” Steinhorst said. “He made the right choice.”
Indeed, he did. Wilkens is a rare three-time Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famer, inducted as a player, NBA coach and U.S. Olympic Men’s Team Coach.
Steinhorst and Wilkens kept in touch during their respective retirements. Wilkens called Steinhorst when a Seattle street was named in the NBA great’s honor and a statue of him was unveiled at Climate Pledge Arena.
“We talked on the phone and agreed to have lunch occasionally,” Steinhorst said.
When he heard the news that Wilkens had died at age 88, Steinhorst was stunned.
“I thought, this can’t be real,” he said.
“It’s been tough for Steff,” Charlotte Steinhorst said. “They’d been friends for over 50 years.”
Bill Reynolds is a general assignment reporter for La Conner Community News.
