Craig Watts didn’t come to NC State from South Easton, Massachusetts, to be a superstar. He came to be part of head coach Norm Sloan’s successful blueprint for building basketball champions.
He was part of a long (vertically and horizontally) line of players in the 1970s that Sloan recruited to do one thing: be tall.
It was the winning formula that made the 1973 and ’74 Wolfpack so successful with 7-foot-2 center Tommy Burleson as a skinny mountain in the middle, bringing home back-to-back ACC titles, the school’s first team national championship and a two-year record of 57-1.
As much as three-time All-American David Thompson is credited for making the Wolfpack nationally elite, the coaching staff of that era always said Burleson was the most important building block in putting together the team that ended UCLA’s seven-year reign as national champions.
Sloan tried hard over the next five years to find a similar replacement, first signing 6-foot-11 junior college standout Tommy Barker to step in after the national championship season, then 7-2 Glenn Sudhop, 7-0 Watts, 7-foot-5 Chuck Nevitt and 6-11 Thurl Bailey.
(Barker, of Weslaco, Texas, never showed up to play for the Wolfpack. After starting his career with Minnesota, he transferred to the College of Southern Idaho, signed a letter of intent with NC State and wound up playing two years at Hawaii before being drafted by the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks.)
In 1978-79, Sloan had three seven-footers on his roster: senior Sudhop, sophomore Watts and redshirt freshman Nevitt.
However, only Bailey – a power forward with a shooting mentality on offense who had skills completely different from the others – ever approached Burleson’s contributions to help the Wolfpack win another national title.
Yet Watts – who died after prolonged health issues on Dec. 26, 2020, at the age of 61 – was a popular figure on Sloan’s final three teams and Jim Valvano’s inaugural edition at NC State. He was also a strong academic student who followed in his father’s footsteps to study engineering.
He always had a side gig while in school, carrying his toolbox around the College Inn to fix whatever beater car his teammates and fellow athletes left in the parking lot.
Known as “Watty” to his teammates, he enrolled as an electrical engineering student who eventually earned a degree in engineering operations. This turned out to be one of the wedge issues between Sloan and the university administration when Watts was discouraged from staying in engineering while pursuing basketball.
“He was just a great mentor as an upperclassman,” Bailey said. “He was one of the first people to take me under his wing when I arrived at State.
“He always had a giving heart but could handle himself in the post. He was a high-IQ player who taught me a lot about taking up space in the post. I will always remember him as a gentle giant – except when he was schooling me in the post.”
Plus, he was quite an anomaly on a Southern team that drew players from all over the country.
“I always loved hearing his New Englander accent,” Bailey said. “I felt like I was talking to a Kennedy.”
Watts never averaged more than six points or rebounds a game, but he never averaged fewer than three either. His best season was his last when he averaged 5.1 points and 5.9 rebounds per game, while serving as co-captain.
“Craig could really run,” the late Valvano said of Watts. “Jeez, he could run. It was up and down the floor, run, run, run. We didn’t get much stats out of him, but, man, could he run.”
“He was a good student and a good guy,” said Eddie Biedenbach, who recruited Watts out of Oliver Ames High School in Massachusetts as an NC State assistant.
Watts was a late-bloomer in basketball, who missed most of his senior season in high school with an injury. He played enough, however, to dream big about playing professionally.
“It’s a one-in-a-million chance at the pros,” Watts said before his senior season. “It’s a dream in the big blue sky. If I was given the chance, then I’m sure I’d give it a try.”
Taken in the fifth round of the 1981 NBA draft by the Los Angeles Lakers, Watts was one of Paul Westhead’s final cuts before the beginning of the 1981-82 season. He was quickly signed to play overseas, spending several years with teams in France, Spain and Portugal.
Watts settled in Cary, N.C., after his professional career ended, spending his time on hobbies like catamaran sailing, grilling, gardening and attending NC State sporting events, as well as being his family’s fix-it man. His only child, Daniel Watts, was a standout basketball player at Green Hope High School who spent four seasons at Elon (2007-11).
To honor Watts’ memory, the family requests donations to the UNC Rex Healthcare Foundation in honor of the sixth-floor Heart and Vascular Unit nurses or to the American Heart Association.
Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.
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