The sparse direct adaptive equalizer (DAE) has recently attracted much attention in underwater acoustic (UWA) communications for its improved performance compared with conventional non-sparse DAEs. The recursive least squares (RLS) type sparse DAEs were barely studied, mainly due to their high complexity despite fast convergence. This letter presents several low-complexity sparse RLS algorithms for multiple-input multiple-output UWA channel equalization. The resulting fast sparse RLS DAEs are tested to be effective and outperform their non-sparse counterpart by experimental results.