CONNIE HAWKINS…“THE HAWK”
“He was Julius before Julius, he was Elgin before Elgin, he was Michael before Michael…He was simply the greatest individual player I have ever seen.”
— Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame Coach Larry Brown —
“One of the best things I ever did on the court was against Wilt. It was in the playoffs, Lakers against the Suns, and we were in L.A. I was on this side of the basket going up for a shot, and Wilt came over to block it. Now (in the air) I ducked underneath the rim and went to the other side of the basket and layed [sic] it up off the back of the glass. Everybody still talks about that.
As a matter of fact, Wilt talks about that shot. He had been playing about 23 years, and someone recently asked him what the toughest shot someone ever had against him, and he always talks about that one…Right after that play, he dunked on me about 11 times in a row. He did some dunks I had never seen in my life. Me against Wilt, and then Wilt against me.”
“But what people don’t know is that me and Wilt started the finger roll. We just didn’t call it that. Wilt used to call it the ‘dipper.’ Now I look on TV, at these commercials, and I see George [Gervin] talkin’ about ‘the finger roll.’ I love George, but he got that from me. I need to start seeing some of his checks. I should be getting some of that money.”
“People always say that they never saw how good I was, really was, because they stole my best years and all that. That bothers me because I look at it like, my first year I made the NBA All-Star team, I made the All-Pro team too. So what did they steal? I showed my capabilities, what I could do, but all most people think about is what was taken from me. Look, I’m in the Hall of Fame. That’s the pinnacle. They saw the best of me. I was fortunate enough to play against the top players in the world. And I know what I did against them.”
— Connie Hawkins in 2010 —
Perhaps just as it should have been for someone who was 6’8” tall, had hands like catcher’s mitts, could jump over the moon and was “quicker than 11:15 mass at a seaside resort.”
But not as it should have been.
How it was.
Connie Hawkins was basketball’s greatest high-flying pioneer. Sure, on the playgrounds of New York there were others but “The Hawk” was at the top of the list. Herman Knowings. Rick Kirkland. Earl Manigault. Joe Hammond. “Helicopter.” “Pee Wee.” “The Goat.” “The Destroyer.”
They took a back seat.
All of them.
Cornelius Lance Hawkins was the best of all.
A New York City basketball legend he had “big hands and long, long, long, really long arms,” according to Willie Worsley, a Rucker League opponent and starting guard on the 1966 NCAA champion Texas Western Miners. “He was the first Dr. J. He was tricky as whatever. He let you know you were on his court.”
Ray Haskins — not to be confused with Don Haskins, the Texas Western College coach — recalled watching Hawkins play at Kingston Park in Brooklyn. Oscar Robertson was there that day, also watching. The Big O asked Haskins what college Hawkins attended. “He was a junior at Boys High,” Haskins remembered replying. “He was masterful at a young age.”
So accomplished that he could dunk a basketball as a 6’2” boy of eleven.
Jackie Jackson, two years ahead of Hawkins at Boys and later a Harlem Globetrotters teammate of “The Hawk,” simply stated that, “Wilt Chamberlain was the best player I ever went up against. Connie was next.”
His schoolyard exploits burnished an already glowing basketball reputation which included back-to-back PSAL titles at Boys and a full ride to play at the University of Iowa in 1961.
He never played a varsity minute for the conveniently nicknamed Hawkeyes.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, he was banned from entering the NBA because of a tenuous connection to and unfounded suspicions of involvement in a New York City-based college point-shaving scandal. College basketball at the time was reeling, gasping for air under its second such allegation.
There really was no hard evidence to substantiate his blacklisting; he was never directly linked to any wrongdoing. And he was never formally accused. The widely-held contention was that he had nothing to do with it.
This was the lot of one of the greatest players in New York City high school basketball history.
“The Hawk’s” prime was spent in the ABL with the Pittsburgh Rens, the Globetrotters and then in the ABA.
When it was all sorted out Connie Hawkins was a 27-year-old NBA rookie recovering from knee surgery.
In spite of this gross injustice, he maintained his humility and more importantly his sense of humor. The record shows that his NBA career lasted for seven years, only four of which were truly productive by what were thought to be Hawkins’ standards. (In his last season in the NBA playing for the Atlanta Hawks in 1975–6, he averaged 8.2 ppg).
But he didn’t see it that way. He was just happy to finally be where he belonged.
There is much to be said for being humble, grateful, kind and self-effacing. Connie Hawkins exemplified all of that and more.
Coming from a dirt poor family with barely enough to eat, he found his niche in the great comfort Brooklyn’s asphalt playgrounds afforded him. Soon he was the playground hoop story of all the boroughs.
Hawkins was a decent shooter but his signature became the one-on-one game in which he would bait an opponent to try and guard him and in the blink of an eye, blow by, gripping the ball in one hand before rising to finish with some ad-libbed aerial wizardry culminating in a breathtaking and thunderous slam.
He flew through the air seemingly defying the laws of gravity. Tongue firmly in cheek he once conceded that “someone said if I didn’t break them, [the laws of gravity] I was slow to obey them.”
Fifty years later give or take “The Hawk” reluctantly admitted in an interview that the turn of events which prevented him from competing at basketball’s highest level rocked his world big-time.
He wasn’t complaining but rather just stating the facts.
“It was totally devastating. I was innocent, but no one would listen to me. Plus, coming from a poor family, no one even thought about trying to get a lawyer to fight it. We just weren’t that sophisticated.”
Eventually he sued the NBA for illegally banning him and depriving him of the “opportunity to earn a livelihood.” A settlement of a reported $1.3 million was reached.
But by the time then-commissioner J. Walter Brown lifted the ban in 1969, Hawkins had lost eight years of his basketball and money-making prime. And those years weren’t coming back.
The one-year-old Phoenix Suns and Jerry Colangelo selected Hawkins second overall after losing a coin flip for the rights to Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar). Characteristically, Hawkins was ecstatic and not resentful. Somehow rancor didn’t appear in his DNA profile.
“I was the happiest guy in the world. Once I became an NBA player, I never looked back. People still to this day ask me if I was bitter about that, and I still tell them the same thing. Hell no. I’m just glad I was able to play.”
Colangelo — the Suns general manager when Hawkins played and later the franchise’s owner — was enamored of Connie Hawkins, describing him as “a legend…a player I had a very deep affection for who kind of put us on the map…One of the first players to play above the rim and kind of set the tone for those who followed, Julius Erving in particular, in terms of charisma on the court and the ability to do things on [the] court.”
In a statement issued by the Phoenix Suns following Hawkins’ death, the praise continued to flow, profusely yet with a matter-of-fact tone. “‘The Hawk’ revolutionized the game and remains to this day an icon of the sport and one of basketball’s great innovators. His unique combination of size, grace and athleticism was well ahead of its time and his signature style of play is now a hallmark of the modern game.”
Colangelo concluded by assessing that if Hawkins had entered the league through college and at the normal age, “he could have been one of the top 10 or 15 players to ever play the game…[and perhaps more importantly, he was] a very warm, compassionate guy who was very humble in his own way.”
In spite of his pro career being haunted by a tired litany of what-ifs, “The Hawk” would have none of it.
“My attitude was that had I not played in the A.B.A., I wouldn’t have a job. Had I not played with the Globetrotters, I would not have learned the experience and traveled around the world. Those things helped me out and gave me a different style of play once I got into the N.B.A.”
Asked if his induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1992 provided him with any sense of vindication, Hawkins responded: “My vindication was that I got into the N.B.A. and was able to play basketball. This was icing on the cake.”
David Wolf who later authored the book “Foul!: The Connie Hawkins Story,” wrote a 1969 piece for Life Magazine (helping to pave the way for Hawkins’ NBA entry) in which he stated that, “evidence recently uncovered indicates that Connie Hawkins never knowingly associated with gamblers, that he never introduced a player to a fixer, and that the only damaging statements about his involvement were made by Hawkins himself — as a terrified, semiliterate teenager who thought he’d go to jail unless he said what the D.A.’s detectives pressed him to say.”
Jonathan B. Segal, reviewing Wolf’s book in The New York Times Book Review observed that it demonstrated “how an underprivileged black man was victimized by a fat-cat, unfeeling Establishment.”
Unfortunately, this does not qualify as news. It’s been happening forever and goes on as we live and breathe today.
What defines the rarified air through which Connie Hawkins soared and swooped was his positive attitude and the way he handled what had befallen him every single day.
Connie Hawkins died at age 75 on October 6, 2017.
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in October 2017.]
