Connie Hawkins
July 17, 1942 — Brooklyn, New York
Connie "The Hawk" Hawkins was an American basketball player from Brooklyn whose extraordinary athletic gifts — his 6'8" frame, enormous hands, and aerial creativity — produced a style of play that influenced a generation of players, but who was unjustly banned from the NBA for five years during what would have been his prime.
Brooklyn's Greatest Playground Player
Born on July 17, 1942 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Hawkins was widely regarded as the most gifted player to come out of the New York City playgrounds by the time he was a teenager. His hands were so large he could cradle a basketball in one palm. At Boys High School he was a schoolyard legend before he was old enough to drive. He entered the University of Iowa on a scholarship in 1960 but was expelled before the start of his freshman season after being falsely implicated in a point-shaving scandal by a fixer named Jack Molinas. Hawkins had known Molinas and accepted small loans from him, but had never fixed a game. The NBA and NCAA banned him anyway. He was nineteen years old.
The ABL, Harlem Globetrotters, and ABA
Barred from the NBA, Hawkins played for the Pittsburgh Rens in the short-lived American Basketball League (1961–63), then spent two years with the Harlem Globetrotters, and then became the star of the Pittsburgh Pipers in the newly formed American Basketball Association — winning the ABA's first MVP award in 1968 and leading Pittsburgh to the inaugural ABA Championship. In the ABA and in his barnstorming years, Hawkins developed a reputation as a player of mythic quality: his soaring drives, one-handed dunks from unusual angles, and ability to pass out of the air were described by witnesses as years ahead of anything the NBA had seen. Journalist David Wolf investigated his case and published a magazine piece in 1969 arguing that Hawkins had been wrongly banned. The resulting lawsuit against the NBA led to a settlement: in exchange for dropping his suit, Hawkins was cleared and admitted to the league in 1969 — at twenty-seven, past his explosive prime.
Did You Know?
Julius Erving (Dr. J), who became the most celebrated high-flying basketball player of the 1970s, has credited Hawkins as a direct influence on his own game. Hawkins's ability to handle the ball with one hand, hang in the air, and improvise in flight — moves he developed on the New York playgrounds — were the template for the above-the-rim style that Dr. J and, later, Michael Jordan made famous. Hawkins never received the credit he deserved because the ban kept him off national television during his peak years.
NBA, Hall of Fame, and Legacy
With the Phoenix Suns (1969–1973), Hawkins was a four-time NBA All-Star, but observers who had seen him in the ABA believed his best years were already behind him. He also played for the Los Angeles Lakers and Atlanta Hawks before retiring in 1976. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1992. He died on October 6, 2017, in Phoenix, aged 75. His story — the gifted young Black player from the projects, falsely accused, expelled, and left to play in leagues that could not adequately showcase him — became a touchstone for discussions of race, power, and the institutional injustices embedded in American professional sports.