The Zen of Connie Hawkins
“Someone said if I didn’t break the laws of gravity, I was slow to obey them.”
Basketball legend Connie Hawkins
In the spring of 1969, I was 14, and there was a copy of Life magazine lying around the living room. If you are not an old person, let me explain that Life magazine was an over-sized photography-heavy magazine with a habit of lying round millions of American living rooms.
In 1969, circulation was 8.5 million. This issue had a bright yellow cover touting a crisis in American high schools. I’m pretty sure the crisis was that students wanted the right to dissent and question authority.
But inside the magazine, there was another story.
It was about a man named Connie Hawkins, who had grown up — raised by his blind mother — in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn which at that time had few rivals in the race to the bottom of poverty, urban blight, and all the gritty, toxic byproducts of despair.
Hawkins’ life would have been defined by all that, except for one thing. He could fly. He became a New York City high school and playground basketball phenomenon and wound up at Iowa for his freshman year.
Leaving New York for Iowa City, almost exactly 1,000 miles away by car, Hawkins borrowed $200 from a shady guy named Jack Molinas. His brother Fred paid the money back the following summer. But Molinas was the white hot center of a college basketball point shaving scandal that splashed mud on the sport in the 1960-61 season.
Hawkins got dragged into it, even though back then freshmen could not play varsity games. A Manhattan D.A. named Frank Hogan got it into his head that Hawkins was some kind of go-between. As Life magazine pointed out, it’s not that there was little evidence to support these charges. There was no evidence.
And yet Hawkins was kicked out of the college game. The commissioner of the NBA said he would never play there either, and in 1964, his year of draft eligibility, all teams passed on him.
How good was he? Reports from those freshman year practices suggested he was easily outplaying the team’s star, Don Nelson, who would play 14 years in the NBA.
The basketball people who saw Hawkins in his prime tended to echo the words of player and longtime coach Larry Brown: “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.”
But not many people did see him. Hawkins started out with the American Basketball League, which immediately folded. He gratefully signed with the Harlem Globetrotters, who offered a punishing schedule of relentless travel and two-a-day games. At the end of four years, the trotting had turned Hawkins’ knees into inflamed globes.
But a new league beckoned. The American Basketball Association prized flash and dash and had this crazy idea that a longer shot should be worth three points. Hawkins, with the Pittsburgh Pipers, was the ABA’s first scoring leader and first MVP.
How good was he? Ask Hawkins: “Someone said if I didn’t break the laws of gravity, I was slow to obey them.”
I put the magazine down. This was an outrage. I went around talking about it to anyone who would listen, which was essentially no one. But then ...
The magazine piece was so damning that the NBA agreed to settle a suit brought by Hawkins. This was the year the Milwaukee Bucks won a coin flip that enabled them to draft Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to you). The Phoenix Suns, with the second pick, took a center named Neal Walk. Note to general managers: Football teams should probably not draft Joe Holding. Same goes for NHL teams and Jean-Pierre Icing or baseball teams and Eli Caught-Stealing. Walk was an interesting guy who at one point suggested basketball would be better if no score were kept and the game was appreciated for its sheer beauty. As a center he resembled Kareem pretty much the way I resemble Neal Walk. Not at all.
The Suns also wound up getting Hawkins as a 27-year-old consolation prize. Which is how I became — in 1969 — perhaps Connecticut’s most intense Phoenix Suns fan. They weren’t on television very often, but when I did see Hawkins, there was still an air of tragedy around him. He was good, but there was the inescapable sense that we had missed his best. And his knees were like bald tires.
Anyway, I have stayed another 50 years, and they have often not been fruitful. One exception was the early 1990s, when Charles Barkley joined the Suns for four seasons.
Barkley is an enormous person by the tale of the tape, but there is something even more out-sized about his persona. When he was a rookie with Philadelphia, the GM of the Sixers was Pat Williams, who famously had 18 kids, 14 of them adopted. He took Barkley on as an unofficial 19th, and there’s a story about the Williams clan at the beach and one of the kids asking Dad, “Can I go in the ocean?” “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because Charles is using it now.” I had a little kid in the early ’90s. He had an enchanting stammer and some conflation of the Suns with the UConn Huskies, the other team we watched on TV. Beholding Barkley, estuaries of sweat running down his bulwark and ramparts, standing at the free throw line, my little boy asked, “Doooooooooo the other Huskies love Sir Charles?”
In the past 10 years, the Suns have been a chore to root for, often coming frightening close to the first season 16-66 record that got them Connie Hawkins (and Neal Walk).
But this season has been, of course, different. They’re really good. My little boy is now 31 and going through horrible times. I lured him back to the Suns and he watches some of the games with me, although I often have to drive home at halftime and text him when the game ends.
Barkley, a delightful TV commentator, crows and chortles about “my Suns.” Hawkins died in 2017, so this is one more thing he’ll miss.
When he was inducted into the Hall of Fame, Connie spoke of seeing the world with the Globetrotters who, true to their name, took him to China and Jerusalem. Hawkins: “A poet once said, ‘I am a part of all that I leave.’ ”
Either I don’t know that poem, or he slightly misquoted Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” a fine text for a warrior who suffered through an unsought odyssey.
I have been thinking a lot about Ulysses during a hard year of decline and loss. Tennyson ends: “and tho’ / We are not now that strength which in old days / Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; / One equal temper of heroic hearts, /Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
Go Suns.