Farewell, Hawk

Hall of Famer, playground legend dies at age 75

IT is a story Lou Carnesecca has probably told a thousand times by now, because Looie is, always was, one of the great curators and protectors of New York City basketball. The funny thing was, the longer the distance got between moment and memory, the better the story got.

Carnesecca was a young assistant for Joe Lapchick then, and like everyone else in the city, he’d heard stories about a kid from Boys High in Brooklyn named Connie Hawkins. But Looie hadn’t just fallen off the turnip truck from Queens, either. He knew, nine times out of 10, the stories don’t befit the reality.

Let him pick it up from here:

“So I finally went to see this Superman play with my own two eyes,” Looie said a few years back. “So Boys is playing Thomas Jefferson, and right at the start of the game here’s this beautiful kid blocking a shot, knocking it all the way to halfcourt. There’s six kids scrambling for the ball but he gets it, tips it forward, grabs it at the free throw line, and dunks it. I’d never seen anything like it before.”

Always he would pause the story here. And always the big finish:

“I ran out of the gym,” Carnesecca said, “and I didn’t come back.”

Hawkins never did play for St. John’s, opting instead to leave the city, play at Iowa, and in one of the great basketball tragedies he’d never play for the Hawkeyes, either. Back home, he’d befriended Jack Molinas, an ex-Columbia player heavily involved in gambling. That association alone was enough to keep him off the court in college, and banned from the NBA until 1969, even though it was never proven he’d ever shaved a point or had any hand in anything nefarious.

By then, by the time the Hawk — who died Friday at 75 — joined the Phoenix Suns, the tales of his legend had grown and grown, some of them true, some of them only partly true. The Hawk who arrived in Arizona was still a glorious player — as a 27-year-old “rookie” he aver- aged 24.6 points, made the first of four NBA All-Star teams, finished fifth in MVP voting. He was still great.

But the folks who saw him back in the day, they’ll tell you that was something to behold. As the great columnist and fervent basketball sage Bob Ryan has written: “Elgin Baylor’s playing vision begat Connie Hawkins, who begat Julius Erving, who begat Michael Jordan.”

That’s quite a lineage to live up to. Connie Hawkins

And by almost all accounts, it was entirely fair. There were dozens of games like the one Carnesecca described, some of them in high school gyms, some on Brooklyn playgrounds. There was one, on March 15, 1960, that the oldtimers still talk about. At night, at Madison Square Garden, in the NIT, when the NIT was king, there would be a terrific battle between St. Bonaventure (led by the Stith brothers, out of St. Francis Prep) and St. John’s.

But that was the after-card. Earlier, Boys High had played Wingate in a semifinal of the PSAL playoffs, Hawkins leading Boys, Roger Brown doing his thing for Wingate. Both players would soon be conjoined in similar muck, Brown finding at Dayton the same unfair fate that awaited Hawk at Iowa before becoming the greatest of all ABA players.

That day, though, 18,000 folks were inside as scalpers cleared a month’s pay outside. Brown scored 39 points. Hawkins had 18 points and 13 rebounds before fouling out in the third quarter (mostly because he was the only one with a prayer of guarding Brown). Boys won, 62-59, and in certain precincts of Brooklyn, you would swear the game took place only last week.

I met Hawkins once. This was maybe 10 years ago, in the coach section of a Phoenix-to-New York flight. There was a middle seat between us. I waited till we were in full descent, turned to him, held out my hand, told him how much I appreciated watching old tapes of him since I was too young to see it in real time.

We shook hands. I’m pretty sure they were the biggest hands I’ve ever seen. “Bless you,” he said. Bless you, Hawk. And Godspeed.