Connie Hawkins

Cornelius Lance Hawkins, born July 17, 1942, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York, is one of basketball's greatest tragedies and ultimate redemptions — a player of such extraordinary natural gifts that many who watched him considered him among the most talented to ever play the game, yet who spent the prime years of his career wrongfully exiled from the sport he was born to play. Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s, Hawkins displayed basketball gifts that were genuinely transcendent. Standing 6'8" with a wingspan that seemed to defy geometry, extraordinary body control, and the ability to handle the ball like a guard while finishing above the rim in ways no one his size had attempted, he was the prototype for a kind of player the NBA would not see regularly until decades later. His reputation on the New York playground circuits was that of a mythological figure. Hawkins attended the University of Iowa briefly before being caught up in a point-shaving scandal in 1961 — despite never betting on or intentionally influencing games, never taking money to affect outcomes, and being guilty of nothing more than knowing people who were involved in gambling. The NBA blacklisted him, robbing him of his professional years when he was 19 to 26 years old and at the height of his athletic powers. He played in the short-lived American Basketball League and then the ABA from 1967 to 1969, where he dominated at such an extraordinary level that the injustice of his NBA banishment could no longer be ignored. A lawsuit against the NBA finally won him reinstatement in 1969, and at age 27 — years past his physical prime — he joined the expansion Phoenix Suns as the franchise's first genuine star. Even diminished by years of denied competition, Hawkins was an All-Star in each of his first four NBA seasons, averaging over 20 points as a Sun and leading Phoenix to the playoffs in 1970. The basketball world finally witnessed what Brooklyn had known for a decade: Hawkins was a talent of the rarest kind. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1992, and the NBA formally apologized for the injustice that had denied him his prime years.