Connie Hawkins' charismatic game, likable personality made him Suns' first star
https://eu.azcentral.com/story/sports/nba/suns/2017/10/07/connie-hawkins-charismatic-game-likable-personality-made-him-suns-first-star-connie-hawkins-death/743284001/
SCOTT BORDOW | The Republic | azcentral.com
Al McCoy loves to tell stories about former Suns great Connie Hawkins, who died Friday at the age of 75. Here’s one of them:
After Hawkins’ autobiography “Foul! The Connie Hawkins Story” was published in 1972, Hawkins would do a series of interviews in whatever city the Suns were playing in that night. At the end of one long road trip, the Suns were in Kansas City to take on the Kings, and Hawkins was exhausted. But, as was his agreeable nature, he consented to the round of interviews that morning and afternoon.
In the locker room before the game, McCoy noticed that Hawkins wasn’t around. He asked longtime Suns trainer Joe Proski where Hawkins was, and Proski said, “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to call the guy, but no one is answering in his hotel room.”
Worried, the Suns sent two ball boys back to the team hotel to try to find Hawkins. After a quick search, they found him sleeping in the room of the book’s author, David Wolf. Wolf had forgotten to wake Hawkins up.
By the time Hawkins arrived at the arena and put his uniform on, it was the end of the first quarter.
“I was sitting courtside doing the game, and when I saw him I said, ‘Hawk, what’s going on? Where have you been?’ ” McCoy recalled. “He looked at me with a big smile and said, ‘Real’ – he always called me Real – ‘look at it this way: If this was baseball and a double-header, I’d be early for the second game.’ ”
Hawkins’ passing did not shock members of the Suns’ family. Hawkins had been in poor health for years, unable to attend McCoy’s Ring of Honor ceremony last March. But the news hit hard, nonetheless.
“He was very special,” Jerry Colangelo said. “He’ll be missed.”
Hawkins’ journey to the Suns was anything but ordinary. A New York playground legend, he was expelled from the University of Iowa in 1961 after his name came up in a point-shaving scandal. Hawkins was not arrested or directly implicated, but no other college reached out to him and he was banned from the NBA. He played one year in the American Basketball League, barnstormed with the Harlem Globetrotters until 1967 and then joined the Pittsburgh Pipers of the American Basketball Association, where he led the league in scoring, won an MVP award and an ABA title.
It wasn’t until 1969, when Hawkins was already 27 years old, that he finally was allowed to join the NBA. The Suns, who had lost a coin flip for the rights to draft UCLA center Lew Alcindor months earlier, this time won a coin flip with the Seattle SuperSonics for the rights to Hawkins.
It didn’t take long for Hawkins to make up for lost time. As a “rookie,” he earned All-NBA First Team honors after averaging 24.6 points, 10.4 rebounds and 4.8 assists per game, and the Suns went from 16 wins their expansion season to 39 wins and the playoffs.
“He helped establish us as a franchise, no question about it,” Colangelo said. “He was our first star.”
Hawkins played parts of five seasons with the Suns, made four All-Star teams and was an original member of the team’s Ring of Honor. In 1992, he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.
But Hawkins’ legacy is not so much what he accomplished as how he did it. Hawkins was the original high-flier, an innovator whose soaring, almost balletic swoops to the hoop influenced legends like Julius Erving and Michael Jordan. In Hawkins’ massive hands, the basketball looked like the size of a grapefruit, and he would effortlessly palm the ball as he took off in flight. Often, he moved his hand under the ball as he got near the basket and dropped it in, doing a finger roll before George Gervin made the move popular.
“He had a flair and charisma to his game,” Colangelo said.
Hawkins’ take was a bit more colorful.
“If I didn’t break the laws of gravity, I was slow to obey them,” Hawkins told the Philadelphia Inquirer.
While his game was outrageous, Hawkins was not. He was a modest man who found joy in the simple things, like a good practical joke or shooting hoops with kids at a Phoenix playground.
“When he was with us he was a star, a superstar but he didn't act like it,” Proski said. “He was just a normal, down-to-earth guy.”
In the early 1990s, Colangelo found out Hawkins was dealing with some difficult personal issues. He bought a ticket for Hawkins to fly back to Phoenix and hired him to be a community ambassador for the franchise. The role fit Hawkins perfectly.
“That’s what he enjoyed,” Colangelo said. “He was good at it.”
An ESPN SportsCentury profile of Hawkins described him as “Jordan before Jordan, Dr. J before Dr. J.”
To the Suns, he was so much more than that.
“I’ll forever be indebted for what he did for the franchise, to help establish it in Arizona,” Colangelo said. “It isn’t often you really get that close to a player if you are ownership, management, all of those things. But he had a real warmth to him and our relationship was just very unique.”
One last story, this one from Proski:
“Hawk is the guy who got me my nickname ‘Magic Fingers,’ ” Proski said. “One game we were playing on national TV and he fell down near the free throw line. I thought he was really hurt. He was grabbing his knee and grimacing in pain. I ran out and asked him what was wrong.
“He looks at me and says, ‘Just think, all your buddies in Green Bay (Proski's hometown) are eating their hearts out because you're on national TV.’ Then he just jumped up. Hot Rod Hundley, who was broadcasting the game, said ‘Oh my God, he must have magic in his fingers.’
“That was Hawk. He was one of a kind.”
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