Connie Hawkins could dunk a basketball at eleven years old. By the time he was eighteen, people who had watched the game their whole lives were already calling him one of the greatest they’d ever seen. Then, before he ever played a single college game, the sport took itself away from him — and it would be nine years before it gave itself back.
Who He Was
Cornelius Lance Hawkins was born July 17, 1942, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, the fifth of six children. His father left the family when Hawkins was about ten. His mother worked as a school cook to hold the household together, and she did it while slowly losing her sight to glaucoma. Money was tight enough that Hawkins shared a single cot with two younger brothers.
He was shy, gangly, and self-conscious — five foot ten and just 115 pounds at ten years old. He stayed away from the neighborhood’s rougher edges and put everything he had into the courts instead. He dunked for the first time at eleven, at PS 3 — and the basketball world had a new name for him before he’d even left the schoolyard. They called him the Hawk, and it stayed with him for the rest of his life. Not long after, he was holding his own against grown men at Rucker Park, including a young Wilt Chamberlain.
The Ascent
At Boys High School, Hawkins started out playing little as a skinny sophomore. Coach Mickey Fisher saw something in him and built his playground instincts into real fundamentals. As a junior, Hawkins made All-City and helped Boys High go undefeated on their way to the city title. As a senior, he averaged 25.5 points a game — including a 60-point night — and Boys High repeated as champions. In 1960, Parade magazine named him a High School All-American. He was, by most accounts, the most talked-about high school player New York City had produced up to that point.
College recruiters lined up for him anyway, even though his academic record told a different story than his basketball record did. Testing at the time reportedly showed his IQ below 75 and his reading skills at a seventh-grade level. Boys High sent him out with a certificate of attendance instead of a diploma. Dozens of coaches wanted what he could do on a court. Almost none of them wanted to fix what the classroom had failed to give him. That gap is not a mark against Hawkins. It’s a mark against an approach that will chase a young man’s talent for years without once slowing down to ask whether he can read the contract he’s about to sign. He chose a scholarship to the University of Iowa and enrolled in 1960.
The Weight of the Affidavit
Freshmen couldn’t play varsity basketball under the rules of that era. Hawkins never suited up for a single Iowa game that season. That fact matters, because in 1961, his name surfaced anyway in a sprawling point-shaving investigation run by Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan — an investigation centered on a fixer named Jack Molinas.
The actual connection between Hawkins and the scandal was a $200 loan from Molinas, money Hawkins said went toward school costs and travel. His brother repaid it before the investigation ever went public. No one — not a single gambler, not Molinas himself — ever claimed Hawkins had anything to do with fixing a game.
He was nineteen, with no lawyer present, when a detective pulled him out of Iowa City and brought him back to New York for questioning. He later told Ebony magazine what that questioning felt like: investigators “kept saying I’d go to jail if I lied. They’d say they thought I was lying. So I thought I’d go to jail if I didn’t tell a different story.” He signed an affidavit under that pressure. He was granted immunity from prosecution — but the affidavit alone was enough for the University of Iowa to expel him immediately. No other college would take him after that. His college career ended before it started.
The NBA followed the same script. Commissioner J. Walter Kennedy made it known no team would sign him. When his class became draft-eligible in 1964, he went unpicked. He went unpicked again in 1965. In 1966, the NBA’s Board of Governors made it official and barred him outright. Hawkins was never arrested. Never indicted. Never convicted of anything. The league built its case entirely on an affidavit taken from a nineteen-year-old, and on his name having crossed paths with the wrong person’s.
Built in the Margins
Locked out of the NBA, Hawkins went and built a career somewhere else. He signed with the Pittsburgh Rens of the American Basketball League in 1961 and, that January, scored a league-record 54 points in a single game. He led the ABL in scoring and won its Most Valuable Player award — at nineteen years old. When the league folded at the end of 1962, he joined the Harlem Globetrotters, touring with them for roughly four years. The ball-handling and control he picked up on those tours would shape the rest of his game.
None of it came easy. He was supporting his own children and his wife’s brother, who lived with a disability, on a Globetrotters salary — enough that he picked up extra income playing in a local industrial league in Pittsburgh on the side. And through all of it, he carried the weight of being treated as a pariah back home, for something he was never proven to have done.
The Lawsuit, the Reckoning, the Return
In 1966, Hawkins filed a $6 million antitrust lawsuit against the NBA, arguing the league had shut him out of his own profession without ever producing real evidence against him. On his lawyers’ advice, he also joined the newly formed American Basketball Association the following year, determined to prove — on the biggest stage available to him — exactly what the NBA had refused to see. In his very first ABA season with the Pittsburgh Pipers, he led the league in scoring, won both the regular-season and playoff MVP awards, and carried Pittsburgh to the league’s first championship.
What finally turned the case was journalism, not just litigation. A Life magazine feature by reporter David Wolf — later expanded into the book Foul! — laid the actual evidence bare for the public and made it plain how thin the NBA’s case against Hawkins had always been. Facing a lawsuit it was unlikely to win, the league settled after the 1968-69 season. Hawkins received a cash settlement of nearly $1.3 million, his ban was lifted, and his NBA rights were assigned to the expansion Phoenix Suns.
He was twenty-seven years old when he finally got to play in the league everyone had always known he belonged in. He didn’t waste the chance. In his rookie season, he played all 81 games, averaged nearly 25 points and better than 10 rebounds a night, and earned First Team All-NBA honors. He went on to make four straight NBA All-Star teams. Across his full career in the ABL, ABA, and NBA combined, he made six All-Star teams and was named First Team in all three leagues — a distinction almost no one else in the sport’s history can claim.
What His Story Teaches
People who watched the Hawk in his prime still talk about him like something rare passed through the game too briefly. Coach Larry Brown, who saw him as both a rival and a peer, put it plainly: “He was Julius Erving before Julius, he was Elgin Baylor before Elgin, he was Michael Jordan before Michael… He was simply the greatest individual player I have ever seen.” Doug Moe, who played against him in the 1968 ABA Finals, said much the same. What almost none of them mention first is what he lost. What Hawkins mentioned, when asked, was different: “I was so happy to play. I didn’t have any problems with animosity or bitterness at all. As soon as I got that Phoenix Suns uniform, I just wanted to play.”
His life shows the same pattern completing itself more than once, on different ground each time. As a teenager on the playgrounds of Bed-Stuy, what he knew about the game and what he understood about his own gift met each other early — Knowledge and Overstanding, arriving together before he’d even finished growing into his body. Years later, in a courtroom and then on an ABA hardwood, he took the only leverage available to him — the truth, and a lawsuit built on it — and refined it into something the NBA couldn’t ignore: a settlement, a lifted ban, and a roster spot. That is Power and Refinement, built from resistance instead of wealth. And what he did with his eventual security wasn’t hoard it. He spent his final decades in Phoenix Suns community relations, giving back to the very organization — and the very city — that had finally let him in. Equality, practiced as an ongoing habit rather than a headline.
None of this required the record to ever fully catch up to what actually happened. Hawkins made his ABL MVP at nineteen whether or not the NBA acknowledged the league. He was innocent of the accusation the day it was made, not just the day the NBA finally settled. What connects the confirmed parts of his life is this: he kept building somewhere, even when the place he most wanted to build refused him entry.
What This Means for You
You don’t always get to choose when the truth catches up. Sometimes it takes a lawyer. Sometimes it takes a reporter willing to actually check the facts. Sometimes it just takes time, and the refusal to let a false story become the only story.
If something was taken from you that you never had the chance to properly answer for — years, a reputation, a shot you should have gotten — that loss is real, and it deserves to be named as what it is. It also isn’t the end of what you get to build. Hawkins spent the years he was locked out becoming an MVP in leagues most people have forgotten existed. He didn’t wait for permission to keep living his life at full effort.
Hawkins’s gift was real. So was the gap nobody closed for him. Boys High watched him carry a team to two championships and still let him leave without being able to read at his own grade level. That’s not a story about one kid falling through the cracks. It’s a pattern — and it’s still a pattern today, in gyms and fields across this country, wherever a young person’s athletic future gets treated as more urgent than their education.
Talent is not a backup plan. If sports are carrying you right now, that’s a real gift — and it deserves a second one standing next to it: a skill, a trade, a diploma, something built that doesn’t depend on your knees holding up or a scout showing up on the right night. Hawkins eventually got his second chance. Most people who lose their shot at one thing never get handed a settlement that hands them a career in the other. Build the backup while you’re building the dream.
Build where you’re standing. Let the record catch up when it catches up.
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