Requiem for a Hawk

One by one they take their quiet leave, all the names who made sports sing for me as a kid. I'm no kid myself anymore, is one dully obvious thing this tells me. Another is that underneath all my hard-won cynicism a foolish romantic clings to life, because whenever a boyhood idol passes I always say "But he wasn't that old!"

Connie Hawkins died the other day, is what I'm trying to say. And, no, he wasn't that old.

He was 75 -- which is nothing, really, especially when he'll always in my memory be the long, ramshackle coil of muscle and spring who stared from the wall in my dorm room at Ball State. That poster went up the day I moved in, if I remember right, and it stayed there: Connie Hawkins in his glory days with the Phoenix Suns, holding the basketball in his huge hands as he contemplated a free throw.

Now both poster and dorm room are gone. The poster vanished who knows when. The dorm room in Hurst Hall disappeared in a shower of rubble this summer, as Ball State demolished LaFollette Complex to make room for newer, better dorms. Hurst, naturally, was the first dorm they took down.

The Hawk, on the other hand, endures. He was my favorite basketball player when I was growing up, even if he wasn't as well known as a lot of his contemporaries. This is because the NBA banned him for most of his prime years, punishment for alleged involvement in a college point-shaving scandal. As it turns out, Hawk was innocent. He was a wronged party, and I've always been a sucker for wronged party stories.

But I also dug his game. Hawk, you see, is the guy who taught basketball how to fly.

He was 6-foot-8 with huge hands and crazy hops, a 1960s New York playground legend as famous in his own sphere as Wilt Chamberlain or Oscar Robertson were in theirs. The man was Dr. J before there was a Dr. J, Michael Jordan before there was a Michael Jordan. He was the first superstar of the fledgling ABA, led the Pittsburgh Pipers to the first ABA title, played for a time with the Globetrotters during his long and undeserved exile.

The great parlor game with Hawk was just how great he would have been had he not had to spend so much of his career in the bushes. By the time he came to the NBA, he was 27 years old, but it was an old 27. As it was, he still made the Hall of Fame.

And now he is gone. At 75.

Not that old. No, not that old at all.