Connie Hawkins and the Battle to Rename a Brooklyn Playground

There are people in Bedford-Stuyvesant who still talk about a pickup basketball game that took place in the neighborhood back in the summer of 1958 or ’59. The details of the story largely depend “on which griot is telling it,” as one old-timer recently put it, but if the best version is to be believed, the game featured one of the most spectacular collections of athletic talent ever assembled on a patch of blacktop.

The guys running up and down the court in Brooklyn that day supposedly included Bob Gibson, one of the greatest pitchers in the history of baseball; Jim Brown, arguably the greatest running back of all time; and the future basketball Hall of Famers Larry Brown, Lenny Wilkens and Oscar Robertson.

And a 16-year-old named Connie Hawkins.

Hawkins was a local high school player, maybe the best in the city. As the story goes, he went head-to-head with Robertson, who had just won a national scoring title at the University of Cincinnati. The college star was visiting friends in New York that summer. “I drove up there and stayed for two weeks,” he recently recalled. “I was just having fun.”

Robertson now says he didn’t play in Brooklyn, but the neighborhood’s oral historians insist otherwise. As they tell it, his appearance at St. Andrew’s Playground on Kingston Avenue — or Kingston Park, as most people called it — sent tremors of excitement through the streets. “Cars would come along, and people would stop at the light and say, ‘You’ll never believe what’s going on,’” Ed Towns, a former congressman from the district, remembered. Soon kids were scaling fences to catch a glimpse of the action. “Connie slowed Oscar’s game considerably,” said the former councilman Albert Vann, who claims he was there.

Of the six stars who are said to have played in that game, Hawkins, who died in 2017, may have actually had the highest ceiling. Lenny Wilkens, who grew up in Bed-Stuy and later spent 45 years in the N.B.A. as a player and as a coach, recalled Hawkins as an athlete with enormous potential. “He was one of those young men that you knew was destined to really be successful,” he recently said.

Larry Brown, another legendary player who was born in Brooklyn, once described him as “simply the greatest individual player” he had ever seen.

But in 1961, while he was in college, Hawkins was falsely accused of getting involved in a gambling scheme and was barred from playing in the N.B.A. He spent the prime of his career wearing out his knees in scrappier leagues, astonishing small crowds with feats of agility and creativity that were rarely captured on film.

To honor the street-ball legend, a group of guys from Bed-Stuy who grew up hearing tales of his underappreciated exploits have petitioned the city to rename the basketball courts at St. Andrew’s Playground after him. That may sound like an easy win. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could object to honoring a local hero whose due has been long denied.

And yet their effort has been met with resistance — not from the newcomers who are buying up the neighborhood, one $2 million brownstone at a time — but from another group of longtime residents who have just as much reverence for Brooklyn’s basketball history as they do. As the members of this rival faction see it, someone deserves to be on a plaque in that park, but it isn’t Connie Hawkins.

The expanse of cracked pavement that the Parks Department calls St. Andrew’s Playground spans a block on the southern edge of Bed-Stuy. Back in the 1950s, when the city was the undisputed capital of basketball, the park was considered “the capital of basketball in New York,” Ray Haskins, an esteemed coach and teacher from the neighborhood, recently contended. Today, weeds grow from the fissures that snake across the courts, and the softball field is riddled with holes. A newcomer would have no way of guessing that the place is a landmark.

Earlier this winter, James Mcdougal stood in the park with some of his allies and spoke about his dream of naming the courts after Connie Hawkins. Mr. Mcdougal is an usher for Brooklyn Nets games at the Barclays Center and the founder of a local youth-mentoring organization, Concerned Community 4 Change. His family has owned a building across the street from the park since 1920. Growing up there in the ’60s, he said, he and his friends looked up to two kinds of people: athletes and gangsters.

His love of basketball kept him out of trouble, and he has tried to encourage others to follow his path. It hasn’t always worked out. Three years ago, one of the young men in his program fired a gun in the playground and hit a 13-year-old girl in the shoulder.

“There’s a lack of opportunities in this community,” Mr. Mcdougal said. Honoring Hawkins wouldn’t change that, but he thought it might at least provide some young people with a source of pride and inspiration. “He was a great example of perseverance in spite of all the walls that were put up in front of him,” Mr. Mcdougal said. “The racism and injustice.”

Hawkins was born in 1942 on the other side of Bed-Stuy from Kingston Park, in a tenement where he shared a cot with two brothers. The family was extremely poor. “We ate,” his older brother Earl told David Wolf, the author of “Foul!” a 1972 book about Hawkins’s life. “That’s about all you can say.”

Tall and awkward, Hawkins was routinely bullied. “People said I was stupid,” he told Mr. Wolf. “They said I was ugly and weak, and I felt they was right.”

His savior, or at least one of them, was Gene Smith, a Black police officer who taught the fundamentals of basketball at a nearby YMCA. Hawkins showed no obvious aptitude for the game, but Mr. Smith noticed one thing that was special about him. “He passed the ball very well for a kid his age,” he told Mr. Wolf. “Most kids want to shoot every time, but Connie seemed to prefer passing.”

At around 12, he began practicing in neighborhood parks, absorbing lessons from the great players who would travel to New York from all around the country to prove their brilliance. Before long, he had developed an array of miraculously graceful and athletic moves, along with a 6-foot-8 frame and hands that made the ball look like a grapefruit. Robert Cornegy Jr., a former councilman from Bed-Stuy who, at nearly 7 feet, was a standout player himself, remembered going to the park with his father to watch the Hawk take flight. “Between his leaping ability and his ability to control the ball in his hand,” he said, “it seemed like he would stay in the air forever.”

Colleges aggressively courted Hawkins, but he didn’t have the grades for a scholarship. He wound up at the University of Iowa, which had devised an elaborate scheme to pay his tuition under the table (not an uncommon practice at the time). He never finished his freshman year. In 1961, toward the end of the school year, the Manhattan district attorney, Frank S. Hogan, summoned him back to New York. Mr. Hogan was investigating a pair of gamblers who were bribing college players to fix games, and he wanted Hawkins to testify against them before a grand jury.

Although the gamblers tried to cultivate Hawkins, nothing had come of their efforts. As Mr. Wolf later recounted in an investigative article for Life magazine, Hawkins hadn’t even realized they were gamblers; they seemed no different to him from the promoters and recruiters who were always hanging around playgrounds, chatting up athletes.

The D.A.’s detectives refused to believe this. They kept the 18-year-old in a Manhattan hotel room for two weeks, pressuring him to say that he’d worked with the gamblers. When he insisted he hadn’t, they told him he could go to jail for perjury. One detective later admitted that they had stopped him from calling his mother and had not informed him of his rights. Scared and confused, he eventually yielded to the pressure and falsely testified that he’d been involved in the scheme. As he later explained to Mr. Wolf, “I decided I’d never get out if I kept telling the truth.”

The leaders of the gambling ring went to prison. In the end, Hawkins was not charged with a crime, but the perception that he’d played a role in fixing games turned him into a pariah. Under pressure from Iowa, he dropped out of college. The N.B.A. refused to let any of its teams draft him, so he pursued less prestigious opportunities. In the eight years after he left college, he played for the Pittsburgh Rens of the short-lived American Basketball League, crisscrossed the country in cramped buses for the Harlem Globetrotters and eventually won a championship for the perpetually broke Pittsburgh Pipers of the American Basketball Association.

Despite his outcast status, he made a strong impression on those who watched him play — especially at summer tournaments in city parks, where he could be seen throwing down dunks over his N.B.A. counterparts. More than almost any of his contemporaries, he was responsible for pioneering the fluid, aerial style that would come to define the modern game. “Everyone plays like him,” the Hall of Fame forward Spencer Haywood said. “And nobody knows who he is.”

In 1961, Hawkins met the lawyer S. David Litman, whose brothers owned the Pittsburgh Rens. Convinced of his innocence, Mr. Litman and his wife, the lawyer Roslyn Litman, later pressed the N.B.A. to grant Hawkins a hearing. When that failed, they filed a long-shot lawsuit. Against all expectations, Hawkins eventually won a million-dollar settlement, which included a contract to play with the new team in Phoenix, the Suns.

In April 1970, still hobbled by a serious knee injury he’d sustained the year before, he led his new teammates to the seventh game of a playoff series against the dominant Lakers. But his prime was behind him. Some suspected that the punishing conditions of life in second-class leagues had aged him beyond his 28 years.

Although his portrait now hangs in the Basketball Hall of Fame, there’s no telling how much more he would have accomplished, and how much money he might have earned, if the N.B.A. had allowed him an opportunity to clear his name from the start. His grandson, Shawn Hawkins, who grew up in a tough housing project in Pittsburgh, said Connie Hawkins left relatives no inheritance. “He should have been able to advance the whole family,” he said. “He should have been able to take a lot of people with him, but he was shortchanged himself.”

According to the younger Mr. Hawkins, the N.B.A., which has been highlighting its history this year in honor of its 75th anniversary, has never officially acknowledged any wrongdoing or offered Connie Hawkins or his family an apology. A spokesman for the league replied, “We don’t know enough about the case to comment and would need to first research any files we may have on league litigation from the 1960s.”

About a year after Hawkins died, Mr. Mcdougal began the process of trying to get the playground courts named after him. With the blessing of Shawn Hawkins, who still lives in Pittsburgh, Mr. Mcdougal held several events to celebrate his grandfather’s legacy, gathered signatures from local residents and even secured a letter of support from Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, now the mayor. But months before his campaign got underway, it turned out that someone else, a property assessor from East New York named Samantha Lewis, had already set out to rename the same playground after a different Brooklyn basketball hero: her father.

Like Mr. Mcdougal, Sonny Lewis had served as a mentor to young people. In the 1980s, he ran the athletic programs at the Bedford-Stuyvesant YMCA and organized playground tournaments throughout the city, often volunteering to referee the games. A loquacious personality and flashy dresser who had his initials sewn into nearly everything he wore, he had a way of connecting with teenagers who generally didn’t have the highest regard for authority figures.

“A lot of adults demand respect,” Billy Gulley, one of his protégés, said. “Sonny gave you respect, and you had to respect him back.” He went on: “I have two brothers, and they spent their whole lives in jail. They used to tease me — ‘Basketball ain’t gonna get you nowhere.’ But after that summer I spent with Sonny, I ended up being good enough to go to college.” He ultimately became a teacher. “Sonny was a great man,” he said.

For those who think of Mr. Lewis as a great man, St. Andrew’s Playground is something of a sacred site. In 1994, Mr. Lewis helped one of his protégés get a permit to run a tournament called the Kingston Unlimited Classic at the park. On one of the first days of the summer-long competition, a referee called to say he couldn’t make it. Mr. Lewis took his place. It was a sweltering afternoon, and the court was surrounded by cheering fans. Less than halfway into the game, Mr. Lewis collapsed. “The crowd stopped,” his daughter said. “He got back up and brushed it off. A few minutes later he fell and dropped dead.” He was 48.

On a brutally cold day this month, Ms. Lewis stood on the court where her father died. “This is where he spent his last moments doing what he loved to do,” she said. She exhaled. It offended her, she continued, that Mr. Mcdougal wanted to put someone else’s name on those courts. “This is causing anger in my soul,” she said. “Why? What is the gripe?”

Although she can’t be sure, Ms. Lewis suspects that the recent standoff with Mr. Mcdougal may have something to do with a dispute that unfolded on these courts more than a decade ago. Around 2010, Mr. Mcdougal began running youth tournaments and other activities in the playground. Some of Ms. Lewis’s friends apparently didn’t care for his presence. They said he dominated the park and tried to kick them off the courts; Mr. Mcdougal, for his part, said he had permits to use the courts for his gatherings.

In the summer of 2018, Ms. Lewis decided to organize a day of games in the park to commemorate her father. By her account, Mr. Mcdougal asked to help run the event, but she didn’t want him involved and told him she could manage it herself. (Mr. Mcdougal says he doesn’t remember this conversation.) She then went ahead and held it without him.

It was around this time, Ms. Lewis says, that she began talking to people in the community about renaming the park after her dad. She and some of her father’s admirers were still gathering the necessary documents months later when she learned that Mr. Mcdougal was trying to get the courts named after Hawkins. She doesn’t doubt that Hawkins deserves recognition, but wondered why Mr. Mcdougal hadn’t picked some other playground. She pointed out that Hawkins had played on courts throughout Brooklyn, especially on the other side of Bed-Stuy, where he lived. “The only reason I can think of is he wanted to beat me to it,” she said.

Since then, both campaigns have run into obstacles. Ms. Lewis says the pandemic has stalled her efforts. As for Mr. Mcdougal, a block association led by half a dozen of his neighbors turned down his request for a letter of support, in part because Ms. Lewis had already approached them. This rejection, in turn, has made it difficult for him to gain the approval of the neighborhood community board, a critical step in the application process. Mr. Mcdougal may find a way around the roadblock, but a spokeswoman for the Parks Department says there are no plans to announce a name change.

One day earlier this month, Mr. Mcdougal stood on the street and surveyed the buildings surrounding the park. By his count, only three of the families he’d grown up with were still living in those houses. Over the last decade, the Black population of the local community district has declined by a quarter, while the white population has more than doubled. “It’s very hurtful,” Mr. Mcdougal said. “It hurts me just knowing that people could come in and move people out and change the whole way of life.”

What hasn’t changed is the physical condition of the park itself. Last fall, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a $425 million investment in an initiative aimed at improving dozens of underserved parks throughout the city, declaring, “Our recovery must focus on communities historically left behind.” St. Andrew’s Playground didn’t make the cut. According to the Parks Department spokeswoman, it needs so much work that the city can’t afford to fix it. “St. Andrews Playground has not had a major capital investment in over 20 years,” she explained.

Despite their differences, Mr. Mcdougal and his rivals share a perspective that few newcomers to the neighborhood are likely to hold. Like so many people steeped in Brooklyn’s basketball history, they say they owe their lives to the game. “Basketball saved me,” Mr. Mcdougal once remarked. “I could have gone another way.”

The disciples of Sonny Lewis can say the same thing. “I don’t know who St. Andrew was, or what he did to become a saint,” Samantha Lewis said the other day, waving a hand at the plaque bearing his name. “But I know that Sonny Lewis was the saint of Brooklyn.”