Cleo Hill had certain remarkable talents as a player. He had fast hands, a wonderful asset for a basketball player. He was quick. But his quickness and his hand speed were wasted when they weren’t harnessed with the team effort of everybody else. It is something a man might learn in a minor league but has to be taken for granted in the majors.
Tag Archives: St. Louis Hawks
Lenny Wilkens: A Pro’s Pro, 1973
Wilkens doesn’t fool anybody anymore: Everybody knows he’s a ballplayer.
Rick Barry: Telling It Like It Is, 1967
For me, basketball has always been fun. Under Bill Sharman, it was no fun.
Zelmo Beaty: The Butler Did It, 1973
Writer Jim O’Brien described Beaty as a “player who moves about the court like a snobbish butler, but works like a laborer under the boards.”
Chico Vaughn and The Man, 1968
Chico, the Pipers’ old pro, knows every airport in America, not to mention the motels and arenas.
Cliff Hagan: In the Twilight, 1970
“I’m not mean,” Hagan said. “I think ‘intensely competitive’ would be more accurate.
Remember When St. Louis Won the NBA Title in 1958?
“We were a mixture of the old and the new, both in experience and style of play. The long jump shot was just catching on in the league and practically none of our players used it.”
Never a Dull Moment with the St. Louis Hawks, 1958
Kerner comes to a basketball game looking, fittingly, likes the best-dressed man in the hall. He leaves looking more like Emmett Kelly, the clown.
Bill Sharman: The Shooter, 1965
What made Sharman’s shooting so remarkable was its purity. He shot with almost robot-like precision, his style so polished and precise that it seemed like an illustration for a book on how to play basketball.
Lenny Wilkens: Supersonic Miracle, 1979
The praise Lenny received in the past and the praise he is hearing again today are not hollow. Especially now that the words are not confined to a few hundred miles of the Puget Sound, we must begin to know that Durocher was wrong: good guys can finish first.
From Way Downtown 