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Larry Hawkins' Biography, 1931 - 2009

Educator, youth organizer, championship coach, and sports authority Larry Hawkins was born in 1930 in Chicago, Illinois. The Wabash YMCA, the Southside Boys Club and Phillips High School formed a "golden triangle" of athletic activity for youth in his neighborhood. Hawkins attended Douglas Elementary School and graduated from Phillips High School, where he was a star basketball player in 1948. He received an A.A. degree from Wilson Junior College in 1950. Hawkins served in the United States Army from 1953 to 1955. He acquired his B.S. degree from George Williams College in 1956, his M.S. degree in 1972 from George Williams, another M.S. degree from Roosevelt University in 1980 and his Ed.D. from the University of Illinois in 1986.

Larry Hawkins grew up on the South Side of Chicago, near 30th and Prairie. His family was poor and on welfare. His father died when he was 11. He attended Phillips High School, Wilson Junior College and George Williams College. He sold newspapers, shined shoes and worked as a stock boy to make money. But friends and colleagues think Hawkins’ legacy was making an impact on thousands of young lives and preaching that athletics are an important part of education.

He played basketball with the old Brown Bombers, a spinoff of Abe Saperstein’s Harlem Globetrotters, under the name Hawk Washington. During barnstorming trips in the South, he saw people who needed help and vowed to teach kids how to cope with discrimination.

Hawkins coached Carver High School to second place in the 1962 state tournament and to the state championship in 1963 before becoming the director of the University of Chicago’s Office of Special Programs and the founder of the Institute for Education and Athletics.While coaching at Carver, he discovered how kids could use sports to achieve a better life.

‘‘I saw clearly what happened around sports, how it energized the school, kids, parents and the whole community,’’ Hawkins said. ‘‘You had to get the attention of hard-to-reach kids so you could counsel them. You have to start with kids where they are so you can understand where you want to take them.’’

In 40 years as an educator, through the Office of Special Programs, the IAE and Big Buddies Youth Services Inc., Hawkins and his staff annually taught, tutored and counseled hundreds of African-American youngsters.

‘‘If you counted up the number of people he impacted and directed to college, there would be more than anyone else in Chicago — and there were more non-athletes than athletes,’’ Maxey said. ‘‘He sent kids to black colleges but also to schools such as Illinois, Michigan, Harvard, Yale and Cornell.’’ Maxey, now a career counselor at Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles, said Hawkins taught more than basketball.

‘‘He taught me to play the game from the floor up,’’ said Russell, who was the college player of the year at Michigan in 1966, played in the NBA for 12 seasons and now is the coach at Savannah (Ga.) College of Art and Design. ‘‘He was a disciplinarian. If you didn’t go to class, you didn’t play for him. He didn’t want instructors to think you were a jock. He taught me foundation, work ethic, priorities, that there are no shortcuts to success.’’

‘‘He taught us a way to deal with the cruel world at that time, when we were coming out of Altgeld Gardens,’’ Maxey said. ‘‘He taught us a sense of striving for excellence, to put your heart into whatever you did.’’