TLDR: Chuck Connors, born Kevin Joseph Connors on April 10, 1921, in Brooklyn, was one of only thirteen athletes in history to play in both the NBA and MLB before becoming an actor.
He played for the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Boston Celtics before landing the role of Lucas McCain on The Rifleman in 1958.
After the show ended in 1963, he worked steadily as a character actor, earned an Emmy nomination for playing a brutal slave owner in Roots (1977), and became personally famous in the Soviet Union when Premier Brezhnev ran across a room and jumped into his arms.
He died of lung cancer on November 10, 1992, at age 71.
In 1973, Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev visited the United States and requested a meeting with his favorite American. Not a president. Not a diplomat. Not a military figure.
Chuck Connors.
The Rifleman was one of the few American television programs permitted to air in the Soviet Union, and Brezhnev was an avid fan. When they met at San Clemente, Brezhnev reportedly ran across the room and jumped into Connors’ arms.
The 6’5″ former professional athlete hoisted the Soviet leader off the ground. Connors presented him with two customized Colt .45 revolvers, which Brezhnev reportedly treasured despite the strict gun control laws of the USSR.
A milkman’s son from Brooklyn, holding the leader of the Soviet Union off the ground in California. Chuck Connors had traveled a considerable distance from the Sunset Park neighborhood.
He Grew Up Poor in Brooklyn and Renamed Himself on a Baseball Field
Kevin Joseph Aloysius Connors was born on April 10, 1921, in Brooklyn, to Irish immigrant parents. His father worked on the waterfront as a longshoreman. His mother took janitor shifts to keep the family fed.
He grew up in Sunset Park, served as an altar boy at the local basilica, and developed an early hatred for his given name that led him through a series of nicknames before settling on the one that stuck.
As a first baseman at Seton Hall University, he had a habit of shouting to his pitchers: “Chuck it to me, baby! Chuck it to me!” Teammates started calling him Chuck. Local sports reporters picked it up. By the time he entered professional sports, Kevin Connors had ceased to exist. Chuck Connors was who he was.
He Played for the Dodgers and Shattered the First NBA Backboard
Connors is one of only thirteen athletes in history to have played professionally in both the NBA and MLB. He played for the Boston Celtics in their inaugural 1946-47 season in the Basketball Association of America, the league that would become the NBA. In a pre-game warmup at the Boston Arena on November 5, 1946, he shattered the glass backboard with a powerful jump shot that struck the improperly installed glass at a precise angle.
It was the first time a professional player had ever broken a backboard. Connors later joked that it was the most memorable thing he ever did in basketball.
Baseball was his primary passion. He spent years in the Brooklyn Dodgers organization working his way through the minor leagues, and in 1949 he was called up to the major leagues to play for the Dodgers. His tenure was brief, a single game as a pinch hitter, but he had played for his hometown team.
His path to the starting lineup was blocked by Gil Hodges, one of the best first basemen in the game. Connors was traded to the Chicago Cubs in 1950 and appeared in 66 games in 1951 before his playing career effectively ended.
He was in Los Angeles playing for the Cubs’ top farm team when an MGM casting director noticed him at a game. Connors had developed a reputation as the character of the team, the one with the booming voice and the easy comfort in front of a crowd. He was invited to audition. That was the end of his athletic career and the beginning of something else.
He Almost Turned Down The Rifleman Over Money
By the mid-1950s, Connors was working steadily as a character actor, frequently cast as soldiers, coaches, and authority figures. He appeared alongside John Wayne in Trouble Along the Way, played a father figure in Disney’s Old Yeller, and built a reputation as a versatile performer who could handle both drama and comedy.
When Four Star Television approached him about The Rifleman in 1958, they offered him a salary lower than what he was already making as a freelance actor. He turned them down. A few days later, the producers took their children to see Old Yeller.
Watching their own children’s reaction to Connors’ performance as Burn Sanderson, the strong and moral father figure, they realized they had no other option. They came back with a higher salary and a five percent ownership stake in the show. He accepted.
He beat out over forty other actors for the role of Lucas McCain. The customized Winchester Model 1892 rifle he carried was modified with a large ring lever and a setscrew that allowed him to fire it in three-tenths of a second by cycling the action. He could do it ambidextrously. The rifle became as iconic as the character, and he was always quick to point out that the rifle was for show while the relationship with his son was for real.
His relationship with Johnny Crawford, who played his son Mark, was genuine off-screen as well. Connors treated Crawford like his own son, taking him camping and fishing alongside his four biological children. Crawford had been a fan of Connors’ baseball career before they were ever cast together.
The warmth between them was not manufactured for the camera.
He Ended the Show Before It Could End Him
After five seasons and 168 episodes, Connors chose to end the show rather than wait for the network to cancel it. The full story of why The Rifleman was cancelled involves network budget disputes, a format war with color programming, and the reality that Crawford had grown from 12 to 17 and was no longer convincing as a young boy in need of a father’s guidance.
Connors told the Associated Press simply: “I knew what Lucy would do to our ratings and I didn’t want to wait around until our show was dropped.”
He left on his own terms. The show ended without a proper finale because production had already wrapped by the time the decision was made not to continue.
After North Fork He Spent Thirty Years Trying to Escape Lucas McCain
Connors spent the years after The Rifleman working hard to prove his range. He starred in the legal drama Arrest and Trial in 1963, a deliberate attempt to distance himself from Westerns.
It lasted one season.
He returned to the frontier in 1965 with Branded, playing a cavalry officer falsely accused of cowardice, a show that explored more psychological territory than The Rifleman but failed to find its audience and was cancelled after two seasons.
He remained a working actor across film and television for the rest of his career, appearing in Soylent Green alongside Charlton Heston in 1973, parodying his own tough-guy image in Airplane II: The Sequel in 1982, and taking on dozens of character roles that demonstrated his range without ever producing a second defining moment comparable to Lucas McCain.
Until Roots.
Roots Showed Everyone Something Nobody Expected
In 1977, Connors was cast as Tom Moore in the television miniseries Roots, a brutal slave owner who was the antithesis of everything Lucas McCain had represented.
He shed the good guy persona entirely. His performance was so impactful that it earned him an Emmy nomination for Best Supporting Actor, confirming what people close to him had always maintained: that the sensitive cowboy was only one dimension of what he could do.
The nomination came nineteen years after he first appeared as Lucas McCain. It was the industry’s formal acknowledgment that Chuck Connors was an actor, not just a persona.
His Final Years and the Reunion With Johnny Crawford
In 1991, nearly thirty years after the show ended, Connors and Crawford reprised their roles as Lucas and Mark McCain for a cameo in the TV movie The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw starring Kenny Rogers. They were still, unmistakably, father and son.
It was one of Connors’ final public appearances. Later that year he was hospitalized with pneumonia.
During his recovery, doctors diagnosed him with lung cancer, the result of decades of heavy smoking. He died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on November 10, 1992, at the age of 71.
He was buried at San Fernando Mission Cemetery, where fans still visit to pay their respects. He had a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame from 1984. He had been inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in 1991, just months before his death.
He played professional basketball and professional baseball. He shattered the first backboard in NBA history with a jump shot. He held a Soviet premier in his arms in California. He spent thirty years proving he was more than a television cowboy and eventually got the Emmy nomination to prove it.
Not a bad route for a milkman’s son from Brooklyn.
