The Day the Hawks Flew South: Eight Player Contracts From the 1968 St. Louis-to-Atlanta Transfer

The Hawks’ move to Atlanta wasn’t a case of a bad team looking for a fresh start. The St. Louis Hawks were Western Division champions in 1968 with a 56-26 record, but their home attendance averaged just 6,288 at Kiel Auditorium, and they played six home games in Miami that season. On May 3, 1968, owner Ben Kerner sold the club to a group led by real estate developer Thomas Cousins and former Georgia governor Carl Sanders, for $3.5 million. Kerner had owned the franchise since its start in 1946 as the Buffalo Bisons, moving it to the Tri-Cities, then Milwaukee in 1951, and St. Louis in 1955. This set of eight player contracts documents the transfer itself, signed by NBA Commissioner J. Walter Kennedy, outgoing owner Ben Kerner, and Atlanta representative Lewis Woodruff, the paperwork that made the players Atlanta Hawks.

The contracts include two Hall of Famers, Lenny Wilkens and Zelmo Beaty, stars of the St. Louis teams that had reached the NBA Finals and were the foundation of the roster Atlanta inherited. St. Louis was where the franchise won its only NBA championship, in 1958, and the Hawks did not win another one after leaving. In that first season in Atlanta, they played at Alexander Memorial Coliseum on the Georgia Tech campus and averaged 4,474 fans per game, a humble beginning for a franchise that went on to become part of the city’s sports identity. Those first contracts are the actual founding paperwork of the modern Atlanta Hawks, signed at the moment one city lost a team and another gained one.