The Brooklyn ballplayer who tamed the west.....

Arnold Laven, A producer of the TV's The Rifleman, remembers the day in 1957 that actor Chuck Connors burst into his office and announced, "I just read your goddamn script, and I want to play that goddammn part." If anybody else plays it, it's goddamn unfair." Who wanted to be unfair to a 6' 5" giant who played two professional sports? Thus did Connors land the lead role of Rifleman Lucas McCain, the granite-eyed cowpoke who shot from the hip with his Winchester repeating rifle and talked horse sense to his son, Mark (Johnny Crawford).

Indeed, Lucas was one of TV's first single parents. Says Laven: "Chuck's relationship with Johnny was just what we wanted, tough and straightforward, with love, but also a sense of making a boy be prepared to grow." The Rifleman rode that relationship to tall ratings for six years and remains in worldwide syndication to this day. It also gave Connors a career horse to ride. As he once reflected: "It's no problem at all for me. My whole ability to make a living is derived from the fact that I was he Rifleman."

His career was still flourishing when Connors died suddenly last week, at 71, of lung cancer. Says Steve Stevens, Connors's agent of 11 years, who was at his bedside at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles when the actor died: "He was diagnosed with pneumonia three weeks ago in Bakersfield [near Connors's ranch in California's Tehachapi Mountains]. When he got worse, he checked into Cedars-Sinai." There doctors discovered that the actor, lifelong smoker, had cancer. He died three days later.

Married three times, Connors left behind four sons---Mike, 42, Jeff, 40, Steve 39 and Kevin 36. He also left behind a TV son, Crawford, now 46 and owner of a car-rental agency, who says, "he was just my hero. He was very expressive and always concerned---but he was always tough as nails." Remembers actress Jane Russell, who appeared with Connors in the 1984 TV series The Yellow Rose: "He was a lot of fun to work with and always straightforward and honest---something you don't always find in Hollywood."

A native of Brooklyn, Connors starred in Basketball at Seton Hall College in New Jersey and played for two years (1946-1948) with the Boston Celtics. Concluding then he was a better first baseman than forward, he switched to baseball after that, playing briefly for the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Chicago Cubs.

Since his career was going nowhere in particular, Connors took up acting in 1951 and won a number of small parts before landing The Rifleman. Over the years, he appeared in more than two dozen movies (including Geronimo in 1962 and Airplane II 20 years later) and another TV series, Branded (1965-66. But he may be best remembered, post- Rifleman, for his role as the ruthless slave owner in the 1977 miniseries Roots.

Throughout his career, though, sports remained Connors's abiding passion. Says Steve Stevens: "He told me many times he would have given up acting---as much as it did for him and for all the money he would have to lose---to have been a major baseball star."

"He could get on a horse and do anything the cowboys could do," says a producer of The Rifleman.

Chuck Connors had an athlete's grace and an Old West face. So he became TV's Rifleman, a favorite baby-boomer icon