The Small Disney Movie Role That Won Chuck Connors ‘The Rifleman’ After He Was Told He ‘Didn’t Have A Chance’

In 1958 the producers of a new Western had their hero on paper, a widowed rancher raising his boy alone, and nobody to play him. The man who finally won the part of Lucas McCain had spent most of his adult life in baseball spikes and basketball sneakers, and by his own account nobody gave him a prayer. “I was told I didn’t have a chance. They’d seen about 40 actors,” Chuck Connors told The Tennessean, in remarks MeTV recently brought back to light.

He got it anyway, and The Rifleman ran on ABC from September 30, 1958, to April 8, 1963. Connors liked to credit a very strange audition. But he also walked away from the first offer, and what brought the producers back was a few minutes of a family movie most people remember for its dog.

How Did A Ballplayer End Up Reading For A Western?

Kevin Joseph Connors was born in Brooklyn on April 10, 1921, and all he wanted as a boy was to play for the Dodgers. He very nearly managed it. According to his Society for American Baseball Research biography, Brooklyn manager Burt Shotton sent him up to pinch hit for Carl Furillo against the Phillies on May 1, 1949. It was his only official at bat for his hometown team, and he never forgot how it ended. “I hit a one hop back to the mound and he turned it into a double play,” he said.

Basketball gave him his oddest claim to fame. After his Army discharge he joined the Rochester Royals for their 1945-46 championship season and then played 53 games for the brand new Boston Celtics. Before a game at the Boston Arena on November 5, 1946, the glass backboard came down in pieces, and the game waited while a spare was hauled over from Boston Garden. “During the warm-ups, I took a set shot, a harmless set shot, and crash, the glass backboard shattered,” Connors recalled. He is widely credited as the first professional player ever to break one.

Baseball pulled him back, and it led him west. He reached the Chicago Cubs in 1951 and hit .239 in 66 games, mostly at first base, while also playing for the club’s top farm team, the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League. An MGM casting director who followed the Angels asked the big first baseman to test for a small part as a police captain in the Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn comedy Pat and Mike. It paid $500. “I said right then, this is my racket,” Connors said.

What Happened When The Rifle Came Flying?

The show grew from a script by Sam Peckinpah, who later made The Wild Bunch. His pilot, “The Sharpshooter,” aired on Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theatre on March 7, 1958, and he wrote and directed early episodes before his taste for hard realism put him at odds with the producers. Johnny Crawford, who played Lucas’s son Mark, remembered that “we had several scripts by Sam Peckinpah in the first season,” as he told Cowboys & Indians.

Connors said the tryout tested his hands more than his line readings. “They had a pretty unique audition,” he told The Tennessean. “As soon as you opened the door they threw a rifle at you with no warning. A lot of guys dropped the gun.” A man who had spent years scooping throws at first base was not going to drop anything. “I just grabbed it like it was a baseball bat,” he said.

The money was another story. Producers Arthur Gardner, Jules Levy and Arnold Laven offered him the part, but according to INSP’s history of his career, the pay came in under what he was earning as a freelance actor, and Connors turned it down. For a few days Lucas McCain had nobody to play him again.

Who Was Mark McCain’s Pa When The Cameras Stopped?

When the deal did come together, it put Connors opposite a 12-year-old former Mouseketeer who already knew exactly who he was. “I remembered him from when he was the first baseman with the Los Angeles Angels,” Crawford told the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph in 1959, as MeTV has reported. The boy’s work as Mark earned him a 1959 Emmy nomination, and their father and son talks in North Fork, New Mexico, became the heart of the show.

Years later Crawford still spoke of him warmly. “He was very easy to work with,” he told Cowboys & Indians in 2017, adding that Connors “treated me like an adult when we were working.” Crawford died on April 29, 2021, at 75, after a long fight with Alzheimer’s disease, as we reported when Johnny Crawford died.

Connors kept riding after North Fork, as Jason McCord, a cavalry officer drummed out of the Army as a coward, in NBC’s Branded from 1965 to 1966. In 1977 he turned his decent frontier image upside down as the slave owner Tom Moore in Roots, a performance that earned him the only Emmy nomination of his career, according to People. He died of lung cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on November 10, 1992. He was 71.

So What Changed The Producers’ Minds?

It was Old Yeller. Walt Disney’s film opened on Christmas Day 1957, and Connors has a small part as Burn Sanderson, the dog’s original owner, who rides up to claim his animal and sees how much the youngest Coates boy loves him. So he trades the dog away for a horned toad and a home-cooked meal. It is a big, rawboned man being gentle with a child, which is Lucas McCain in a single scene.

Gardner, interviewed for the Television Academy’s Archive of American Television in 2009, recalled spotting his future Rifleman while watching the lanky actor in Old Yeller, as Variety reported. SABR and People both point to the same film. In the version fans have repeated for years, the producers saw it with their own children. Whoever sat beside them in the dark, they came back to Connors with a bigger salary and a five percent ownership stake in the show, and this time he said yes.

The ballplayer nobody expected to get the part ended up as the father a generation of kids wished they had, and the boy who played his son summed him up best. “He was unique,” Crawford said. “I’ll never meet anybody else like him again.”