Chuck Connors was a career minor-league ballplayer who played portions of the 1949 and 1951 seasons in the major leagues with the Brooklyn Dodgers and Chicago Cubs, respectively. Connors, though, gained greater fame as one of the very few ballplayers who was a successful actor in his post-baseball career (best known as Lucas McCain in the TV show The Rifleman). Connors was also one of the few men who played both major-league baseball and basketball (with the Boston Celtics in 1946-47).

"I owe baseball all that I have and much of what I hope to have," Connors said in 1953 when he retired as a ballplayer. "Baseball made my entrance to the film industry immeasurably easier than I could have made it alone. To the greatest game in the world I shall be eternally in debt." For Connors, the turning point in his life came during spring training in 1951 when the Chicago Cubs demoted him to their Los Angeles Angels farm club in the Pacific Coast League. "Greatest break I ever got," Connors said in 1954. "I'm out there right in the middle of the movie business where, if a guy has anything, he's got the chance to break in."

Kevin Joseph Aloysius Connors was born on April 10, 1921, in Brooklyn, New York. He was the only son of Allan and Marcella Connors, Irish natives who came to the United States via Newfoundland. Connors had one sibling, his sister Gloria. Connors grew up in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, where his parents struggled to eke out a living during the Great Depression of the 1930s. His father was unemployed for much of the decade, as his mother supported the family by scrubbing floors in office buildings; his father eventually found work as a night watchman. Connors said that growing up poor in his pre-adolescent years motivated him to work hard to achieve success as a ballplayer and later as an actor.