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Vincent Mallozzi - Doc: The Rise and Rise of Julius Erving

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Book:
Doc: The Rise and Rise of Julius Erving
Author:
Vincent Mallozzi
Publisher:
Wiley
Genre:
Books / Politics
Year:
2009
Rating:
4 / 5
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The definitive biography of basketball genius Julius Erving--the icon who transcended his sport and defined an era

Julius Erving, aka Dr. J, was a wizard with the basketball, performing feats the world had never seen before: midair spins and whirls punctuated by powerful slam dunks, which he was the first to glamorize. In a career that lasted from the 1970s well into the 1980s, he was one of the first players to make extemporaneous individual expression an integral part of the game, setting the style of play that has prevailed ever since. Hes also long been respected as a gracious, dignified, and disciplined man. As there are great men of history, there are great men of sports, and Dr. J is just such a man.

This book tells Dr. Js amazing story, following his basketball journey from his Long Island childhood to the street games of New York City to a college career as his skills, reputation, and character grew. It follows his entrance into the ABA, where he revolutionized the game by glamorizing the dunk, and his conquering of the NBA, where he was Michael Jordan before there was a Jordan. It relates the family struggles hes had since leaving the game and charts the transformation of the man into myth.

The first complete biography of one of the greatest and most popular basketball players of all time
Draws on interviews with Dr. Js childhood friends and his family to teammates and coaches at all levels
Written by a New York Times sports journalist and author of Asphalt Gods: An Oral History of the Rucker Tournament
Includes Ervings years as a player with the Virginia Squires, New York Nets, and Philadelphia 76ers

Read Doc and follow the incredible journey of the basketball genius who elevated the game off the hardwood and helped make it Americas passion.

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Table of Contents

This one is for you Momyou left us way too soon I picked up the phone to call - photo 2

This one is for you, Momyou left us way too soon. I picked up the phone to call you on April 7, 2008, shortly after Mark was born, and then I put it down. For a brief moment, I had forgotten that you moved to heaven.

Foreword

By Dave Anderson

The phrase the best basketball player Ive ever seen is usually attached to a famous name, seldom to an unfamiliar one. However, in the winter of 1971, at a weekly luncheon of New York-area college coaches and basketball writers at Mama Leones restaurant on West 48th Street, Jimmy McDermott, the Iona College coach, stood up to report on his team and said, We went up to the University of Massachusetts and lost, but I saw the best basketball player Ive ever seen.

The best basketball player McDermott had ever seen? As a prominent small-college coach in the New York area, McDermott was respected because he had seen the best of that era come through Madison Square Garden as college and National Basketball Association (NBA) players. His opinion meant something, but who could this best player be? Furthermore, if this player was really that good, what was he doing in the woods of western Massachusetts? Even more important, what was his name? Before anyone could ask, McDermott told us. Julius Erving, he said.

That was the first time I ever heard of the six foot six inch basketball player who would soon be better known as Dr. J and widely recognized as one of the best players in history.

Shortly after his junior season at UMass ended in 1971, Dr. J walked into the Long Island offices of the New York Nets, not far from where he grew up playing in Roosevelt Park and at Roosevelt High School in Roosevelt, New York. I want to play with the Nets, he told Lou Carnesecca, then the general manager and coach. Wed love to have you, Carnesecca said, but our policy is not to sign undergraduates.

It was not, however, a policy of the Virginia Squires, for whom Dr. J, in the first year of his four year contract for five hundred thousand dollars, would average 27 points a game as the American Basketball Association (ABA) second-team all-star and rookie of the year. After that season, he was eligible for the NBA draft because his UMass class had graduated.

The Milwaukee Bucks quickly grabbed him up because their general manager, Wayne Embry, had remembered a visit to a teenage camp in the Adirondack Mountains when he was with the Boston Celtics. I was playing one on one against this skinny high school kid from Long Island, Embry said at the time. He was six-three, six four then. I was six-eight, 250 [pounds], going into my ninth season in the NBA, and this kid was beating me.

The day after the Bucks chose Dr. J, the Atlanta Hawks announced that they had signed him prior to the draft as a free agent. Contractually, however, he remained committed to the Squires, which prompted a legal dispute that would require a federal judges ruling.

On a Sunday afternoon late that summer, with Dr. Js future in limbo, I stopped by the Holcombe Rucker Memorial Playground across from the tall red-brick Polo Grounds project apartments on Eighth Avenue in Harlem. To stay in shape, Dr. J, like many other pros in that eraWilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Willis Reed, and Connie Hawkins, to name four Hall of Famersoften played there against other pros and playground legends on the blacktop courts in the Pro Rucker for no pay with no box office and no ticket takers. Anybody from anywhere could join the crowd of 3,500 sitting on the wooden bleachers, standing in the aisles, perched in the trees, hanging atop the wire fence, and enjoying the show in which a players moves provoked more of a reaction than a routine basket did.

You really a surgeon, Doctor, somebody shouted that day when Dr. J shimmied, soared, and dunked on an embarrassed opponent. You really operating on that man. At the Rucker, there were no locker rooms and no showers. The players changed in the Parks Department workroom, and thats where Erving told me how he got his nickname.

In high school, he explained, a friend of mine kept telling me he was going to be a professor, so I told him I was going to be a doctor. We just started calling each other that, Professor and Doctor. And later on, in the Rucker League in Harlem, when people started calling me Black Moses and Houdini, I told them if they wanted to call me anything, call me Doctor.

Not long after that, a federal judge ruled that Dr. J still belonged to the Squires, so he had to return there for another season, in which he averaged 31.9 points per game. On August 1, 1973, he finally joined the Nets, along with center Willie Sojourner, in a trade for forward George Carter, the draft rights to Kermit Washington, and cash.

After the news conference that day at the Nassau Coliseum, I asked him to take me over to Roosevelt Park, where he had developed his game. When we got there, he pointed to a far basket on one of the two green cement courts with white lines.

Thats the best basket, that one there, he said. Thats where I played the most. Id ride over here on my bike and play one-on-one here, two-on-two, three-on-three. Sometimes on Sunday, kids from other towns would come over, and we played five on five all day. The years I was in college, I ran the league in the park. I had the key then; I turned the lights off when I left, sometime around midnight. I worked on shooting and dribbling. If somebody else was around, Id play 100 points won. We didnt play for money. We just played for ego, for pride.

Dr. J had been playing for money with the Squires, of course, and now he was playing with the Nets for even more money. At $350,000 a season, his eight year contract was worth $2.8 millionbig, big money in those years, before free agency and salary caps. The deal had taken so long to hammer out that Roy Boe, the owner of the Nets, said it was like the closing of a house, but Dr. Js agent, Irwin Weiner, called it the closing for a bank.

It really was the closing for a franchise, and the beginning of a franchise, too. The Nets won the ABA championship in the 1973-1974 season, and again in the 1975-1976 season, but the shame was that ABA games were not on national television, in those years before ESPN and other cable channels.

As a treaty with the NBA was being negotiated the summer of 1976, not enough people appreciated that Dr. J had averaged 29.3 points per game that season and 34.7 points in the play-offs. Many thought that if he was in the ABA, he couldnt possibly be as good as, much less better than, the best NBA players. However, when I asked him during those play offs whether he thought he could do the same things with a basketball in the NBA that he did in the ABA, he did not hesitate.

Yup, he said, quietly but firmly. Dr. J wasnt being smug or sarcastic. He wasnt like that, on or off the court. I once described him as a showman but never a showboat. He simply knew what he could do, and he knew he could do it on any basketball court against any team in any league. When the NBA absorbed the Nets, the Indiana Pacers, the San Antonio Spurs, and the Denver Nuggets for the 1976-1977 season, Dr. J had the opportunity to prove it.

Sadly, it would not be with the Nets. To keep the Nets franchise solvent, Boe decided to sell Dr. J to the highest bidder. Boe offered him to the New York Knicks, but the Madison Square Garden impresario at the time, Michael Burke, in a rare moment of sympathy for a new NBA member who would be a natural rival, did not want to dilute the Nets as a team.

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