Dr. J

by Julius Erving

“Do you want to go to the ball together?” she says. “I mean, is that what you are asking?”

  Suddenly, she is embarrassed, shy at having inadvertently asked me before I have actually asked her.

  “Okay,” I say.

  The night of the ball, I wear my best suit and walk over to pick her up. We are so shy, we don’t manage to say more than hellos and good-byes and, again, I am almost too frightened to look at her. We manage to dance to two slow songs and then I walk her home. I don’t even kiss her.

  I have no swagger.

  When I get home, my stepfather, Dan, is sitting up in the dining room, smoking one of his short, black cigars.

  He tells me that Marky is in the hospital. He had a real bad asthma attack, couldn’t breathe, was turning blue. Even with his medicine, his inhaler, he couldn’t catch his breath. Mom called an ambulance to take him over to Mercy Hospital and he’ll spend the night there. Mr. Dan says he’ll take me over.

  Marky is in a four-bed ward. Across from him is an old Chinese man who seems to be talking in his sleep. Mom and Freda sit beside Marky as Marky sips juice from a plastic cup.

  He turns as I walk in. He smiles.

  “Marky, my man!” I say, trying to be cheerful. “How you doing?”

  I turn to Mom. “How is he?”

  Mom shrugs, taking Marky’s hand. “Doc don’t know.”

  I know that Marky lately has had some new problems. He complains that his joints ache. And he’s been developing strange skin rashes if he goes out in the sun too long. But he’s never been hospitalized before, or not overnight, anyway.

  “Maybe it’s just the allergies,” I say, repeating our common suspicion.

  “June!” Marky says, smiling. “How was the ball?”

  I want to tell him it was strange, uncomfortable, that Grace Fenton remains unfathomable and mysterious, that I assume this will be the start of a lifetime of tongue-tiedness and confusion and fear around the opposite sex, but I know that’s not what Marky wants to hear. Marky wants to live through me a little, to participate in those parts of life he can’t have because of his health, his weakness, without me. So I oblige him.

  “It was fantastic. Everything I wanted. And Grace, well, um, Grace really seems to like me.”

  Mom and Freda both look at me, as if unsure of what they just heard, because it is so unlike me to boast.

  But I tell Marky what I think he wants to hear.

  24.

  The only person in Long Island who can stop me from scoring 25 points a game is Ray Wilson. Coach Wilson is such a traditionalist, he believes in playing his seniors. We’re a small, skinny team. Our front line averages about six foot two and our backcourt about five foot ten, and after five games Mr. Wilson breaks down and realizes that he has to start me and give me serious minutes. While the offense doesn’t run through me, I average double figures almost entirely on putbacks.

  Under Mr. Wilson’s guidance, I work on my defense, on establishing position, on the team game. During warm-ups, in the layup line, I’ll throw down some dunks, but in the game, we never dunk. I remember when we played JV ball and one of the varsity players, Joe Scott, attempted a dunk during a game and clanged it off the back of the rim. Coach Wilson pulled him out and sat him on the bench the rest of the half.

  I use all the crafty layups I’ve developed on the playground and in one-on-one games, so on fast breaks I like to take off from about the foul line and then finish with a little finger roll or a spinning bank off the glass. I’ve noticed I have an ability to use a wider portion of the backboard than some of my peers. Because of the size of my hands and the spin I can get on the ball when flipping it up, I can bank it off the backboard well outside the rectangle above the rim with enough English to get it to drop. I see the basket almost as a pocket on the pool table. If someone is between me and the basket, that’s like a billiard ball blocking me from shooting straight into the pocket, so I can either go around them, or else just shoot around them, using the ball’s own rotation to bank it off the glass from an improbable angle.

  I rise. I am the team’s leading rebounder, averaging over 12 a game.

  I can’t explain it, but even teammates can see that I seem to know where the ball is going before the ball goes there. I can watch a shot making its way to the rim and predict the trajectory of its carom. I can outjump anyone on that court. With my long arms I can outreach anyone. With my huge hands I only need to get my fingers on the ball to control it. And with my second jump being so fast, I can come down with the ball.

  It’s a gift, one I spend ten thousand hours giving to myself.

  I do jumping drills, rim touching drills, backboard touching drills. I’m out in Centennial Park by myself after even the one-on-one games are finished and Leon has gone home, doing an hour of jumping, touching the rim with my left hand, coming down, and jumping again, touching the rim again with my left, and repeating that ten times. Then I do a squat, gather myself, jump up, and do the same thing with my right hand. After ten right-hand touches, I squat and then jump up and touch the rim with both hands. The tenth touch I grab the rim with both hands and hang there. That’s when I rest, on the rim, and then I drop and do it all again.

  The idea is to perfectly land after each jump on exactly the same spot because that allows me to spring back up faster since my weight is already evenly distributed. That’s hard to do and requires practice, but it’s what gives me that fast second hop and third hop. I do that, ten times lefty, ten times righty, ten times both hands, and then I do another set of ten, and then another, and then another, until I do it perfectly, landing on the same spot, hitting the same part of the rim. If I’m all over the place or falling or gathering myself before each jump, then I stop and start over from one.

  I like perfection and order in my drills.

  I also jump for distance. I start at the half-court line and run toward the basket and take off, my goal being to hit a spot on the backboard above the rim. At first, I’m taking off from the dotted line, and I keep moving it farther and farther out, my goal being to take off from the foul line. Momentum converts height to distance. My ability to rise translates to flight. I can take off a dozen feet from the hoop; with enough vertical lift, I soar through the lane. I can hit that same spot on the backboard ten out of ten times.

  Then I do little hook shots. Right hand, left hand, right hand, left hand, let the ball hit the ground, get a rhythm going, make fifty in a row. Then change it up, fake left, shoot right, fake right, shoot left, make fifty in a row. If I miss, start over. I believe I should never miss a layup or hook shot from inside ten feet. (I am amazed at how many of my teammates, and guys I play with and against in playgrounds around New York City, can’t make ten layups in a row with alternating hands.)

  I do these drills so often and with such consistency that when I do get the ball in the lane during a game, either indoors or on the playground, I can look at the ground, at the paint, and know exactly where I am on the court and can put the ball up with my eyes closed and get the kiss of the glass or the swish through the rim. It becomes automatic for me.

  I sacrifice more. I practice more. I drill more. I rise.

  Some of the other guys want to experiment with beer, with weed. Maybe they need girlfriend time. And by not doing any of that, I give myself so many advantages. And the work shows.

  Mr. Wilson notices, compliments me on how my left hand has developed, on how I can do everything with my left or my right, so that late in the game, when other players are getting tired and going toward their dominant hands, you can’t force me one way or the other on the court, you can’t assume I’m going to finish with one hand or the other. I’ve become, as my friend Leon puts it, “an amphibian.”

  My junior year at Roosevelt I grow another two inches, so I’m six foot two by the end of the season. We go 13 and 4, making the county playoffs but losing in the first round. I win the Most Improved Player award in Nassau County as I average 18 points a game and 15 rebounds. They don’t kee
p track of blocks, but I probably would have led South Shore Division 4 in that as well.

  In a game against a South Shore rival, all these hours of drills contribute to this moment: I go up for a missed shot, tip the ball, then go back up and grab it with one hand, holding the ball over my head. Lenny and Odelle are both covered, so I take the ball myself, dribbling easily up court, weaving past my man, and then taking off from just inside the foul line, looking for an angle to spin the ball off the glass. I go up, I’m rising, I see my path to the basket. It will be a little layin, but my hand is so far above the rim that instead of a layup, I turn my hand over and dunk it.

  In a game. Indoors.

  I didn’t mean to.

  Our crowd is hollering, stamping their feet on the bleachers. Our bench is all standing, slapping fives. The refs are even looking at each other.

  I don’t stop to celebrate. Win without boasting.

  As I’m running down the court, I look over at Mr. Wilson, expecting him to pull me out of the game. He pretends not to see me, and he leaves me in.

  My hand just turned over. And it never stops turning over after that.

  25.

  At night, the gym doors are open and yellow light cascades down from the cage-protected fixtures and reflects off the varnished floors and spills from the gym onto the pavement outside where the last of the straggling students and teachers make their way from campus.

  Practice is over. Mr. Wilson keeps the gym open for us. He tosses the ball off the backboard two feet above the rim and tells me to go get it.

  I fly across the lane to get it, snatching it from the air.

  “Shout when you get that ball, boy!”

  Another toss up.

  Another leap.

  I rise.

  “Ah!”

  “Boy, get freaky. Get mad. That’s your ball. Shout. Shout!”

  I rise.

  “Aaaah!”

  He throws it up again.

  “AAAAH!”

  For the first time, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Mosley both tell me this is my ticket. That my game can take me to college. That I have a gift, and if I continue to do well in school, then I will be the first in my family to go to a four-year college, to get a degree.

  “You want that?” Mr. Wilson asks.

  I nod.

  “Then get it.”

  He tosses the ball up again.

  I rise.

  “AAAAAAAAAAAAAH!”

  26.

  In the summer I ride my bike, a five-speed English racer (skinny wheels, gears on the crossbar, curled handlebars) down Seaman Avenue to Goldie Blum’s jewelry store in a little mall in Rockville Centre. I breathe in the exhaust of trucks and cars, of families on their way to the beach or beating the traffic back to Manhattan. I have a job this summer, as I do every year, and I ride the six miles to work on my bicycle, the knees of my bowed legs pistoning so high that they hit my elbows.

  I’m a curious sight, I know, this big boy on this tiny bicycle. Head down, pedaling forward: this is what my life feels like.

  There is a war in Vietnam. There are riots on the streets of Newark. There are those who tell me that I need to make a choice. That the black man in America has been oppressed. That what is needed is nothing less than a revolution, a new society, or, even more confusing, that we need to return to Africa, to rediscover our culture and ourselves. And, man, some brothers are telling me I need to say if I’m with the Man, or against him.

  The Man?

  I don’t know who that is. I don’t see the world in those stark terms. And I listen to Mr. Wilson, to Mr. Mosley. I have a chance to make it to college, to make something of myself, and that is through this system that some of these brothers want to burn down.

  I put my head down. I pedal.

  Even the music is changing. There’s Otis Redding, maybe the greatest R & B singer of the ’60s, but there’s also the funk of James Brown and the rock of Jimi Hendrix. Never mind the Beatles, who everybody, black and white, is listening to. Up in my room, sometimes, I’ll sit in my cushioned chair, listening to James Brown on my eight-track player singing “Fever” and “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” and I’ll feel connected to what is going on, to the turmoil and strife and the desire to fight to change all that—by any means necessary, even—but I’m also self-aware enough to know that isn’t me. I’m not a fighter.

  I put my head down. I ride.

  I park and lock my bike in the parking lot and go up the stairs to the store and then down an interior stairwell to a shipping area where I pack and ship jewelry. Goldie Blum is a kind, middle-aged Jewish lady who sells trinkets and gifts. Her mail-order business is composed almost entirely of out-of-state buyers looking to avoid paying New York taxes on their modest necklaces and bracelets. We carefully set the jewelry in the small, plush boxes with the Goldie logo on the satin inside of the top, and then seal those boxes in slightly larger shipping boxes. We have a Monarch labeling machine that requires we sort through the built-in case for letters and numbers and our own postage machine, the first I’ve ever seen, and we spend an entire six hours, from ten till four, assembling these little packages for shipping to Altoona, Pennsylvania, and Decatur, Indiana, gold, silver, and diamonds in plain brown boxes, an entire week’s salary, sometimes, or even a month, packed and shipped. At the end of the day, we load the boxes onto a hand trolley and roll them over to the post office.

  It’s subterranean work, and for the six hours that Junior Poulsan and I are down there, the only sunlight we see is when we’re biking in or making a run to the post office. We’re getting $12 a day but something doesn’t seem right about this.

  I’ve been working since I was twelve, and it’s taken me a while, but I’ve now realized what I’m not going to do for the rest of my life. I’m not going to punch a clock. That’s not going to be me. Leon and some of the other brothers are talking about how they are going to avoid this life of drudgery. I don’t mind work; Mom taught me I have to earn my own way. What I mind is the sameness of the tasks and days, the repetition, the way time spent working unfurls as slowly as catsup pouring from a cold, stuck bottle. The idea is a little bit alien to me, as I have been taught to be humble, but I think, I realize, I am above this. I am. Better than this. Even while I am doing this, packing those bracelets into their little boxes, I am somehow floating above myself and thinking, No, this isn’t you. You are meant for something else.

  And, pedaling back along Seaman Avenue, I feel the world around me, the possibilities, the opportunities, the subtle shifting and rearranging that my gift with a basketball will make possible. I am, I think in a moment of giddy fantasy, an artist, like James Brown, like Otis, like Jimi even. Only my song, my art, is basketball.

  It will set me free from this life of being a wage slave. I don’t think it will make me rich, but it will get me to college. I am determined.

  I will rise.

  27.

  In exchange for a one-week stay at the Shamrock Basketball Camp at Schroon Lake in upstate New York, I wash dishes and pour bug juice for prep basketball players. It is a good exercise in humility, and perhaps Ray Wilson and Earl Mosley came up with this as a lesson for me. Wash the dishes of players who don’t belong on the same court as me, who don’t offer much competition in the few scrimmages in which I participate in exchange for the week’s $50. But the real prize comes in the competition. Wayne Embry, a forward with the Boston Celtics, instructs at the camp, and he drills the other campers during the day, but at night a select few players join the counselors and instructors—and kitchen boys—and some serious games begin. The kids who I’m serving during the day are now sitting and watching. Wayne has recruited some Boston Celtics teammates to come up, as well as a half-dozen college players and some of the top prep players in the country. And those games under the lights are some of the best competition I’ve faced, and the first time I’m playing night after night against NBA-level competition.

  I’m still able to play my game, getting up and over the
six-foot-eight Embry to grab my one-handed rebounds, and throwing it down over kids who have won college scholarships. Some of these guys I don’t even recognize, but Wayne is looking at me and nodding because I am apparently confirming what he has already told some of his Boston Celtics peers: Julius can play.

  One afternoon, Hawthorne Wingo from the Knicks comes up and he’s working out and he asks Wayne if there’s anyone around who can give him a run.

  Wayne tells him there’s a kid around who’s not too bad.

  “A kid?” Hawthorne is skeptical. “I said a run.”

  “He’s pretty good,” Embry says. He sends one of the campers up to the kitchen to get me.

  I come down, in my T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. “What’s up?”

  Wayne asks me if I want to play one-on-one against Hawthorne Wingo.

  I shrug. “Sounds good.”

  He gives me outs, I dribble, once, twice. Hawthorne is sort of sizing me up, seeing what kind of game I have. He’s giving me the 17-footer. I drain it.

  I take the ball back out. Now Hawthorne is up on me, doing a little hand-check, his way of telling me he’s not going to give me anything.

  I dribble and hold the ball up over my head and behind and take off from a step inside the foul line. He’s running with me and manages to get his hand between me and the basket, but I power through it for a hard dunk.

  Hawthorne is shaking his head. “Damn!”

  Wayne is smiling, nodding. “Told you he could play.”

  28.

  Coach Ray Wilson is also my guidance counselor. He’s helping me work through the recruiting process that starts my junior year but accelerates the next summer. College coaches become a regular sight in the stands for the last high school season, Louie Carnesecca from St. John’s, Lou Rossini from NYU, Jimmy Valvano from Rutgers, Paul Lynner from Hofstra, coaches from Manhattan, Niagara, from plenty of other schools in the mid-Atlantic region. I’m six foot three now and in many ways blessed to have grown at my own leisurely pace. I never have one of those crazy three- or four-inch spurts that some guys have when they’re fourteen or fifteen that causes their size to outpace their coordination. At every stage of my growth, I retained my shooting touch, my deadeye passing, and natural ballhandling. I don’t have an awkward phase.