Dr. J

by Julius Erving

  Before we go down, Mr. Wilson puts me in touch with Bob Woolf, who represents John Havlicek, Carl Yastrzemski, and Jim Plunkett, among other notable athletes. I tell Woolf what I’m doing. He tells me to call him during the negotiations if I need to. But I assure him, this is just an exploratory mission. I’m not going to sign anything.

  Mr. Wilson and I take an early-morning train down. We don’t tell anyone, not even Coach Leaman, where we are going. Meeting us at the Airport Motel in Philadelphia are Johnny Kerr, the Squires’ general manager, Al Bianchi, their coach, and Arnold. I like Bianchi immediately. He’s a Long Island guy, and a former guard-forward for the Syracuse Nats and Philadelphia 76ers. He has a big smile that splits his round face like a wedge taken out of an orange, thick glasses, and brown hair combed over his receding hairline. Kerr is another basketball legend and former teammate of Bianchi’s. I remember Red Kerr, as he is known, from his career with the Knicks. He’s a big man, about six foot nine, and has a rectangular face with a square jaw. Both men are wearing jackets with turtlenecks beneath them.

  Al and Johnny have taken a suite at the motel. We meet in the sitting room, with room service coffee on the table. Al and Johnny both shake my hand and I can see them carefully checking the size of my hands and then nodding at each other, as if I have confirmed something they’ve heard before. Red is taller than I am, but my hands are much larger than his. “Man, look at your hands,” he says.

  Red makes a similar pitch to what Arnold has been telling me: the leagues are going to merge, giving players less leverage.

  “If I stay in school,” I tell them, “I could be a first-round draft pick.”

  Red counters by asking: “What if you get hurt? A career-ending injury, you break an ankle, leg, whatever? Then it’s all over, off the table. Nobody will draft you.”

  They talk about the Squires, who were originally the Oakland Oaks before moving to Washington, DC, for a season and now play in Virginia.

  Arnold keeps looking at me and nodding, emphasizing the points Red is making.

  Then they start talking about money, a lot of money. They are offering over $400,000 for a four-year contract, but the payout will be deferred over twenty years. At this point I realize that I wouldn’t be in this room, with an agent and the general manager and coach of a professional basketball team, if I am not seriously interested in playing professional basketball. The offer of the money makes it all suddenly very real.

  Ray and I decide to get a couple of rooms and stay over in Philadelphia for the night.

  As we’re talking, it becomes clear there are two different sums involved here. There is the actual annual salary, and then there is deferred money. The big numbers we’ve been reading about in the newspapers are the gross payment, including salary and deferred payments. What the ABA has been doing to make the contracts seem larger is including deferred payments that are actually annuities that will pay out over twenty or so years. When University of Cincinnati forward Jim Ard signed with the Nets for, supposedly, $1.4 million, the actual cash was $250,000 over four years. The rest was to be paid in annuities into which the Nets would invest a few thousand dollars a year that would start paying Ard decades later. So his annual salary was more like $60,000.

  I’m no financial genius, but I know the difference between cash now and the promise of cash later. I excuse myself from the meeting and go into the bedroom, shutting the door behind me to call Bob Woolf and lay out the situation. He agrees with me: cash now is our goal.

  He tells me to put him on with Red Kerr.

  He tells Red that he is advising me to stay in school because I’ll be a first-round draft choice.

  “Then why is Julius here?” Red asks.

  Woolf tells Red that the offer isn’t even close to enough to make him advise me to leave school. “This kid has the Olympics coming up, the Pan-American games. I can’t tell him in good faith to go pro.”

  The negotiations continue all afternoon and evening. Wilson, Arnold, Bianchi, Kerr, and I sit around that table, our jackets off, room service hamburgers and french fries and congealing ketchup on white plates spread out before us. And that evening, the owner of the Squires, Earl Foreman, arrives. Foreman had basically taken over the Oakland Oaks from singer Pat Boone two years earlier by assuming Boone’s debts. Despite the Oaks winning the ABA Championship in 1969, Foreman immediately moved them. (This was the second year in a row the ABA champion moved after winning the title. Connie Hawkins’s Pittsburgh Pipers had moved to Minnesota after winning the title the year before. Then they moved back to Pittsburgh the next year. The ABA, I am discovering, is an interesting league.) Foreman’s team played in Washington, DC, for a year as the Washington Caps—while remaining in the ABA’s Western Division, which meant the longest road trips in the league—before moving to Virginia and the Eastern Division. Their biggest star had been Rick Barry, who Foreman sold to the New York Nets for cash, but they have second-year guard Charlie Scott, a New York City legend who is coming off a Rookie of the Year season averaging 27.1 points a game.

  Foreman shows up wearing a blue suit and a striped tie. He’s smiling and eager and now it seems like the negotiations really have momentum. He gets on the phone with Woolf and they kick around some more numbers while Arnold is talking to me, telling me that the latest offer, $500,000 for four years, is better even than George McGinnis has gotten. “And George went to Indiana!”

  I get up and call my mom to tell her what is going on.

  “Oh June, I don’t know. But that is so much money!”

  My mom and Mr. Dan make less than $15,000 a year. I mean, we are already talking about more money than I ever dreamed of making. And for playing ball!

  I tell her I won’t do anything without calling her first.

  I call Carol and fill her in.

  “This is exciting, Julius! But if you turn pro, what about us?” she says. “This is Julius, my college boyfriend, and you’re talking about playing pro basketball? For the . . . Virginia who?”

  She’s never heard of the Virginia Squires.

  I tell her that we’ll be fine, we’ll stay together no matter what.

  Ray is calling Jack Leaman and now telling him what is going on, warning him that I may leave school.

  Earl Foreman is agreeing to the $500,000 over four years, but he wants a twenty-year payout.

  No, I’m not interested in that.

  “Now, Julius—” Arnold says.

  “Call Bob,” I tell Ray.

  I explain to Bob that I need more money up front, shorter payout. Earl gets on the phone with Bob.

  By now we’ve had two dozen room-service hamburgers on that coffee table, drunk about six pots of coffee, and Earl is smoking cigar after cigar. I’m sitting on the sofa, listening to Bianchi and Kerr talk about what a great fit I will be on the Squires, with Charlie Scott, with Fatty Taylor, big man Jim Eakins, the power forward Neil Johnson.

  Finally, Earl comes back in.

  “Five hundred thousand dollars, $125,000 a year for four years, paid over seven years.”

  Now I get up and call Bob back.

  He says it’s the best we can do.

  I tell everyone in the room that I’m going to sleep on it. Earl is having his secretary down in Norfolk, Virginia, draft a contract and she’ll be here in the morning with it.

  The next morning, I call Mom and talk it over with her. I tell her I’m thinking about signing.

  “June, promise me one thing.”

  “What is it?”

  “You’re an adult and you have to make a decision you can live with. But promise me you’ll finish school.”

  “I promise.”

  I’m going pro. I sign. (Mom, Marky, Tonk, Bobby, you are all with me. We rise together.) They give me my first payment, $10,000 in cash, right there.

  It turns out Al, Red, and Earl Foreman have never even seen me play. They’ve only seen one grainy film of me in the NIT against North Carolina, the game I fouled out of, maybe my worst varsity g
ame. Arnold has seen me play a couple of times and he has managed to convince these guys that I’m worth every penny.

  On the train back to New York, Ray and I sit next to each other in the row of three seats, both staring forward. I’m thinking, What have I done? I’m moving to Virginia? To play in the ABA? When I go back to campus for the last few months of my junior year, that will be the end of my college experience, the end of being a student-athlete. I’m just going to be a . . . jock. I never wanted to be a jock.

  My only regret, and it hits me riding in that train back to New York, is that I will never get to play in the Olympics, to represent my country, and maybe even make a difference for the United States in the 1972 Munich Games.

  18.

  I take over my mom and Mr. Dan’s mortgage, I give Freda some money for her kids, and I head back up to Amherst, where I drive my old blue Chevy over to a Lincoln-Mercury dealer with my friends Al Skinner, Leon Saunders, Herman Curtis, and Alonzo Somerville. I’m going to trade in the Chevy for a new car. I like the look of the Mercury Cougar, and when I take it out for a test drive, I’m thinking it’s a done deal. But the guys are all crowded in and they are saying, “Man, it’s kind of tight back here.” The Cougar is a coupe, and they are saying I should look at something a little roomier, maybe a Lincoln.

  Never bring your friends when you’re going to buy a car.

  When we’re back on the lot, the dealer shows me the new Lincoln Mark III, a coupe with a grill like a set of chrome shark teeth. This car is a beast: blue on blue, with a 460-cubic-inch V8, eight-track player, power everything, and plenty of space in the back for my friends. Man, now that I’ve driven the Mark, I can’t go back to the Cougar, so I make a deal to trade in the Chevy and pay another $5,000 plus some financing so that I can leave that day in the Mark. Driving back to campus through those two-lane Northampton roads, my Afro—I’m starting to get a little freaky with my hair—almost but not quite brushing the padded top, I feel like I’ve made it. All my dreams, my hard work, it was all for a reason. This is the fruit of my labor, the Mark an obvious symbol of my success, but there is also an accompanying feeling, this sense of flight, of rising, of this opportunity. There was never a schedule, or even really a plan. I just kept working and playing and staying focused, kept my life in its neat columns and rows, and now look, I get to drive around in the Mark with a contract to play ball for $125,000 a year. I’m on my way, Marky, I’m on my way.

  Not necessarily academically, however, as my grades slip my final term. I finish my three years at UMass just 30 credits shy of my degree, and I plan on going to summer school as well, so I’ll pick up a few more.

  My promise to Mom I intend to keep.

  19.

  So that summer, I spend the weekdays up in Amherst with Carol and attend classes. Every Friday I drive back to Harlem in the Mark. Because I’m no longer protecting my college eligibility, I can for the first time play in the Rucker Pro League. A schoolyard player I’ve run with named Dave Brownbill sets me up with Pete Vecsey, a sportswriter for the Daily News who’s the player-coach of the Westsiders (sometimes known as the Daily News All-Stars). Brownbill and another New York City player, Ollie Taylor, have sold Vecsey on me, and by the time I meet with him he tells me he has saved me a spot. But when I ask for a paycheck, he tells me that’s not how the Rucker League works. You play on what he calls the World’s Greatest Outdoor Arena for love of the game and to test yourself against the best.

  Rucker, at that time, is comprised of playground legends and NBA and ABA all-stars, all competing in free-flowing games where, if the contest is good enough, the timekeepers will shut down the clock just to keep it going. I’m intrigued, and since I’m about to play pro ball, I need to know how I measure up against the best players in the world, and most of them are right here every Saturday and Sunday, playing for one of the dozen teams in the league. We have my future teammate Charlie Scott, Billy Paultz from St. John’s, Walt Szczerbiak, New York Knick Hawthorne Wingo, so we’re loaded with professional talent, and Vecsey isn’t even sure how many minutes I’ll be able to play. Clyde Frazier is playing in the Rucker League, along with Nate “the Skate” Archibald, Willis Reed, Pee Wee Kirkland, and Earl Monroe. I can’t wait to test my game against these legends.

  On my first possession of our first game, against the Cincinnati Kings, their star Sid Catlett and two defenders converge on me as I dribble the ball along the baseline, take off from the left side of the basket, and slam down a reverse dunk. Man, it’s great to be playing in a league where I can dunk the ball.

  After college, playing up in Rucker Park is like a release. Finally, there are no coaches or rules to stop me from playing to the best of my abilities on the court. I’m discovering that some of my playground moves, the dunks and spins and finger rolls, will not only work against this professional-level competition, they are actually more effective than some of the methodical zone-busting, outside-in, pass-and-cut offensive moves that my coaches taught me back at UMass. And equally important, the fans love the game when I take it higher, up above the rim.

  Because when you’re balling, really balling, up at Rucker, you feel like a straight-up rock star. I pull up in the Mark, throw it into park, don’t even have to lock it because no one dares mess with it, and when I walk in through the chain-link gate, I’m going through a herd of people and the crowd is just parting and I can hear the murmurings of recognition. “Julius. Julius. Juliussssss.” There are people reaching out and touching me, putting a hand on my shoulder—“not the hair,” I have to tell them—because, I have given them something they can’t buy. These are people who are going to the Garden during the season to watch the Knicks. And they come up here every weekend to get a taste of something even better, often with Knicks all-stars playing up here as well. At this point, the Knicks may be the best team in the NBA, but what fans are getting up at Rucker is something more beautiful, spontaneous, improvisational, it’s jazz versus classical. Plucky Morris is doing his rap over the PA, introducing me like I’m a heavyweight champ, making up nicknames for me, “Little Hawk” and “Black Moses” and “Houdini” before I finally tell him, “Yo, man, just call me the Doctor.”

  “The Doctor is in,” Plucky shrieks. “He’s gonna be operatin’. He’s gonna be dissecting brothas.”

  And the crowd is hyperventilating. Women fanning themselves. Guys whipping their T-shirts around. The bleachers are packed. There are people leaning out the windows of the buildings along Eighth Avenue, up in trees, lined up on the roofs, sitting on top of the chain-link fence, even standing along the viaduct leading to the 155th Street Bridge. And there are always some beautiful women in attendance up at the park, and these are women dressing to be seen. Somehow, the word has gotten out and Braniff and Pan Am stewardesses are making it to the park whenever they have a layover in New York City, and some of these fine ladies let it be known that they are available. I take up with a fine female, one of the Braniff stewardesses, my Rucker girlfriend. I’m still in a committed relationship with Carol and living up in Amherst during the week, so this is my first taste of the temptations of big-time basketball.

  There is this intense emotional connection I feel with that audience. They seem to know that they are witnessing an emergence. They are discovering me at the moment when I am discovering myself as a pro. I mean, think about this, this black community, they don’t have very much. This is their outlet, this park, and this experience. And if you’re not here, in this park, then you don’t see it. These games are not televised; they are played once and the only highlight or replay is the story you tell your brothers who weren’t there.

  I feel like a gladiator walking through that crowd. My Afro is flaring; it’s adding a good four inches to my height. I’m skinny and long and ropey and strong as a lion; in fact, one brother describes me as looking like a “lion on stilts.” And my game, I don’t know why, but once I’m playing at Rucker, it’s like the chains are coming off. Even though I’m on asphalt instead of wood,
I’m running faster and rising higher and playing with a creativity and imagination that I never dared back in college.

  At one point, Pete Vecsey and I are sitting on the bench after a game and Pete is shaking his head and he looks at me and says, “You know what, Jules? When you’re playing, and you make a sweet move, somehow, you give the people a taste of what it’s like to be you. They feel like they’re making the move just by watching you.”

  I nod. I know it’s a compliment. And, coming from Vecsey, who’s a pretty good player himself with a silky mid-range shot, it must be high praise. But I don’t know what he’s talking about.

  The games are so pure. I’m not worrying about the coach taking me out if I make a bad decision or don’t make an outlet pass. I can go coast to coast if I want, whenever I want. But in this league, if you throw it down on your man, he is going to come right back at you. No respite. You make a shot, then you know you’re going to have to make a great defensive play because your man is going to be looking to get even. It’s back and forth that way, games going to 162–160, and every crowd-pleasing move my opponent makes just motivates me to come up with something even bolder.

  In part because the games are not televised, some of our exploits are exaggerated and certain matchups get blown out of proportion with each retelling. There are some legendary games, among them a game against Milbank, a playground squad that includes the man who is supposed to be the best playground player of them all: Joe “the Destroyer” Hammond. My teammates are telling me, “Man, the Destroyer is gonna show up.”

  I’m like, “Who’s the Destroyer?”