Dr. J

by Julius Erving

  I know I’m going to have to get my points from offensive rebounds or when Charlie’s double-teamed. About halfway through the first quarter of that exhibition, I take the ball and I’m driving down the lane on the left side and I rise, seeing Issel and Gilmore both coming to block my shot. Then I watch Issel sort of slide down, and then Gilmore slides down, and I’m still . . . rising. I dunk the ball over both of them.

  This is my confirming moment. This is the first time I ever thought of the idea of airbrakes, that I can go up and somebody will come at me and I just wait, take a breath, and I can watch their hand, as gravity will inevitably assert itself, and I stay up. It all happens in an instant but it seems like slow motion to me. I’m up there, and I wait for the hand to drop. And when I see the hand drop, it’s over. Kaboom.

  23.

  I’m fortunate in that I can sleep anywhere. If you give me ten minutes, I can take a nap. That makes ABA life a lot easier for me. We were always traveling on Piedmont Airlines or Mohawk Air, regional fights, tiny seats, and sometimes we have to make three connections to get from, say, Norfolk to Tampa. And about half of the flights on these regional airlines seem to turn around because of equipment malfunctions, fuel leaks, a door being open, whatever. And then we miss our connection and we’re killing five hours wandering around an airport in Shreveport. There’s no first class on these thirty-seat turboprops, and we’re squeezing into these tiny seats, but it doesn’t bother me, as I manage to catnap wherever I am. It’s an essential skill in pro sports—catching up on your sleep however you can—because one of my first discoveries about life on the road in the ABA is that there are an awful lot of girls, who will cost you some valuable zzzs.

  The veteran players know girls in all the cities, they introduce me to them, and occasionally they even send them down to knock on my door, their way of showing that while I may be a new player with some moves, they still have the game off the court. And these are good-looking women, too, fast girls who are down with basketball players. I’m torn, because Carol and I are still together while she’s at school and I’m a rookie in the league, but the temptations are everywhere. During our rookie training camp, I’m rooming with Willie Sojourner when this white guy in an Army uniform waving a gun around busts through our door.

  “Where’s Jennifer?” he’s shouting. “My wife, Jennifer?”

  I’m looking at Willie and he’s looking at me like, What the hell is this? We got a white man with a gun accusing us of doing something with his wife. We know enough to realize that this doesn’t usually end well here in the South.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “My wife. I know she’s with one of you ballplayers.”

  “You can look around the room if you want,” I say. “Just don’t be shooting anybody.”

  Evidently, his wife had been with somebody on our team—to this day I don’t know who. And he was probably right, his wife may just have been one of those hoochie mamas who like to flirt and go after ballplayers, some of them single and some of them not single but still available.

  It’s a perilous situation for a supposedly committed brother like me. I resist temptation for as long as I can, but how many times can a young man resist a beautiful woman knocking on his door and saying, “Hey, man, so-and-so told me to come by, said you needed some company.” And she’s a foxy woman, so I smile and say, “Really? Well, he was right.”

  On the road, the groupies travel in packs of twos or threes, and they are an attractive and diverse portion of the population. This is, after all, the free-love era, the swinging ’70s, and I’m a pro athlete. There’s money, sun, food, booze, drugs for those who might be inclined. You don’t even have to look that good: if you’re a basketball player there’s a groupie for you.

  Is there any explanation needed beyond being twenty-one and having a little money in my pocket and free time on the road? I’m flying around the country and living out of hotel rooms. I even start to experiment, to see if I can sleep with a different woman every night. For eight nights, I do exactly that, as we go from Dallas to Richmond to St. Petersburg, up to New York, down to Charlotte, over to Louisville and then back to Hampton, Virginia. A different fox every night, an Asian woman, a sister, a Caucasian, and so forth. But after a few nights, the excitement and macho thrill wear off and I start to feel empty. My conscience is getting the best of me and I realize that while this is gratifying to my ego—and I am definitely making up for those lost years before I got to UMass—it is leaving me feeling disconsolate. Once the girl leaves I am still Julius Erving, I’m still Callie Mae’s son and Freda’s brother—and I’m still in a long-distance relationship with Carol. It depletes my soul, this philandering. And it bothers me that I’m failing at my relationship.

  I decide I need to talk to one of the older, married players. In a hotel in Pittsburgh, where we’re playing the Condors and my Rucker league running mate, Walt Szczerbiak, I seek out the oldest guy on our team, who is in his mid-thirties, happily wedded. I’ve never seen this player catting around with any groupies, which in this environment makes him a little like a wise man on top of a mountain.

  He’s up in his hotel room, relaxing on his bed, watching The Courtship of Eddie’s Father after shoot-around. We’re killing time before going back over to the Pittsburgh City Arena, where the Condors play before about twelve thousand empty seats.

  I tell him my dilemma, how I’ve promised to be faithful to Carol, but I’m finding the temptation of life in the pros to be overwhelming.

  “How do you do it, man?”

  He gets up, turns off the television, and takes a sip of his root beer.

  “We’re warriors, young man. Warriors! And we have to overcome these temptations of the flesh, to channel all that energy into our game. Man, you refrain, and you will make it rain.”

  I’m nodding. Okay. But refrain how?

  “Young man, you got to be strong! And if you know this girl is special, that she is the great love of your life, then you will be strong. For her. That’s where your strength will come from.”

  I guess that’s the veteran approach. A sort of abstinence, like we’re high priests of sport. I don’t know if that’s really workable for a young buck like me. But if my teammate can do it, then maybe I can, too. I want what he has, this kind of happiness that comes from a long-term, committed relationship and beautiful children. Look at him. He has this serenity about him, like he’s at peace with himself. That must be what happens when you don’t mess around with groupies.

  “Hey, Doc,” he says, before I leave. “How is that sister of yours?”

  “Freda?”

  He nods. “Hmm-mmm. She’s fine.”

  “Um, yeah.”

  “Tell her I said hi. Maybe, if you don’t mind, I’ll take her out sometime.”

  “Aren’t you married?”

  He shrugs. “You’re the one who asked me for advice. I never said I was faithful.”

  Adapting to life on the court is easier. We start the season winning 9 of our first 12 games. As I’m making my first stops around the league, Charlie Scott remains our big draw, but I win folks over during pregame warm-ups, when I can throw down whatever funky dunk I can imagine. I have dreams of dunks—in one dream, I see myself tossing it off the backboard, catching it with one hand making a reverse dunk—and the next night in the layup line, I do it. In games, it’s not that different. In my first game against the Indiana Pacers, probably the ABA’s best team, I take off from the right baseline, and Darnell Hillman comes out for the block, his Afro waving, and I sort of pull the ball back and just float by him. Then Mel Daniels comes over, and I ball-fake the pass and keep floating until Roger Brown is now swooping down on me. By now, I’m beneath the basket on the left side, still floating, so I spin the ball high off the glass with my right hand. A no-look basket.

  That season, Charlie and I are the highest-scoring combination in all of basketball, as we average nearly 62 points a game. Charlie leads the league in scoring at over
34 a night, and I add another 27 and pull down 15.7 rebounds and lead the league in offensive boards. But for all our scoring both Charlie and I feel that we’re missing something as a team, some killer edge. We win five in a row, then lose four, and continue that boom-and-bust cycle. Until this point, through Salvation Army, high school, and college, I’ve never played on a team that was so inconsistent. We have the talent to beat anyone, but too often, if Charlie is having a rare off night and if I’m unable to make up the shortfall, then we get beat by determined team play. But it becomes more and more obvious to me, the more cities we pass through, and the more courts I step onto, that I have the talent to score on anybody in this league.

  One of the biggest surprises about being a highly paid pro athlete is just how little money I actually have. I didn’t negotiate any signing bonus, so after that first $10,000 advance on my salary—about half of which I spent on the Mark and most of the rest of which I gave to my mom and Freda—I have to live on my paychecks. After they take out the agent commissions, taxes, and the deferred money, my first check is less than $1,000, and that’s supposed to last me a month. My salary is $75,000 gross, which after the $10,000 advance is taken out, then federal, state, and local taxes and insurance, and then divide that into twenty-six checks—I’m paid biweekly—that means my net pay is something like $900 a week. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a good salary in 1971, but I’m not exactly rich.

  I ask Irwin to see if he can get me some of that deferred money. The word is out about me, and most of the folks coming out to Scope to see the team are coming to see me. (And Charlie, of course. They bill us as “Charlie ‘The Great’ Scott” and “Julius ‘Dr. J’ Erving.”)

  Irwin comes down to see Earl to ask about renegotiating my contract. Now that they know I’m a sure thing, Irwin says, they should make a new deal. After all, there are two leagues. I could always jump over to the NBA. We have some leverage. Earl refuses, despite the fact that Irwin tells him I wasn’t fairly represented at the signing and that he thinks we can get the contract nullified. Earl isn’t interested. He won’t budge on the terms.

  Not only does Earl Foreman refuse to pay me the deferred money, but some of the checks I am getting from him start bouncing. Now this is worrisome. Here I am. I’ve left college, uprooted my sister and her boys, and some weeks I don’t even have a paycheck. “Irwin, man, you gotta see about getting me out of this contract.” Now I like Earl, and I always give him a hug when I see him on the sidelines, but I’m starting to realize that not only is he not paying me what I’m worth, sometimes he’s not even paying me what I’m not worth. But he never holds a grudge. It’s just business, he says. Don’t let it color our relations.

  Irwin tells me I just have to play out this season, and then we’ll make some moves. He says he thinks we can undo this contract because of the fact that my agent, Steve Arnold, had a conflict of interest, because he was working both sides of our negotiation. In the meantime, I just have to keep playing and putting up big numbers and showing what I can do, so that an NBA team will take an interest and allow Irwin to leverage a bigger contract.

  24.

  Fog pushes in, thick wispy soldiers on the march up the sandy beach and down the suburban streets, a gray army overwhelming us some mornings. I wake up to windows that seem painted white. I hear the boys downstairs, eating cereal, asking Freda about when I’m getting up, their chatter deadened by the cocoon of air around the house. There are the sounds of my old friend and driver, Herman’s deep voice, then the hiss of water running in the sink, the scuff of chairs sliding, shoes scraping against the wood floor. Boys on their way to school. Herman must be driving them.

  The boys will need some new Chuck Taylors, the Mark needs new tires, we need a whole shopping list of food. I hear Freda moving the pans around. I know what I am, I’m the man of the house again, supporting a whole family, not even my own, and trying to stretch a too small paycheck to cover too many people. How did this happen?

  “June? You hungry?”

  Freda says she’ll make me pancakes.

  I put an eight-track into the system. Marvin Gaye sings “Trouble Man.”

  I come up hard baby, and that ain’t cool

  I didn’t make it sugar, playin’ by the rules

  I know not to complain, not to bemoan the fact that I don’t have as much as I think I should have. But I’m twenty-one, a boy in a big man’s body, and I can’t help but want the perquisites of stardom. The cars, the clothes, man, I want a fine suit. I’m not materialistic by nature, but I do feel that my success should bring me some reward. I never want to feel like I’m working in that jewelry store basement, no matter how grand the trappings or how glamorous my life looks.

  I am the product. I am what Earl Foreman and the Virginia Squires organization is selling, more than any red, white, and blue ball or dancing girls in skimpy outfits. They are coming to see me. I am on a treadmill of capitalism.

  This isn’t vanity or ego. This is just my understanding of business. The way I see it, I’m in business for myself, so I have to figure out my worth. That’s what Irwin and I talk about.

  I’m standing before the mirror, still skinny as six o’clock, with a chicken butt. I’m a boy stretched long into a ballplayer, yet the burdens of the world are on my back. I pull on a Nik Nik shirt, orange and brown, with a broad, deep collar, some bell-bottoms, some platform shoes. And the Afro, man, I need to work on that. You have to invest time in it. Otherwise, it looks raggedy. I can’t stand the disorder of a raggedy ’fro.

  My Afro, jabbing skyward, scrapes the ceiling as I come downstairs, give a warm greeting to my sister—“You okay?” and a smile—and cut up the pancakes Freda had made for me.

  The fog loosens, light cutting through in the gaps between grounded clouds, like the sky has settled down on earth for a spell. I figure I can drive through this, take 284 straight out of Virginia Beach, over the inlet, down to the Admiralty Motel, where Chopper has set up his training room. He does all his taping out of the motel room. He’s even got a whirlpool over there.

  I pull out of the driveway, the Mark shining from Herman doing a wash and wax. I turn on the headlights and drive, past the other suburban homes, and I tell myself that this is what it feels like to be an American, to be a businessman on his way to the office, only my office is a basketball court, and what I manufacture is baskets. But this routine, this commute down 284, is a version of the life so many of you know—that time by yourself behind the wheel in the morning commute. The road cuts through Mount Trashmore and Pocahontas Village, the river birch and swamp oak trees turned rust and brown, the black-headed gulls flying inland. I brought Marvin Gaye with me.

  I come up hard, but that’s okay

  ’Cause trouble man don’t get in my way

  My music is loud. The fog is lifting. I’m making good time toward the estuary over the Eastern Elizabeth River when I hear a siren going off behind me. It’s the state police, stopping me for the fifth time since I’ve moved to Virginia. Something about a black man in a car like this attracts an awful lot of attention.

  “License and registration, please,” the trooper asks.

  “Was I speeding?”

  “I’m stopping you for GP,” he says.

  That’s what they always say. General principles. They didn’t like the look of me. Something about me just seemed wrong to them, so they pull me over.

  My license is valid, my registration is clean.

  “What is it you do, boy?” he asks.

  “I play for the Squires.”

  Now the Squires haven’t caught on with everybody. Earl Foreman’s plan to be a regional team meant we had a minuscule following spread around the state.

  “What’s a Squire?”

  I tell him it’s a professional basketball team.

  “You know, officer, you guys stop me every week,” I say. “I drive down this road every day, from my home to our practice facility.”

  He shrugs. “Don’t look so suspicious.”
He hands me back my license and registration.

  I sit there awhile. I’m a calm man, a patient man, but sometimes I feel like stepping out of the car and smacking around this state trooper. It’s like the clock has been set back down here. I know the pace is slower in Virginia than in New York, and maybe because of that they hadn’t caught up with the times. I mean, I’m stopped once a week. This is harassment, and it takes all my will and patience not to become a statistic out there, another black man perceived to be mouthing off or threatening an officer and then I could end up in court or worse. I don’t use drugs and I don’t drive drunk, so there is nothing any law enforcement can catch me at, but what they are doing is trying to provoke me into doing something, anything, so they can justify an arrest. It weighs on you, this kind of harassment. It makes you wonder about how many young men never get a chance because they can’t remain calm in the face of this kind of discrimination.

  The irony is, the only guy on our team who I know is smoking weed is white, our power forward, Neil Johnson, who always has his stash in his socks. He’s a little kooky anyway, so whenever he shows up late to practice, I always wonder if he’s been busted. But, no, Neil would always roll in, socks bulging. Now, if he was a brother, some state trooper stopping him on a GP would have found that stash. Virginia’s still some trouble, man.