Dr. J

by Julius Erving

  He says he’ll come over to take her out. “She want to go to the movies?”

  “You like the movies?” I ask Cynthia.

  She looks at Turquoise. Turq nods.

  Gervin drives over and quickly deduces that I haven’t been totally frank about Cynthia’s charms. But he takes one look at Turquoise and he knows why I’m so eager to be alone with her.

  Once they leave, I can get my mood going again, the music, the candles, and after a few more minutes of talking, Turquoise says she’s going to slip into something more comfortable.

  Oh, yeah, this Doctor can operate! I am so smooth—

  Then Turquoise comes back in wearing a two-piece flannel pajama suit that leaves everything to the imagination.

  She makes it clear to me, no matter how slick I think I’m being, that she isn’t ready to get intimate with me. “This is our first night together, and I’m not some groupie,” she says.

  So instead we talk through the night. She tells me she was married and has a son, a seven-month-old named Cheo. She and the father—a football player at Wake Forest—aren’t together anymore. “I’m raising him on my own,” she says. “He’s with his grandparents tonight. But he’s a big part of me, of who I am, and I want to be up front about that.”

  As I’m listening to Turquoise, I feel the initial powerful connection becoming even stronger. She’s a feisty sister, no pushover. She’s serious about life. And even though she is six months younger than I am, she has this maturity that I find almost comforting. And I am overwhelmed by her beauty.

  She tells me how she wants to go back to Wake Forest now that she’s had the baby, to finish up her degree.

  I’m smitten, and that night, before we’ve even slept together, I know that this woman is something special. I’m aware, at that point in my career, that I’m a handful. I have my habits, my desire for order, my problems with fidelity. Being with a pro athlete is not for the fainthearted. There is no training or preparation for the excessive lifestyle. A sister has to have a pretty strong ego and sense of herself to feel like she can regulate her man. And Turquoise is not intimidated or even particularly impressed by who I am. She’s just like, “I have a child, I am not interested in messing around anymore.”

  I’m not thinking that Turquoise is the one, but I know that I want to spend more time with her than with anyone else.

  Later that night, after their movie, George comes back with Cynthia and drops her off without coming inside. “I’m not feelin’ her, Doc,” he whispers.

  Turquoise and Cynthia take one bedroom and I take another.

  35.

  Despite the addition of George Gervin, we finish the 1972 season 42-42 and lose to Issel, Gilmore, and the Kentucky Colonels 4-1 in the first round. I end up leading the league in minutes per game, with over 42, and for the first time in my career, the wear and tear slows me down. I miss 9 games with a groin injury, the most playing time I’ve missed since I tore up my knee playing sandlot football. It’s disappointing to have taken a step back as a team, but it’s also indicative of where our organization is going. Despite Earl’s generosity in allowing me to live in his pad, I know that this is my last season in Virginia. The regional franchise strategy has not worked out for the ABA. The Floridians have finally folded, and the Squires aren’t in much better shape. Earl has supposedly lost $700,000 running the Squires this year, in part because of the $200,000 in legal fees he ran up fighting my case. I know Earl is looking to sell me to a new team, which means I’ll be able to renegotiate my deal.

  While Indiana, led by superstar George McGinnis, beats Kentucky for their third ABA Championship, Irwin and Earl are furiously working the angles to try to trade me to the New York Nets, back on Long Island. Roy Boe, the owner of the Nets, has lost his big star, Rick Barry, to the NBA. He’s looking for a gate attraction to help fill his new arena, and local boy Dr. J would be the perfect fit. I’ve had a fine season, leading the league in scoring and being named to the All-ABA First Team. Billy Cunningham is named MVP, scoring 24.1 points per game, 12 rebounds, and 6.3 assists, while I average 31.9 points, 12.2 rebounds, and 4.2 assists. So I can honestly say that I also had an MVP-type season. But I did miss 13 games. And the Kangaroo Kid played every game and led a Carolina team that won 57 games, so he deserves the trophy.

  Billy is an NBA guy who spent the first seven years of his career in the other league before joining the ABA. He’s been an all-star in every uniform he’s worn. There are plenty of guys who have jumped back and forth, and that’s one of the reasons why I never consider the ABA to be inferior to the NBA. The NBA does have the bigger markets, but in terms of talent, there is plenty to go around for both leagues. There are seventeen NBA teams in 1973 and ten ABA teams. (By the time you read this, there will be thirty NBA teams.) So the guys I’m playing against in Virginia are some of the best players in the world; we just aren’t always regarded that way in the media or viewed that way by the NBA. That’s why we take those exhibition games against the NBA so seriously.

  When we play an ABA versus NBA all-star game in 1972, the best of both leagues match up. They call it the Supergame, and NBA stars like John Havlicek, Wilt Chamberlain, Oscar Robertson, Nate Archibald, and Bob Lanier match up with ABA stars like Rick Barry, Dan Issel, Artis Gilmore, and me. The coach of the NBA team is Bill Russell and I haven’t seen him since he came up to UMass to give his lecture and we spent the night talking.

  Bill hasn’t been following my career. As he’s going over the scouting report with his players, Nate and some of the guys who know me from the Rucker League or preseason exhibition games are saying the guy Bill needs to plan for is Dr. J.

  They keep repeating, “Dr. J, Dr. J.”

  Bill has been retired a couple of years, and he’s wondering, Who is this Dr. J everyone is talking about?

  So when the ABA team comes out and we’re doing our layup and dunk line, he’s watching me and smiling and I’m nodding back.

  “I know that kid!” he shouts. “That’s Julius!”

  We share a big hug.

  In that game, the ABA ends up losing to the NBA by 2, 106–104, but the margin is indicative of how balanced the leagues are in terms of talent. What really separates us is the lack of a national television deal. If basketball fans were able to watch the best of the ABA every weekend, the great Indiana and Kentucky and New York and Denver teams, then they would see an exciting, wide-open brand of basketball—not to mention the red, white, and blue ball, which looks great on TV. What made the old American Football League was its TV deal with NBC. That’s what brought that league to national attention and forced the merger with the NFL. We all think that sooner or later there will be a merger with the NBA, but the inability of the ABA to secure a national TV contract really holds us back, keeps the league from gaining the leverage to force a merger of equals.

  Irwin is furiously trying to work a deal that will either have me playing in the NBA or for the New York Nets of the ABA. I’m talking to him by phone every day during the week when I’m back at my mom’s and going down to his offices on Park Avenue where he is explaining our options. This has become one of the most complicated transactions in sports history, involving, as it does, four basketball teams in two different leagues and millions of dollars in cash that have to change hands, not to mention my own contract, which is obviously paramount in my own mind.

  What is exciting me, and my mom, is the possibility that I will be playing back on Long Island. I’ve met with Roy Boe, who purchased the Nets back in 1969 and helped found the New York Islanders of the National Hockey League in 1972. Boe is big, tall, Scandinavian—born and raised in Brooklyn. He made his money in the fashion industry, founding a clothing company called Boe Jests that he had sold for a bundle back in the ’60s. I like him immediately. He’s smart enough to know that there is no reason to pursue this deal if he can’t make my contract work out. He’s not going to trade for an unhappy star. There is also the matter of coaches. He’s getting rid of Louie after
a losing season, which disappoints me personally, but I also know that Louie’s style still isn’t the right fit for me.

  But before I can join the Nets, Irwin has to run a gauntlet of lawyers and contracts. The Atlanta Hawks want to be paid for sacrificing their claim, and of course Earl Foreman has to get paid for selling me to the Nets so he can keep the Squires franchise going. Hanging over all the ABA guys is the fact that if they don’t get this deal done, then I will be going to the NBA, and that would be awful for the league. By this point, I tell Irwin, I actually want to stay in the ABA. I have developed a certain camaraderie with the guys.

  The deal we finally work out has the Nets paying $500,000 to the Hawks, with the Hawks passing along $250,000 and two second-round draft picks to the Bucks, all that to repay the Hawks for my own signing bonus and the Jaguar. The Nets also pay $1 million to Earl Foreman. To make the deal look more legit, they also trade George Carter to Virginia for me and Willie Sojourner. And the most important part of this for me: I sign a five-year deal for $2 million to play for the New York Nets.

  I’m coming home.

  36.

  I have a new video camera, a three-quarter-inch videotape machine that weighs twenty-two pounds that I load into the trunk of the Jaguar. Turq is wearing a pantsuit and scarf, a pair of sunglasses, her hair curled and golden in the late-morning sun. Downtown Norfolk glistens from the dawn’s coating of rain, now steaming back up to heaven, and we drive through the slick streets, tires growling over moist pavement, the way miraculously clear, as though Highway 264 itself had been closed for our triumphal procession of two. We are young, beautiful, powerful, irresistible, the unspoiled fruit of a nation, the gifted, the chosen, the mighty mighty. Earth, Wind and Fire sing:

  In our hearts lies all the answers

  To the truth you can’t run from

  The selfishness of youth, the arrogance of entitlement, the hubris of being young and fine and rich. Allow me a few moments of guilt-free bliss at our own good fortune, to be riding in a beautiful car with a beautiful woman down an open road on a warm spring day, to feel the world opening up, the options infinite, the opportunities limitless, and to have a sense that this is one more good day in what will be an unbroken string of good days. I have risen. I have taken this blessed life. We are the Bonnie and Clyde of black and sexy, the JFK and Jackie of African-American and cool.

  Dr. J and Turq.

  For just a few moments, I don’t want to think about what my mother would say, what my sister would say. (What Marky would have said.) What you would say. Let me live free from expectations and from the constricting code of being a good Christian man, of being the son of a deaconess. Let me ride fast and hard through life and take what I can and enjoy what I can.

  This fast car.

  This beautiful woman.

  This fast life.

  The highway unspools under my wheels, a silver-slick ribbon of gray asphalt, a machine-gun burst of white lines, a dozen off-ramp gas stations and fast-food signs and promises of lodging of comfort and rest. We drive on. We will not be stopped, neither by need nor the inquiring patrolmen. This morning is ours, the world pliant and beseeching: the world prostrate, begging, needing us more than we need it.

  So we drive, motor roaring until we hit the ocean, the dappled Atlantic, the foaming uptide, the hissing sand, the circling birds, the diving pelicans, the walking couples on a quiet, wide beach. We park, we walk, we hold hands.

  You admire. You gape. You gawk.

  Everyone we pass stares at us, nods at us, admires us. We are so fucking perfect. I’m not arrogant, but let me for once be proud. God made us. God made us beautiful.

  We come to a small park, where in the afternoon there will be children and parents and the swirling noise of play, but now there is no one, just us. This is our playground, and Turquoise takes a seat on a swing, and I push her, and then I walk around to the other side of her, and I videotape her, record her swinging, her head back, laughing, her gorgeous legs forward and tapering to her elegant feet. Her smile is joyous, eager, knowing, terrifying, cruel, sensuous. She swings back at me again, her face growing larger as she comes toward the lens, her finely shaped face coming into focus as she swings upward toward me.

  At the time I am taping her, I think only how I admire her, how fine she is.

  Later, when watching the tape, I will think I can spend my life with this one, singular woman.

  1.

  It’s gonna be fine, baby doll.”

  I’m reassuring Turquoise that my moving permanently back up to Long Island doesn’t mean anything has to change. We’re at the penthouse, and I’ve packed the Jaguar with my alligator skin suitcases. Two seasons in Virginia and I’m done. I’m going to miss some of the guys, Gervin, Fatty Taylor, George Irvine, and even big Neil Johnson and his socks full of grass, but I am more excited about moving back home and playing in New York again. I will not miss getting stopped by the cops every week.

  The one loose end is Turquoise, and her beautiful baby boy, Cheo. While I’ve not committed to her exclusively, I’ve accepted that if I’m going to be in her life, I need to be a father to Cheo. I know she’s not going to let me go easily; I also know I don’t want her to.

  She worries that when I move up to New York, she’s going to be forgotten.

  I tell her that’s not going to happen, that’s not my intention. I tell her we’ll make it work. But based on what I know about long-distance relationships—look what happened with Carol—I know that this will be a challenge. I want this to work, but I’ve got to go.

  Back on Long Island, I hire a real estate agent and we drive around a few neighborhoods and look at some houses. I decide I want to live on the beach, not far from where Marky, Freda, and I used to go swimming. She shows me a condominium in a brand-new development in Lido Beach, and I close on a modest one-bedroom next to the water, about twenty minutes from Hempstead and the Nassau Coliseum where the Nets play. I offer $50,000 and we make the deal. Irwin is pleased with how prudent I am being with my money, but I have learned from living at Earl Foreman’s how little I really need in my life in terms of material possessions.

  But being back in the old neighborhood raises issues. It’s wonderful to be close to Mom and Mr. Dan and to be able to spend time with my extended family, all the Abneys who have moved north and gather for occasional reunion picnics over at Hempstead Lake State Park. I’m the most famous person in my family, the successful athlete, so some of my relatives come to ask me for some help, and because it’s family, I’ll try to do what I can financially.

  With friends and acquaintances, it’s another story. There are some, like Archie Rogers, my old Salvation Army teammate, who I am happy to help out with a couple of bucks, even though I know he’s had his issues with the law and been in and out of prison. Still, we go way back, back to before the Sal, even. I will always be loyal to Archie.

  There are some acquaintances, however, who seem to look at me like a bank, but a bank to which you don’t have to repay a loan. I have to sit through so many business plans—a basketball barnstorming tour, a car dealership, a rib joint—that after a while I pass along to Irwin Weiner and ask him to take a look. Irwin will tell me, “Julius, if you want to help out a friend, then help him out, but don’t count on getting this money back.” I have to come up with some kind of policy here, some stock answer when these supposed friends of mine keep coming back and asking for more. I once heard Reggie Jackson say that with his various friends and acquaintances, the rule was, you could come see Reggie once. That’s it. You get one bite at the apple. He also said not to make dependents out of people who should be independent, and I think about that, frequently.

  I decide I’ll match his policy. If we go back a ways, or if you’re the best friend of my best friend, then I’ll help you out. Once. I’ll decide how much, and then that’s it. You don’t get a second bite. That’s my rule and I try to stick to it. Now, if you have a legitimately lucrative business idea that makes sense to me an
d stands up to Irwin’s scrutiny, then that’s something that may make sense for the right reasons, not because we went to high school together.

  Still, over the years, I probably give away $6 to $10 million to various friends and acquaintances, sometimes for business ventures or loans, sometimes just to help a brother out.

  I do treat myself to one nice new perk: I buy a white Avanti sports car to drive me from the beach to the arena or into the city. Being back in New York feels like being home. And I’m returning not as some college kid on break but as a conquering hero, and for the first time I can really take advantage of the city. My wardrobe takes a serious step up, as Clyde and I head back down to his tailors on the Lower East Side. There are no names on the doors, just these old Jewish and Italian guys. I have my first fur pieces made, some wraps, some half-jackets, some three-quarter-lengths, a full-length mink, and some fur hats as well. But here’s the difference between Clyde’s style and mine. If he would get a suit in, say, champagne-colored velvet or some crazy print, I might get the same cut in a solid blue or gray.

  2.

  Can you see me now? I’m driving in my white-on-blue Avanti, wearing a mink coat with a fur buccaneer hat perched atop my Afro. I’m looking sharp, and I’m feeling good. I’m healthy, my groin injury has completely healed. Last season, I was taking novocaine shots and cortisone shots pretty regularly because the right side of my upper thigh kept tightening up. Those shots masked the pain, but as a result my injury never had time to get any better. Now, with some off-season rest, I feel like I’m pain-free and looking forward to the season.

  The Nets have hired Kevin Loughery, a Brooklyn native and former St. John’s man who had an all-star career in the NBA with the Baltimore Bullets. His only head coaching experience was going 5-26 the previous season running the 76ers, which was actually an improvement over the guy he replaced, Roy Rubin, who had started the season 4-47. Somehow, Roy Boe thought that a coach with a .161 winning percentage was the right man for the job. And I have to hand it to him: he was right. From my first meeting with Kevin, I like his frank style and his willingness to adjust if his plan isn’t working. From the start, maybe because I’ve been brought in as the star player with the big contract, I feel like Kevin is trying to figure out how to use my talents and get the most out of my abilities. He’s not going to try to make me conform to some abstract idea of how the game should be played. He’s got a New York swagger, and he’s not afraid to mix it up with the players, to grab your uniform jersey by the numbers, if he feels that’s how he can make his point.