Dr. J

by Julius Erving

  We have to go through Indiana and Milwaukee to get back to Boston. Milwaukee actually becomes a pretty serious rival to us during this period. The 1981 Bucks win 62 games themselves behind Marques Johnson, Sidney Moncrief, Junior Bridgeman, and Bob Lanier, who are among the seven players they have averaging double figures. It takes us until a game 7 at home to dispatch the Bucks, and we are finally flying back to Boston for what seems inevitable: another Eastern Conference final against the Celtics.

  Game 1 in Boston and who else but the Boston Strangler comes through with two free throws in the final seconds. We lose game 2—Toney scores 35 but I contribute only 12—and we head home after salvaging a split. The only ominous sign is that Larry is on fire, putting up a 33-10 in game 1 and 34-16 in game 2, despite Bobby’s and my best efforts.

  Still, we win game 3, as we “hold” Larry to 22-13, and then we win game 4 by 2 points as Bobby, who is having a great series, makes a clutch steal at the end. We are in control, 3 games to 1, and miraculously, the Lakers have lost out west to the Houston Rockets, a team with a losing record, so the winner of this series should have a pretty clear path to the title. I can’t help but think we can finally win one for Philly and our fans.

  We return to the Boston Garden for game 5, and we are leading by 6 with under two minutes left. This is it. Bring on the Lakers. We feel it. This is our best Sixer team yet, with a more mature Darryl Dawkins, with Andrew Toney coming on, with Bobby still providing his steely defense and sixth-man heroics. And then, I get that feeling of water engulfing me, as Bird and Tiny Archibald start to make amazing plays on both ends, and Bird in particular smothers me so I have trouble even getting my shot off. We’re turning the ball over. We somehow fumble the game away and lose by 2. And Bird is definitely back on track, posting a 31–11, with 5 assists.

  No matter, right? We’re back home for game 6 at the Spectrum. We’ll clinch it before our home fans. We go up 51–42 at the half. The champagne is literally on ice.

  But we melt.

  Boston takes the lead early in the fourth quarter and we never get it back.

  Back to Boston for game 7.

  The NBA is generally a more physical league today than it will be long after I retire. And in the playoffs, the refs swallow their whistles and let us play. And in a game 7, you know you are out there on your own with no one but your teammates to protect you. Game 7 in Boston is a war, as we again start out strong and take a lead into the old, damp, cramped Boston Garden visiting locker room at halftime. Neither team is shooting well, and every time I drive to the basket I feel like I’ve been thrown through a windshield. I end up with 6 turnovers, and commit 5 fouls trying to guard Larry and Cornbread Maxwell. Larry makes a typical clutch shot, banking in a 15-footer with twelve seconds left. Mo Cheeks gets fouled, hits one of two free throws. We manage to get the ball back. Billy calls time-out, we inbounds the ball to Bobby, who puts up a high, arcing pass toward the basket, which I’m supposed to alley-oop. There are so many bodies packed in around the basket that I can’t get in position for a clean touch. Final score: Boston 91, Philly heartbroken.

  Billy’s face is creased, pale, pinched; his lips are contorted like a lasso in mid-toss. Once we’re back in our locker room, he tries to find some words, something to say, but when he opens his mouth, nothing comes out but a gasp. The locker room floor is strewn with towels, torn bandages, paper cups, ice. Bobby and Andrew are sitting with their heads in their hands. Darryl is hunched over, so that his head is actually leaning inside his locker. Billy is right. There is nothing to say. We dress quickly, file out, climb onto our charter bus, and then the bus starts rocking. I’m thinking back on my senior year of high school, when we lost to Elmont and our students went over and tried to tip over their bus. Now the Celtics fans, whose team just beat us, are trying to tip over our bus? Why? They should be celebrating.

  Here’s the thing about Celtics fans: they’re sore winners.

  35.

  My third son, my beautiful boy Cory, is born in 1981. We are blessed with healthy children, who mirror our own sound bodies. We are a family that is embodying the American dream. I’m a millionaire, with a beautiful wife, four gorgeous children—and a new dog—we have cars, clothes, an estate. We are an oil painting come to life, some white supremacist’s nightmare, the beautiful black family that has somehow displaced English nobility and taken up their wardrobe and home. We are the wishes of our ancestors, I think, the culmination of the struggles of the dreams of Abneys and Ervings and Browns.

  But American dreams always intersect with the American dream machine.

  So I’ve starred in a film, The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, a long off-season spent filming with director Gilbert Moses and actors Debbie Allen, Harry Shearer, Jonathan Winters, and the Harlem Globetrotters’ legend Meadowlark Lemon. Gilbert had come to a shoot-around at the Forum before a regular season game against the Lakers and shown me the script and asked if I wanted to play Moses Guthrie, the egotistical star of the Pittsburgh Pythons, a forlorn basketball franchise that turns to astrology in an attempt to reverse its fortunes, changing its name, along the way, to the Pittsburgh Pisces. I hadn’t read too many film scripts before this, but I did know enough to think this one sort of odd, but then again, this was the ’70s and Gilbert said Cher had already committed to play astrologer Mona Mondieu. He said if I wasn’t interested, he had Marques Johnson ready to come on board.

  I showed the script to Irwin Weiner, who negotiated a six-figure fee, plus I got some back-end participation—I still get a few hundred dollars every year from Fish. I ended up in Hollywood, where I had to take improv classes with Meadowlark. We learned how to react to each other, how to listen to our acting partner, a lot of breaking down our inhibitions so Meadowlark and I aren’t afraid to cry in front of a room full of strangers.

  We spent two months shooting, one in Pittsburgh and one in Los Angeles. At one point, we’re all excited that Kareem has joined the cast, playing the center of the Los Angeles Team, as the imaginary LA franchise is called. But Kareem had an argument with Gilbert over the shape of his goatee, so he knocked over his chair and stormed off the set. That’s why Kareem is in the first three quarters of the championship game climax of the film, but then vanishes for the fourth quarter, probably the only time in his career Kareem wasn’t on the court during crunch time.

  Making movies is grueling work. And in the evening, when we were finally done with shooting, I headed back to the hotel with Jonathan Winters and he was telling jokes the whole time. If he got to the car before me, he would actually put a whoopee cushion on the seat and then wait for me to sit down. Here’s the thing about whoopee cushions. They are actually funny. And when you’ve just been on a film set for twelve hours and watching Kareem argue with a director, to sit down on one at ten p.m. while Jonathan Winters is sitting next to you with his thumbs in his ears and his tongue is darting in and out of his mouth, well, it’s pretty hysterical.

  And then we would get to the hotel, which would be swarming with fans who were there to meet the film stars, and I would just be trying to get to my room while Jonathan would spend the next two hours in the lobby, entertaining the crowd with hand buzzers and puppet shows and pretending to tell people’s fortunes. He had amazing and relentless energy.

  There are some great scenes in the movie. I love the one where I’m sitting in a car with Toby, played by the lovely Margaret Avery. She bemoans the fact that her son Tyrone is hanging around with my character, “an overgrown adolescent who can only count in twos.”

  And I turn to her, take her chin in my hand, and say in my deepest, most soulful voice, “What’s wrong with twos?”

  I then go out on a basketball court and do a bunch of dunks to the Spinners’ “No One Does It Better.” (That movie had a great sound track.)

  But I decide this isn’t how I want to spend my off-seasons. I’ll stick with playing tennis at the Hôtel du Cap with Bill Cosby. I’m lucky I did Fish, however, because my family and I still get our
health insurance through the Screen Actors Guild.

  With a young family at home, four children under the age of eleven, I don’t really have time to make movies, anyway. I am branching out into new businesses, and through Irwin I’m meeting some heavy hitters. We have dinner in New York with Bruce Llewellyn, owner of Fedco Foods and one of the richest African-Americans in the country. He says he’s getting tired of operating a chain of twenty-four-hour groceries and is looking for something else.

  “Too many calls in the middle of the night,” he says. “Somebody’s breaking into the store, somebody’s slipping on the floor.”

  He says he’s going to find an investment for us. “I want you to ride with me.”

  “How much?” I ask.

  “Well, you put like a half-million dollars away and wait for my call.”

  I do a little research into Bruce. When he bought Fedco Foods in 1969, he was ahead of his time in how he financed the deal, using the kind of leveraged buyout strategy that would become famous in the 1980s. Bruce, I quickly realize, is a visionary. I’m in.

  I start putting at least $50,000 of my salary away every season, thinking of it as my Llewellyn Fund. Finally, a few years later, he calls me up and says he has just the perfect vehicle.

  “No matter what is happening in the economy, people always want beverages,” he explains. “Coke, Pepsi, water, beer, they will always buy beverages. When people go to the grocery store, they always come out with beverages.”

  He tells me he’s been looking to buy a bottling operation, and he’s identified Philadelphia Coca-Cola Bottling Company, which controls the Coca-Cola bottling rights to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. This is a huge business, he explains. You can’t buy Coke or Sprite or Diet Coke or any of a number of other beverages, from anyone but the local bottling company. It’s like a monopoly, only legal. He needs $80 million for the whole thing. He’s putting up most of it himself, but he is asking a few select individuals to come in with him, including me and Cosby. Bruce pools our money and borrows some from the bank, and we end up the owners of Philadelphia Coke. My half-million-dollar stake will eventually grow to $12 million and would pay a handsome dividend every quarter along the way. It’s also a great education about how business works, how these kinds of transactions unfold, what an exit strategy looks like, how I should look to get ahead in the business world. First, I need to complete my education.

  I’m not going to be a basketball player forever.

  I’m also honoring my commitment to my mother by working toward my college degree. I left Amherst about thirty credits shy of graduating. UMass has a program called University Without Walls, which allows me to take correspondence courses, and throughout my Sixer career, I am taking classes. I switch my major to an area of study I’m familiar with. The primary course load is writing papers and theses about leadership and mentoring. I have these papers due constantly, and often, while the rest of the guys are out on the town, I’m in my hotel room writing a paper on, say, Martin Luther King. Or Martin Luther, for that matter. I’m also allowed to use my own experiences, my own relationships with corporations and sponsors, to write about the relationship between the spokesman and the business he represents. For example, I write a paper about Converse that explores their corporate structure, how that business works, and my role in it. I spend plenty of time in public libraries around the country, in Dallas, in Denver, working on my class papers. It’s a slow process, because I only earn one or two credits a pop, three if I’m lucky, but I stay the course because of that promise I made to my mother.

  36.

  What is it about newborn babies that pulls you toward their cribs, even when they are sleeping? Sometimes, I go into Cory’s room and bend over to kiss his soft cheeks and sometimes I just go in there and stand and sniff the air, smell his smell. It is, I suppose, the species ensuring its survival. A new baby in the house settles things down, exerts a focus and calming influence. The machine of family is working, the engine is running, the product is this: a beautiful child.

  I peer in on Cory in his upstairs nursery and then walk down the hall to my office, taking my seat behind my desk, making sure my leather desk pad is parallel to the edge of my desk and my pens are in order. My drawers are neat and tidy, the top left locked like it always is. My checkbook is where it should be, inside my top drawer and flush against the bottom of the felt interior. Good.

  I open my mail, sorting through the bank statements, credit card statements, lease statements, the usual fan mail and requests from friends and acquaintances. And there is a personal letter, handwritten on yellow stationery.

  It is from Samantha Stevenson, the former sportswriter, and she writes that she has a daughter, Alexandra Winfield Stevenson, and I am the father.

  37.

  After my customary two weeks of off-season workouts at the Hôtel du Cap on the French Riviera—running along the beach, playing tennis on the clay courts with Cosby, dining on homard, and drinking rosé—it is back to the grind and to attempting another climb up that mountain. I am at the absolute peak of my athletic abilities, a reigning MVP of the league, arguably the best player on the planet, but, as I said, I can hear the clock ticking. I can chart the passage of time in my sons, in Cheo, who is now—can this be?—a strapping ten-year old, and a fine athlete himself, and J, who is seven, and adorable Jaz, who is four. In beautiful Cory, the baby, who inhabits that blessed spot of the youngest and cutest, the displacer of Jaz from that role, who herself displaced J. I feel that incessant, cruel onrush of time. I need to win, now.

  I’m watching great players like Doug Collins finally call it quits, after struggling to come back from numerous injuries. His body surrenders, and he retires before the season.

  Pat and Billy don’t make big changes in the off-season. This is a team still built around me and my abilities, with plenty of shots for Andrew Toney, who is in his second year and becoming one of the most feared scorers in the league. Cheeks has developed into a reliable scorer in addition to being a steady ball handler and gifted passer. We still have Bobby playing forward, though we have to limit his minutes because of his epilepsy, and Caldwell, Dawkins, and Catchings as our big men. This is a great shooting team, with Toney, Bobby, Mo, Darryl, and me all hitting over 52 percent—which is fortunate, because we are a terrible rebounding team, finishing twenty-second in the league in defensive boards.

  It’s an issue that will plague us all year. When Darryl Dawkins comes down on Mike Gminski’s foot in a game against the Nets, the situation becomes so critical that Pat is talking to Wilt Chamberlain about coming back.

  I tell Pat he can’t be serious. “Wilt? Really? This is a publicity thing, right?”

  But Pat thinks our rebounding needs are that extreme.

  We have a new owner, Harold Katz, the founder of Nutrisystem, the weight-loss program, who bought the team from Fitz Dixon for $12 million. (To put in perspective how much the league has changed since 1981—or to just give some sense of inflation—there are forty NBA players in 2013 who earn that much in a single season. That’s right, Nene Hillario earns enough to buy the 1981 Philadelphia 76ers.) Harold played a little ball in high school, once losing to Wilt Chamberlain’s Overbrook High School 80–22. Maybe he learned a lesson from watching Wilt and spent the rest of his life believing that you need a quality big man if you want to win. This year, the Sixers just don’t have that. Darryl has been an enigma his whole career. The Dawk should have been Moses Malone: he has a body that looks like it should average 20–10, but he never really comes close. I think that if Darryl had spent a year or two in college, then he could have been a smarter player—he certainly would have become better at staying out of foul trouble. Darryl was like Shaq before Shaq, the same irreverent attitude, the constant jokes—much of Darryl’s material came from old black comic albums, the chitlin circuit, Moms Mabley, Slappy White. He was doing stuff he had heard growing up. He has the same whimsical approach to life as Shaq, but in the latter’s case it had been
refined by a couple of years at LSU where he saw what the wider world had to offer and knew how to carry himself among more sophisticated people. Dawk remained an overgrown high school kid with a juvenile sensibility. He and World B. Free were having water balloon fights while I’m trying to write my term papers and figure out how to diversify my portfolio. For basketball players, college isn’t just about developing as a player, it’s an introduction to the grown-up world and will give you a sense of how to cope with those adult demands. I can’t imagine Dawk sitting down with a financial planner and listening to various investment strategies, but I could see him exchanging whoopee cushion tips with Jonathan Winters.

  Katz was already exasperated with Dawkins when he was healthy, but now that we are getting outmuscled every night, he tells Pat that we have to get stronger inside.

  38.

  After reading that letter from Samantha, I sit with it for a while. I’m thinking this over. If Alexandra is really my daughter, then I have to own up to that; that’s the right thing to do. I have to deal with this in my marriage and be straight with my wife.

  I go downstairs and find Turq in the kitchen. She’s drinking tea from a white ceramic cup. I take a deep breath and show her the letter.

  Turq is a swinger, in that when she is mad, she starts throwing punches around. And the girl can hit. As she is reading the letter, she is torn between getting to the end of the letter and unleashing a haymaker.

  She is pissed. As Don King would say, she is pissed to the highest degree of pissivity.

  “You fucking pig,” and she is pounding me, hurling punches that I’m trying to parry with my arms crossed over my chest. I’m backing up, until finally I’m against a cabinet. Then she picks up her teacup, and she’s throwing that at me, along with a spoon, a pot, another pot, another cup. I need to get out of here.