Dr. J

by Julius Erving

  I often wonder if Turq has some issues from her own childhood or from her first marriage, but I know that I have to stay true to my commitment. I chose my wife and I didn’t choose my mother. I love my mother, but I have to live with my choice, and it breaks my heart to have this enforced distance from my mom. She still comes down plenty and attends my games, but it’s not the same as when we were living in Long Island. Freda and her kids have moved over to Queens, and those boys are also like sons to me, so the distance between Freda and Turq is hard for all of us to bear. I put a lot of miles on my Mercedes driving back and forth from Philly to New York.

  My nephews, Barry and Keith, are old enough to take the train by themselves or even drive down for a visit. Barry is turning into a fine ballplayer himself, as well as a solid student. Keith, also a very good athlete, is more prone to getting into trouble. Barry will eventually play ball at Wagner College, earning his MBA from Temple. Keith will join the Marines.

  I’ve converted the condo at the Academy House into the office of the Erving Group, the umbrella company for my businesses. I hire my old coach Ray Wilson as my first employee. I already know this is my last pro contract, and that means I will retire, at the latest, at thirty-seven.

  Irwin and I talk regularly about how I need to take the considerable fees I am paid for my endorsements and appearances, together with my NBA and ABA savings, and use these as seed money for the new businesses that can provide for me after my career. I have a lot to learn in this regard, and thankfully I have mentors like Bruce Llewellyn, Steven Wynn, Larry Magid, Harold Katz, and Bill Cosby.

  It is an early off-season afternoon when the phone rings in my office. It’s Freda.

  “Hey, June, how you doing?”

  Freda’s voice embodies for me wisdom and kindness, along with the gentle judgment of being my big sister.

  I stand up and walk around my desk, looking up Locust Street at the cars driving by on Broad.

  “I’m sick,” she says.

  “You got a cold?”

  She explains it’s more serious than that. Cancer is a taboo subject. I don’t hear many people talking about it, and then only after the fact, after someone has passed and you realize you haven’t seen them in a few months or years. So when Freda tells me that she has cancer, I think that can’t be right. She’s so young, still not yet forty.

  She says the doctors found blood clots in her stool. They did a biopsy and detected some polyps in her colon, but rather than have an operation, she is pursuing some alternative medicine that she believes is better than the surgery. She has heard about these homeopathic treatments through her church. What she doesn’t tell me is that with her kind of cancer and the stage at which it is detected, the odds of remission from conventional surgery and chemotherapy are not that great anyway.

  I tell her whatever she needs financially, I’ll of course take care of it. She should just call Irwin and he’ll make the necessary provisions.

  “Have you told Mom?”

  She says she hasn’t.

  “Gonna break Mom’s heart.” Like it’s breaking mine.

  I don’t understand God’s will. I don’t understand His plan. The universe sometimes seems arbitrary to me, its cruelty as unthinking as a mousetrap. When Marky passed, I forced myself to keep moving forward, as I did with Bobby, Tonk, and Wendell, but when I go with Mom and Freda to Marky’s grave in Rockville Centre, I think again about the substance of this life, about the extinguishing of the body and the mysteries of the soul. I always believe that Marky travels with me, and I sometimes feel him there, but I also know that this is the story I tell myself in order to soften the harsh truth of his being gone.

  But could God’s plan really be to take another of us so young? And a mother of two young boys? That doesn’t make sense.

  I call Mom and through tears we talk about what we can do for Freda. Mom is close by, so she can help out with Barry and Keith, and for now, anyway, Freda remains strong.

  The homeopathic course seems to be working wonders for Freda over the next few months, as she goes into remission and takes on a vibrancy in her life that belies her diagnosis. She continues to work as a church receptionist, frequently calling to fill me in on how the boys are doing. On my regular trips up to Long Island to stay at Williams Street with my mom, Freda comes over for family picnics and meals, and she is the same beautiful, vivacious girl I have known all my life.

  When she tells me to go inside to pick up more sweet tea, I listen.

  I think there is a light in her that will never go out.

  Mom still has her hair salon and her friends around Long Island, and wouldn’t it be nice if she had all her kids and grandkids there? I regret that I am unable to provide this for my mom, giving her only stolen moments with her grandchildren.

  Everyone is always reminding me of the significance of winning a title, of basketball games. I believe there are more important things, like family.

  42.

  This year, before our annual trip to the French Riviera, we are joining Joe Meriweather, M. L. Carr, and a half-dozen other NBA players on a goodwill tour of China. We visit Beijing, Xian and the terra-cotta warriors, Guangzhou. Turq and I stay in the room in the Beijing guesthouse formerly occupied by Richard and Patricia Nixon. It’s a strange room, featuring a urinal in the bedroom. This is before China has fully opened up to the West, and in some places we visit we are the first brothers the locals have ever seen. We have dinners with some very high-level party officials and various eminences where we are served plenty of foods we’ve never seen before. This is the first time I’ve eaten every part of a duck, and I mean every part: they serve us duck tongue, duck intestines, duck feet, and duck ass. And that’s a delicacy, the ass, so they always give it to the most important person. I end up eating a lot of ass.

  For most of that trip, we are out of touch with the United States. They don’t have international phones in the hotels. We are left to sightsee on our own, which means that I spend an awful lot of time arguing with M. L. Carr.

  I’m telling him he’s lost his identity since moving up to Boston. He started out in the ABA, but since joining the Celtics he’s become a towel-waving automaton.

  “You forget where you came from,” I tell him one afternoon as we’re opening up canned peaches so we won’t be too hungry at dinner.

  He says I’m just bitter because I know the Celtics are going to take us apart next year.

  We do get one piece of news while we’re at our hotel in Guangzhou: the Sixers have traded Darryl Dawkins to the New Jersey Nets for a first-round pick next year.

  “Oh no,” M. L. says when he sees me, “it’s over. You guys gave up your best big man!”

  I feel awful. I’m marooned in the middle of China and our title chances seem to be receding further. The Lakers have picked James Worthy in the draft. The Celtics’ young big men are a year older and they are about to trade for all-star wingman Scott Wedman. And what have we done? We’ve drafted a couple of decent college players, but in the arms race of the NBA, that’s not enough to close the gap with the Lakers, much less stay ahead of the Celtics.

  M. L. Carr is giddy the rest of the trip as I descend into a funk. He’s probably in his room waving the hotel towels around as he thinks about the upcoming season.

  When we finally reach Hong Kong, Turq and I check into our room and there is a message from the Sixers waiting for me. We’ve just signed Moses Malone.

  M. L. Carr has heard the news as well, and when I see him down in the lobby, he’s shaking his head. “You guys just won the title.”

  43.

  Bill Cosby also has a house in Philly, so he and Camille become regular guests at our place. In the summers, we have parties every weekend, inviting Arthur Ashe, Grover, Teddy Pendergrass, Lynn Swann, Patti LaBelle, other Philly athletes like Mike Schmidt (Doug Collins’s best friend), Harold Carmichael, Reggie White, Garry Maddox, and many of my teammates and Sixer staff. Billy Cunningham lives just up the street, so he and I
are often at each other’s houses, talking shop. Turq and I start to have these weekend afternoon events I call Hit, Sip, Dip, and Dine. That’s a little tennis, a beverage, a swim in the pool, and then dinner.

  Velveteen manicured grass that my friend John Havlicek might call Celtic green extends from the house an acre in every direction, to the stands of maples and spruce, green and going gold in the late summer. The treetops undulate in the afternoon breeze, their tips waving good-bye to the season. The oval pool, wrapped by a granite patio, is down a mossy stone path from our back deck. There are children in the pool, our own, our guests’, their peals like aural confetti swirling around us. On the tennis courts behind me, I can hear a game in progress, the hollow thunk of well-struck shots, the grunt of a point lost. Turq is in the kitchen, working hard. She is a wonderful cook, her creations, usually hearty southern-style fare, are the reward after a hard day of play.

  A man walks through this patio, along this deck, a glass of wine in hand, and he feels that he is somehow at the center of the world. He has beautiful children, a lovely wife, fine friends, and here around him is the evidence of that, every blade, every leaf, every splash: it is all a blessing that he never takes for granted.

  But beneath that image, or around it, are the great strains of my life, and ahead of me, there is so much pain still to come. I have to admit I am no longer that shining example of promise and potential. I am now fully realized, but that means I also have to admit that this is what success is, what it looks and feels like. I appreciate its every minute, but with success come previously unconsidered problems and concerns.

  One thing I am now confronting is how different my children’s experience is from my own. Cosby had told me that nothing about growing up poor teaches you how to be a rich dad. My eldest son, Cheo, whom we nickname Bam-Bam for his physical strength, his nose for disruption and heavy-handed chaos, his frank boyishness and unremitting mischief, is an indifferent student, dismissive of his teachers. He’s a bright boy, cat quick when he wants to be, but too rarely shows that at school, where he is a steady disciplinary problem, the concerned calls home from teachers and administrators a regular occurrence.

  His younger brother J idolizes him—I wince when I realize that this is how Marky must have looked up to me. J will follow Cheo through any of his perilous, ill-conceived ventures—a plot to heist small change or record albums or candy or extra soda pop.

  When Cheo is twelve and J is eleven, I get a call from my teammate, Steve Mix, saying that someone has called him and told him that my kids are smoking cigarettes behind the Friends School in Philadelphia. Now, my children are the children of a celebrity, for better or worse, and therefore are subject to constant scrutiny. That’s the downside, I suppose, of being Dr. J’s sons.

  I call my boys into my office and ask them where they’ve been today.

  They tell me, “Nowhere.”

  “How come you got home so late from school?”

  “We were playing a little ball,” Cheo says.

  I nod. “Suppose I told you I got a call about you guys smoking cigarettes behind the school. Does that mean someone’s lying on you?”

  They realize they are busted. I can see Cheo running through the calculations about whether it is better to come clean or to spin another lie.

  They fess up.

  And then here comes the lecture. About honesty. About smoking. About drugs. About all of that, but the pattern is established. I tell them that no matter what, I will help them. I will fight for them, that Turq and I will always listen to them and try to find a solution.

  Cheo nods, agrees, promises to tell the truth.

  But this is something I don’t understand. How he can look me in the eye and deny what I know to be the truth? And J will nod along with him. The two of them are dissembling right through their teen years. They can never keep their stories straight. They say they are going one place and actually heading to another. And throughout their teen years, Turq and I share this frustration in understanding our boys through these lies.

  I don’t want to write too much about my sons’ stories, out of respect for their privacy, but perhaps the greatest challenge for me as a father is to resist viewing their lives through the prism of my own adolescence. I was a different boy from Cheo and J.

  As the first generation of our family to have money, Turquoise and I turn to our friends and associates for parenting advice. We consult specialists and counselors.

  It is a mistake on my part to try to solve my sons’ issues—as our Mainline neighbors suggest, at least by their prosperous example—by finding them a different school. They begin a labyrinthine journey through elite private schools. Their upbringing is so different from mine. I didn’t have choices. If you flunked out of the local public school, well, that was it. There was no alternative. With money, however, come all kinds of options, of parenting solutions far more esoteric than my mom beating me with a switch.

  I never hit my children. I break that terrible tradition. But I perhaps create a too lenient alternative where my kids are indulged. Instead of telling them, “You stick it out. You hang in there. You follow rules,” I impart the message that we will change the rules to better accommodate them.

  It is, I now believe, a colossal mistake.

  Perhaps I am overcompensating for being absent so often. A professional athlete’s life means extended absences. I am gone too often, and so I try to make up for it by providing in money what I can’t always give in time. My job is to play basketball, and the time that demands is not optional, it is required. So I miss too much of my children’s lives. I don’t know that there is anything I can do about that. I am as involved as I can be. Either Turq or I will go to every parent-teacher night, to every soccer or basketball or lacrosse game, to every performance and recital.

  And there is a certain amount of nature that can’t be overlooked in this discussion of where my nurturing was wanting: Jazmin is a good, studious girl who stays at Episcopal Academy through high school. She’s smart, steady, beautiful, and seems to thrive, despite, or perhaps because of, being my daughter.

  Part of it, of course, is that Cheo and J are the boys of “the Doctor,” and they have had it whispered in their ears by friends, by their peers, that, hey, they don’t have to worry about anything because “your dad is Dr. J.”

  Like they have it made.

  My dad was Tonk. I never had it made.

  That may be the biggest difference right there.

  But I love my children with an intensity that causes its own distortions. I’m not a stern disciplinarian, and so perhaps we are too lenient, are too soft where perhaps hardness is required. I am reacting to my own upbringing.

  I play ball on our backyard court with J and Cheo, challenging them to beat me two against one. I explain to them that two should always be able to beat one, and they need to find a way to do it. I’m not allowed to shoot layups. No dunks.

  We spend days on that court. Each of them tries to take me off the dribble or tries to make long jumpers instead of using the passing game to beat me.

  I always tell them, “Figure it out.”

  Eventually they do.

  But I’m very conscious of never forcing them to play sports, or in any way judging them as athletes. I know that they will be measured by too many others against the accomplishments of their father, and that’s not fair.

  They need to be allowed to just be boys. That’s what I was before I became Dr. J.

  44.

  Moses Malone is the reigning MVP of the NBA, which means that we have the two most recent MVPs on this team. But what inspires confidence in training camp isn’t the hardware or the statistics, it is Moses’s work ethic. From the first day, he is running harder than the rookies trying to make the team. He says he’s not even playing until he’s sweating.

  And he is a world-class sweater. I’ve never seen a grown man sweat so much. There is water dripping off him everywhere. It’s puddling on the floor. We’re hydroplan
ing in Moses’s sweat, splattering it up into the seats and onto the backboard. He is so intense. In every scrimmage, the second team never comes close to the first team because Moses refuses to lose in practice.

  We may never drop another game.

  Moses makes it clear from the beginning that he feels this is “Doc’s team.”

  “There’s a lot of Indians, but there can only be one chief.”

  But he still leads by example.

  Moses vows to go after every missed shot. He says he figures there are a hundred chances for rebounds in a game. If he fights for every one of them, then he’s bound to get at least 15.

  Our owner, Harold Katz, has solved our rebounding problems in a spectacular manner, by bringing in the best rebounder of all time. The only problem is that Moses was looking forward to playing with his old friend Caldwell Jones, and when he finds out that we’ve given CJ to the Rockets as compensation for Moses, Big Mo almost backs out of the deal. I’m also terribly disappointed to see CJ go. He’s a warrior, our only player who has been willing to deal with Kareem or Parish straight up. But to get Moses, you are going to have to sacrifice something. Moses, after balking, signs, and he immediately reaches out to me and we establish the rapport that we still have to this day.

  He remains one of the funniest and most perceptive individuals I know. He is shy and often speaks cryptically, and this causes many to dismiss his intelligence. But Moses has a sharp mind; he just chooses not to share it with many people.

  Moses is a country boy from Petersburg, Virginia, and like Darryl, he never went to college. Only Moses didn’t need to. When Moses left home at nineteen, after one of the craziest recruiting wars in the history of basketball, with sixty-five or so college coaches and scouts staying at motels and in rented rooms all through Petersburg, his momma gave him a Bible, which he carries with him everywhere.

  “That’s my rock,” he tells me.

  “The Bible?”

  He nods. “Momma gave me something to put in there. That’s my rock.”