Label Luke Epplin however you please. He’s the dreamer from small-town Illinois who once came to New York City with two suitcases in hand, knowing if he could make it there, yada, yada, yada. He’s also the writer who went from fledgling poet/playwright to struggling novelist to accomplished author. And the dude who somehow went from single to engaged to married to girl dad while completing his second book.
That book, “Moses and the Doctor: Two Men, One Championship and the Birth of Modern Basketball,” came out Feb. 10 and traces the careers of Moses Malone (RIP) and Julius Erving, two distinctly different men who banded together to lead the Sixers to their last championship, in 1983.
Long before that, their fortunes had been entwined in the old ABA, Erving having established himself as that league’s standard bearer years prior to Moses becoming the first player to jump from high school to pro ball. They experienced parallel frustrations over the ensuing years, many of which were visited upon them by Larry Bird’s Celtics and Magic Johnson’s Lakers, and when they finally joined forces they were well aware they needed each other – that their strengths were complementary.
Epplin deftly illustrates that early in the book, when he shares a tale related to him by Erving in an interview for the book. (Luke told me it was in fact the first thing the Good Doctor recalled about Moses.) Erving’s New York Nets visited the Utah Stars, Malone’s first ABA team, early in Moses’ rookie year (1974-75). And because Dr. J was who he was – because he was eloquent and ambassadorial, because he gave the league an identity, because he was stylish and elegant in addition to being a kick-ass player – the Stars asked him to deliver a speech before tipoff.
Think about that a moment: Erving was just 24 at the time, five years older than Moses. But he gave the ABA a heartbeat (faint as it might have been by then; the league was in its next-to-last season), so it was incumbent upon him to welcome this most unique newcomer. Oh, and then go out and compete against him.
So according to Epplin, Dr. J said the following: “My high school coach once told me that when you go into the ocean for the first time, you cannot expect to swim right away. First you have to get your feet wet. But, Moses, you have been thrown into the ocean, and you can swim already.”
In the years that followed, Moses had one question for Erving, every blessed time they crossed paths: “How’s my swimming going?”
That underscores their differences in a nutshell – how Dr. J, understanding his place as a public figure, weighed every utterance and considered every gesture. And how Moses, who cared not a bit for the spotlight, was wiser and funnier than anybody outside his own locker room might have known.
Epplin, for his part, seems to swim to the whistle of his own lifeguard. Whether going upstream or downstream, he has remained buoyant throughout his writing life, forever paddling forward.
And never mind that fewer and fewer people want to jump in the pool with him. Books, it seems, are becoming increasingly passe in an age of goldfish-length attention spans (h/t Ted Lasso). The 47-year-old Epplin, who doubles as an editor at Penguin Random House, noted that himself in a recent appearance on Jeff Pearlman’s podcast “Two Writers Slinging Yang,” saying it used to be that a successful book would sell 10,000 copies – that that was a sure indicator that it had “penetrated the culture,” as he put it.
Now, he told Pearlman (an accomplished author himself), that’s down to about 5,000.
So that’s the fight he’s fighting, and indeed the one every author fights: Fewer and fewer people read anything of substance. Everybody, it seems, craves the quick dopamine hits provided by Instagram posts, Twitter drivel or Snapchat snippets.
“If I were starting out now,” Epplin told Pearlman, “I don’t think that I would have this aspiration to do this – or if I did and I got here and I saw the future of what this is, I probably would have went to grad school.”
Thankfully he did not. In 2021 he released a terrific book about the Cleveland Indians of the late 1940s entitled “Our Team,” and his latest work has also been well received, as evidenced by the fact that it has found its way onto the USA Today bestseller list.
The day it came out, Epplin and his friend Bradford Pearson, editor of Philadelphia Magazine, appeared at a Barnes & Noble near Rittenhouse Square. Fifteen people settled onto chairs before them to discuss the book, and would later line up to have their copies signed. It was lively and engrossing to all but the heavyset guy in the fourth row, who dozed off 45 minutes into the Q-and-A session. And began snoring.
Went on for a while, too. Epplin laughingly dismissed it as “standard book-reading behavior” when I asked him about it a day later, which seems completely on brand for him, given the way he navigates life’s ebbs and flows.
As he mentions in the acknowledgements of “Moses and The Doctor,” he met Jane Healy, the woman who would become his wife, in January 2022. At that point he had merely compiled notes for the book, but by August of that year he began writing a proposal.
By the time they were married in May 2023, he had nearly completed his research, and by the time the couple’s daughter Ava arrived in March 2024, he had written half the book. He wrapped it up in ‘25, and here we are.
During a Jan. 29 appearance on “After the Buzzer,” a podcast I co-host with former LNP sports columnist Mike Gross, Luke said he would often awaken at 5 a.m. to write for a few hours, then tend to his full-time job. And when he came home, he would do some additional work from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.
“It’s not great for a marriage, I would say,” he told Mike and me.
Especially since Jane has a demanding job of her own, as a vice president at Merck, focusing on cancer research.
But when he stepped back and reconsidered his three-year journey – one that also saw the couple purchase a house in Jersey City, N.J. – Luke came to a different conclusion than the one he had reached on the pod.
He recently wrote on his substack that Jane “was an anchoring force” in his life, that she provided him with “the comfort and stability (he) needed to wade back into the watery churn of book-writing.” With that in mind, he dedicated his book to his wife and daughter.
Well before that, he seemed to have no problem plotting a course on his own. Growing up in Litchfield, Ill., a farming community of some 6,500 people, he was obsessed with going to New York City, for reasons unclear even to him. He had never been there, and his parents thought he would be better off setting his sights on a city closer to home, like Chicago. But that was his quest, and he would not be deterred. He even mentioned it while delivering the valedictorian’s address on commencement day.
Four years later, after graduating from Washington University in St. Louis with a degree in English Literature, he made good on that promise. Arrived in the Big Apple with those two suitcases and a roundtrip airline ticket, the return leg of which had to be redeemed within three months. So that’s how much time he gave himself to figure things out.
“I had no job, no connections,” he told me before the signing in Philly. “Just crash-landed in New York City, and I was like, ‘This is it. I’m gonna make it.’”
He had saved some money, and he lived frugally at first, settling into a room at a YMCA while tutoring some children. (He upgraded in time, when the well-heeled parents of those kids offered him a room in their luxury apartment.)
He had only a vague idea of what he was going to do long term, though his interests had always been in the written word. While in high school, he composed what he described as “really terrible poetry,” then shifted to plays.
“I would write full-on 150-page works, things like that, and was not really clear what I wanted to do with them,” he said. “But it did sort of plant a seed in my head that I could do this.”
At Wash U he trained to be a novelist, and he continued to write fiction into his 30s. In time Epplin concluded that he wasn’t good enough to make a living at that, but the techniques he learned about developing characters and story arcs informed both his books.
Meantime he had settled into his editorial job at Penguin Random House, while doing some freelance writing on the side, for outlets like The Atlantic and n+1. At one point he attended a reading given by one of his editors at the latter outlet, Chad Harbach, also the author of the superb novel “The Art of Fielding.” The occasion was the 2013 re-release of Christy Mathewson’s 1912 book “Pitching in a Pinch,” for which Harbach wrote the foreword.
It struck a chord with Epplin, who proceeded to write a piece about baseball’s mental aspects. And on a lark he emailed it to the New Yorker.
Then he went to lunch.
When he returned, he was stunned to learn that it had been accepted. It appeared in the Oct. 25, 2013 issue of the magazine, and was entitled “Christy Mathewson and the Thinking Man’s Game.”
Almost immediately an editor reached out to Epplin and suggested he write a baseball book. “Our Team” was the result, though he told Pearlman it was an agonizing process that took a toll on his health and his social life.
He nonetheless waded back into the watery churn of book-writing, sometimes riding the wave, sometimes beating ceaselessly against the tide. Seems to work for him. Seems like he has no problem keeping his head above water. You know, sorta like a young Moses.