One night in October 2022, I was seated by myself at a table in the large banquet room of a local hotel when I felt someone’s hands around my neck. That was obviously unsettling in the extreme, not only because I had been approached from behind but because of the sheer size of the mitts in question. When I say they were around my neck, I mean completely around. These were some serious meat hooks.
Happily, my would-be assailant quickly released his grip.
“Boo,” a deep-voiced gentleman said.
I turned to see the smiling face of Julius Erving, who immediately headed off in the direction of the stage for a question-and-answer session. He would hold forth for a good long while, cover a great many topics.
One he chose to dwell upon was his relationship with Bill Russell, who had died just a few months earlier. The Celtics icon had had a considerable impact on not only Dr. J’s life, but those of several other NBA guys as they rose through the ranks. He was, in Erving’s words, “a change agent.”
But now the Good Doctor believed there was a void to be filled. Now someone else needed to step forward and guide younger players.
“Who’s gonna be next?” he asked the crowd. “I think it’s me. Whaddaya think?”
There was polite applause from the small gathering, but also some awkwardness in the room, owing to the fact that such a position must be conferred, not demanded. Erving – for all his grace, for everything he accomplished during his Hall of Fame career – would not seem to be a guy capable of impacting current players in the same way Russell impacted those in past eras.
Maybe that’s because times have changed, the pace of life has accelerated and … well … kids these days, amirite? Maybe it’s because Erving has always been so diplomatic, so circumspect, while Russell was more apt to make what has come to be known as good trouble. Whatever the case, it seems unlikely that Erving, for all his good intentions, will be able to hold the entire basketball world in his sizable hands.
This is not to say that his impact on the game should be dismissed. It’s just to say that it was greatest during a 16-year career that began in 1971 in the old ABA, ended in 1987 after 11 seasons with the Sixers and was defined by his above-the-rim style and ambassadorial bent.
Here was a guy who literally took his game to never-before-seen heights, while elevating an entire sport. And that is ably explored in Mike Sielski’s forthcoming book “Magic in the Air: The Myth, The Mystery and the Soul of the Slam Dunk.”
Sielski, a Philadelphia Inquirer sports columnist, writes of dunking pioneers such as Georgeann Wells, the first woman to jam in a college game, as well as star-crossed legends of the practice (David Thompson, Connie Hawkins), guys who blossomed in the shadows (Earl Manigault, Jackie Jackson) and even one-hit wonders (Lorenzo Charles). Nor does he forget luminaries like Michael Jordan and Dominique Wilkins or current guys like Ja Morant.
There’s even a little something about Mac McClung.
But the cornerstone of the book, which is due out in February, is undoubtedly the chapter devoted to Dr. J. And that is as it should be, because he did for the dunk what Dickens did for Christmas Yet to Come – enabled us to look at something in an entirely different light. He added creativity and imagination to an act that had once been dismissed as showboating, that in fact had once been banned on the collegiate level, something else Sielski covers in the book.
(Full disclosure: Mike is a friend and respected colleague. But this book, like his previous works, “Fading Echoes” – about two Philly-area high school football players who went off to war – and “The Rise” – a Kobe Bryant origin tale – stands on its own merits.)
Sielski covers familiar territory – i.e., Erving’s path from his native Long Island to the University of Massachusetts to the ABA to the Sixers – while injecting some compelling new details. We learn that as a young man Dr. J dunked on an NBA player named Harthorne Wingo in a summer camp, and schooled a guy nobody else in his local gym could match.
Turns out the guy was Bob Beamon, who went on to set an Olympic record in the long jump.
We also learn that Erving had a bet with Doug Moe, then a Denver Nuggets assistant coach (and for a brief time years later, the Sixers’ head man), on his foul-line jam in the legendary dunk contest at the 1976 ABA All-Star Game. And that Moe won, since Doc took off from just a hair inside the free throw stripe.
Sielski also got Erving to swear – no mean feat, since Dr. J is usually extremely measured in his public utterances. But in the pages of this book he is quoted as saying the narrative about Larry Bird and Magic Johnson saving the NBA was “bullshit,” that in fact the 1976 merger did so, three years before that duo’s professional debut.
(My .02: While the merger injected the league with fresh, exciting talent, the Magic-Bird rivalry took things to an entirely different level, not only because of their skill and style, but because they wound up on opposite coasts, playing for iconic franchises. And let’s not kid ourselves – there was a racial element to it as well.)
Erving’s hands are also mentioned at least twice in Sielski’s new book. He relates the moment in 1969 when Doc first meets Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then Lew Alcindor), near a playground in Queens – fascinating in and of itself, since players of that caliber would in this day and age know each other from the AAU circuit or the recruiting trail. But that was the first time they crossed paths, and while the 7-foot-2 Alcindor wasn’t playing pickup ball that particular day, he couldn’t resist comparing hand sizes with his fellow New Yorker, who was half a foot shorter.
Turns out Erving’s hand was bigger.
Sielski later reprises a quote from Johnny “Red” Kerr, who was the Virginia Squires’ general manager when Erving was a rookie with the team.
“I never saw such long fingers,” Kerr said. “They were the fingers of a pianist or a surgeon.”
Big enough to lift up an entire sport. To carry one league and help propel another into the stratosphere. That should never be dismissed or minimized, and is worthy of the sort of dissection offered here. It is in fact the very foundation of the larger tale related in this book, and adroitly so. One that is no doubt in the right hands.