#8 Favorite Athlete of All-Time: Julius Erving
I’ve always been shy. When I was young, I was so shy that I often hid when someone rang the doorbell. I was eight years old when my parents divorced. My Mom moved my sister and I into the neighborhood she grew up in. She knew it was safe and that it had a ton of kids in it. The neighborhood we’d lived in previously was a little isolated and my sister and I had few kids to play catch with, or play games with, or just to hang out with.
Both of us found new friends right away after we moved. We had a park nearby and I hung out there quite a bit because it had a baseball field and a basketball court. It also had a nice long, flat empty field in which neighborhood kids played many a tackle football game. One day after school, I went up to the park with my basketball and shot a few hoops. I met a group of guys and fit in with them. Soon, my ritual was established. I’d get home, do my homework, eat supper, and head for the park and spend the next several hours running up and down the court playing basketball.
One particular friend I met on the court was a huge NBA fan. We didn’t have cable television then, but he told me about putting the radio close to his ear at night and listening to NBA games all over the country. He could pick up broadcasts for the Dallas Mavericks, the Chicago Bulls, and I think the Milwaukee Bucks. His favorite team was the Boston Celtics. Mine was their arch rivals—the Philadelphia 76’ers.
I’m sure I picked them because they were good, but I also loved to watch Julius Erving (Dr. J) play. He did things I’d never seen before—like taking off just a couple of feet inside the free throw line and dunking the ball. Or going high into the area on one side of the basket, only to realize that his shot was about to get blocked, so while in mid-air, he would somehow change direction and end up on the other side of the basket to do a reverse lay up.
He was Michael Jordan, before Michael Jordan. He could do everything. Dribble with the best point guard, pass over, under, and around defenders. He could hit a three pointer, and dunk unlike anybody I’d ever seen. But he also had this sort of class thing going on. He was well respected around the league. Of course, playing in 16 All-Star games didn’t hurt. But it was more than that. He wasn’t known as a trash talker and he genuinely seemed interested in the success of the game at large.
I started following him toward the end of his career—when he was still striving to a NBA championship (he’d played for the Nets in the ABA when they won two titles). It eventually happened in 1983 and it was so much fun watching him finally get what he worked so hard for. But on the way, my friend and I (the Celtic fan—who by the way, got to celebrate many more championships than I did) traded friendly barbs on the basketball court about whose team was the best.
I look back on those times and smile because those were the years when I finally found a place to fit in with people. I wasn’t the fat kid, or the shy kid, or the loner. I was just a kid who found a magical place that I’ll never forget.
