Julius Erving

• 1. Introduction

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  Julius Winfield Erving II was born on the 22nd of February, 1950, in East Meadow, Long Island, and by the time he retired in 1987, he had scored more than 30,000 points across two professional leagues and reshaped what a basketball player could do in mid-air. His nickname came from a private exchange with a high school friend named Leon Saunders. "I started calling Saunders 'the professor' and he started calling me 'the doctor'. So it was just between us," Erving explained. That small ritual between two friends would eventually become one of the most recognizable names in American sports.

  The questions his career raises are not just about athletic brilliance. They are about legitimacy. Erving spent his prime years in the American Basketball Association, a league so poorly covered by television that many of his greatest performances went unseen by the wider public. He was the player who made the slam dunk respectable, then made it an art form. He won championships in two leagues, was voted Most Valuable Player in both, and never once played on a team that missed the postseason. Yet the full scale of what he accomplished only became clear once people could finally watch him.

• 2. Roosevelt to UMass

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  Erving moved to Roosevelt, New York, at the age of 13, having lived previously in nearby Hempstead. He attended Roosevelt High School and played for its basketball team, where Leon Saunders first called him "the doctor." Later, in the Rucker Park league in Harlem, players tried out other nicknames. Erving settled the matter. He told them that if they wanted to call him anything, to call him Doctor.

  At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he enrolled in 1968, Erving averaged 26.3 points and 20.2 rebounds per game across two varsity seasons. That placed him among only six players in NCAA history to average more than 20 points and 20 rebounds per game. In 1968, the NCAA adopted a rule prohibiting dunking, which meant Erving's most spectacular ability was visible only to teammates at practice.

  He left Massachusetts after his junior year to pursue a professional career, but he made a promise to his mother before doing so. Fifteen years later, he kept it, earning a bachelor's degree in creative leadership and administration through the University Without Walls program. In September 2021, the university unveiled a statue of Erving outside the Mullins Center on campus.

• 3. The ABA Years

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  The American Basketball Association had a rule that the NBA did not: players could leave college early under a "hardship" exemption. Erving used it. He signed a four-year contract worth $500,000, spread over seven years, with the Virginia Squires. As a rookie he scored 27.3 points per game, made the All-ABA Second Team and the All-Rookie Team, and led the ABA in offensive rebounds.

  What followed was a legal tangle that involved three teams in two leagues. Milwaukee had drafted Erving in the first round of the 1972 NBA draft. Atlanta had signed him to a contract worth more than a million dollars, with a $250,000 bonus. The Squires went to court to force him back. On the 2nd of October, Judge Edward Neaher issued an injunction preventing Erving from playing for anyone other than Virginia. He complied, returned to the Squires, and promptly had the best scoring season of his career at 31.9 points per game in 1972-73.

  The cash-strapped Squires then sold his contract to the New York Nets in a complex deal. Erving signed an eight-year agreement worth a reported $350,000 per year. The Squires received $750,000, George Carter, and the rights to Kermit Washington. With the Nets, Erving led the team to the ABA title in 1973-74, defeating the Utah Stars. In the final ABA season of 1975-76, his postseason averages reached 34.7 points per game, and he was again named Most Valuable Player of the playoffs. That season he finished in the top ten in points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks, free throw percentage, and three-point percentage simultaneously. The source notes this is the only season in ABA or NBA history where a player accomplished that.

• 4. Arrival in Philadelphia

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  When the ABA-NBA merger arrived after the 1975-76 season, the Nets joined the NBA along with the Nuggets, Pacers, and Spurs. Almost immediately, the New York Knicks demanded $4.8 million from the Nets for encroaching on their territory. The financial pressure made it impossible for owner Roy Boe to honor a salary commitment to Erving. Erving held out.

  Several teams lobbied to acquire him. The Nets actually offered Erving to the Knicks in exchange for waiving the territorial fee, and the Knicks declined. The Philadelphia 76ers then offered to buy Erving's contract for $3 million. Boe had little choice but to accept. Roy Boe later said, "The merger agreement killed the Nets as an NBA franchise." The Nets dropped to a 22-60 record the following season.

  Erving had worn No. 32 with the Nets, but Philadelphia's No. 32 was being retired for Billy Cunningham. He chose No. 6 instead, in honor of Bill Russell, who had been one of his heroes growing up. He led the Sixers to a 50-win season and into the 1977 NBA Finals against the Portland Trail Blazers, where they fell after losing four straight games. Three years later, in the 1980 Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers, he executed what Sports Illustrated called "The, No Way, even for Dr. J, Flying Reverse Lay-up" along the baseline, reaching over the backboard to score a right-handed layup even as his entire body had passed behind the hoop. Dr. J described it as "just another move."

  The championship he had come to Philadelphia to win finally arrived in 1982-83. Center Moses Malone joined the team, and Malone publicly predicted the Sixers would sweep all three playoff rounds in what he called "fo-fo-fo." They went four-five-four instead, losing one game to Milwaukee in the conference finals before sweeping the Lakers for the NBA title.

• 5. The Art of the Dunk

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  Before Erving, dunking was something big men did standing close to the basket, and many purists considered it unsportsmanlike style over substance. Connie Hawkins, "Jumping" Johnny Green, Elgin Baylor, Jim Pollard, and Gus Johnson had all performed spectacular dunks before him, but dunking had not entered the mainstream game. Erving changed that by using the dunk as a high-percentage finishing shot at the end of moves that began well away from the basket, making it harder to block rather than a display of dominance.

  The 1976 ABA All-Star Game Slam Dunk Contest gave a national audience its defining image. Erving faced George "The Iceman" Gervin, Larry "Special K" Kenon, Artis "The A-Train" Gilmore, and David "The Skywalker" Thompson. He began by dunking two balls simultaneously. Then he ran to the opposite end of the court and back and dunked from the free-throw line. Jim Pollard and Wilt Chamberlain had performed the foul-line dunk in the 1950s, but Erving introduced it to a national audience and it became his signature image.

  In game 6 of the 1977 NBA Finals, he ran the full length of the court against the entire Portland team and dunked over UCLA defensive legend Bill Walton's outstretched arms, with all five defenders running alongside him. In a 1983 regular-season game against the Lakers, after Maurice Cheeks deflected a pass by James Worthy, Erving picked up the ball and cupped it in his wrist and forearm while charging toward Michael Cooper, rocking it back and forth before slinging it behind his head and dunking over a ducking Cooper. Lakers radio broadcaster Chick Hearn named it "Rock the Baby." Basketball slang for being on the wrong end of a dramatic dunk, being "posterized," was first coined specifically to describe Erving's moves.

• 6. Beyond the Court

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  Erving was among the first basketball players to build a significant commercial presence, endorsing multiple products and having a shoe marketed under his name. He starred in the 1979 basketball comedy film The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh. In 1981, he was named NBA Most Valuable Player. That same year, he performed narration in a concert performance of Copland's Lincoln Portrait with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Riccardo Muti, honoring the 62nd birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.

  On the 17th of April, 1987, in his final home game against the Indiana Pacers, Erving scored a season-high 38 points in front of the Philadelphia crowd to reach his 30,000th combined point across both leagues. Opposing arenas, including those in Boston and Los Angeles, paid tribute in his last visit that season.

  After retiring, Erving obtained ownership of a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Philadelphia and worked as a television analyst. In 1997, he joined the front office of the Orlando Magic as Vice President of RDV Sports. He and former NFL running back Joe Washington fielded a NASCAR Busch Series team from 1998 to 2000, the first racing team at any level to be owned entirely by minority owners, with sponsorship from Dr Pepper.

  A mural painted by California artist Kent Twitchell now stands on the corner of Green Street and Ridge Avenue near Spring Garden Street in Philadelphia. Twitchell chose to depict Erving in a business suit rather than a uniform, to show him as a man and a role model rather than simply an athlete. Local residents maintain a small park in front of it. It is the only Philadelphia mural so respected that it appears in homage in another mural, the student-painted panorama of urban life on the Spring Garden Street Bridge.

• 7. A Permanent Legacy

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  Erving was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1993. Both the Brooklyn Nets and the Philadelphia 76ers have retired his jersey, No. 32 and No. 6 respectively. In both 1996 and 2021, the NBA named him to its anniversary teams marking the league's 50th and 75th years.

  The reach of what he did to the game has a specific vocabulary. The slam dunk moved from the margins to the center of basketball, incorporated into the basic skill set of the sport alongside the crossover dribble and the no-look pass. Johnny Kerr told ABA historian Terry Pluto: "A young Julius Erving was like Thomas Edison, he was always inventing something new every night."

  Many of Erving's ABA performances remain partially invisible because the league had so little television coverage. What survived is remarkable enough. He remains the ninth-highest scorer in combined ABA/NBA history at 30,026 points. In 2023, the NBA named the Slam Dunk Contest champion trophy after him, and the Julius Erving Award is given annually to the top men's collegiate small forward, ensuring that every new generation of players is introduced to the name before they ever see the footage.