Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Vincent M. Mallozzi is a "New York Times" reporter who covers sports, metropolitan, and society news. He has written three books on basketball, including "Asphalt Gods: An Oral History of the Rucker Tournament." He was a producer of the ESPN basketball documentary "Big in the Mind," the story of the New York streetball legend Joe Hammond, and is a member of the Pro Rucker Basketball Hall of Fame.
Mallozzi's professional basketball career, with the Brooklyn Wonders of the ABA in December 2006, lasted 91 seconds. (The playing time came in exchange for a Sunday column in the "New York Times.") Born and raised in East Harlem, Mallozzi is a graduate of St. John's University, where he was later a professor of journalism, and of the Technical University of Budapest in Hungary. He now lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, with his wife, Cathy, and their three sons, Christopher, Michael, and Mark.

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Always a showman, never a showboat

""Doc" was awesome, baby! with a capital 'a.' Dr. J was the consummate Hall of Famer. He electrified crowds with his dazzling display of dunks."
--Dick Vitale

He won three ABA scoring titles and was an All-Star in each of his eleven NBA seasons. He scored more than 30,000 lifetime points, was named the 1981 NBA Most Valuable Player, and led the Philadelphia 76ers to the 1983 NBA championship. But what distinguished Julius Erving from the greats that preceded him were his incredible leaps and his unprecedented style--the midair spins and twists, the faultless fakes, the limitless grace with which he moved. In "Doc," you'll meet the real Dr. J, follow his career from the asphalt courts of his childhood to the mammoth arenas of the NBA, and discover the qualities that made him not just a basketball star, but an admired and respected hero to millions.

Aus dem Klappentext

When Julius Erving announced that he would retire from the NBA after the 1986-87 season, every away game on the Philadelphia 76ers' schedule became a stop on the Dr. J farewell tour. Fans across the nation rose to their feet to honor the man who had both transformed and transcended basketball with his astounding physical abilities, impeccable showmanship, and truly admirable character.

In "Doc," celebrated sports writer and lifelong Dr. J fan Vincent Mallozzi traces Erving's epic basketball journey from the asphalt courts of his Hempstead, Long Island, childhood through his final season with the Sixers and beyond. He follows Doc through his days at Harlem's legendary Rucker Park, where so many basketball greats were nurtured, and his three seasons at the University of Massachusetts, where "the best kept secret in sports" wowed teammates and coaches with his explosive leaping ability even though dunking was forbidden by the NCAA at the time.

Drawing on scores of interviews with friends and family, coaches, teammates, and opponents, sportswriters and broadcasters, and team owners and managers, this definitive biography reveals new and compelling information about the founding father of modern basketball. You'll meet Dr. J's first coach and his first crush, tour his first court and his first job, and even take a look at his high school scouting report.

Coach Lou Carnesecca reveals why the Nets refused to hire Erving in 1971, forcing him to spend his first two professional seasons with the Virginia Squires. Nets owner Roy Boe defends his 1976 decision to sell his best and most loyal player to the Philadelphia 76ers, and Charles Barkley remembers how he was guided through his rookie season by the soon-to-retire superstar who was always willing to go out of his way to help a teammate.

A University of Massachusetts teammate recounts the awful night when he drove a distraught Erving home after the death of his brother Marvin. And childhood friend and teammate Archie Rogers marvels at the loyalty and generosity of the man who stood by him, even after Rogers became a drug addict and thief, and was arrested and sent to prison.

Complete with dazzling photos from Dr. J's early years and his pro career, "Doc" is a fitting tribute to a basketball genius who turned his passion for the sport into America's passion. Whether you're a Dr. J fan from way back or someone who has never experienced the thrill of seeing him play, this powerful portrait will give you new insight into one of the greatest players who ever graced the court.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Doc

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

On a summer day in 1958, an eight-year-old boy named Julius took a nasty spill on a patch of broken glass on the asphalt courts in Campbell Park, the playground adjacent to the Park Lake Apartment complex on Beech Avenue in Hempstead, Long Island, where Julius lived with his mother, Callie, his older sister, Alfreda (Alex), and his younger brother, Marvin.

Callie Mae Erving, a deeply religious woman, prayed for the quick healing of young Julius's torn-up knee, which was bleeding profusely as he hobbled up the steps to his third-floor apartment.

How much more could Callie take? Five years earlier, her husband, Julius Winfield Erving, had abandoned the family, leaving Callie to raise three children on a welfare check and the money she made cleaning houses. Nevertheless, Callie, who was heavily involved at the South Hempstead Baptist Church, kept the faith.

She took Julius to see a doctor, who stitched the bloody wound but announced that the young boy would be limping around town for a while. The doctor's prognosis did not prevent Julius from returning to his favorite court, however, where he practiced shooting from sunrise until sundown. Callie, watching her son hone his skills through a window of their apartment, cried at the sight of her young "June"-short for Junior-dragging one leg behind the other as he made his way around the court.

Showing signs of a hoops IQ that would one day put him in a basketball class by himself, Julius found a way to limit the pain while strengthening his bum knee. With each trip up and down the stairs of his building, he would take two, three, sometimes four steps at a time; each leap minimized the painful steps while greasing the springs in a pair of bony legs that would catapult Julius Winfield Erving II from poverty and relative obscurity to fame, fortune, and a place in history as one of the greatest athletes of the twentieth century, a superstar whose gravity-defying theatrics would have puzzled Isaac Newton.

"He is that rarity," Dave Anderson, the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist of the New York Times once wrote of Erving, "a showman who is not a showboat."

Dominique Wilkins, one of the most extraordinary dunkers in the history of basketball, idolized Erving as a child and as a contemporary.

"I think that Julius will go down in history as the most exciting player who has ever stepped on a basketball court," Wilkins said. "He's the one guy that all of us wanted to be like when we were growing up. He set the benchmark really, really high for all the great players who followed, most notably Michael Jordan."

Erving, the first player to glamorize the slam dunk, is now the NBA's professor emeritus of suspended animation. If he were given frequent flyer miles for every one of his majestic flights to the hoop, he could travel around the world, free of charge, for eternity.

"As a longtime broadcaster and basketball fan," said Marv Albert, "I can tell you that Julius is one of the most extraordinary players I have ever seen. Back when Julius was with the Nets, I was a television news sportscaster, and when we did the six and eleven o'clock broadcasts, we always wanted to put some Dr. J footage on the air, so we would go to his play-off games for live shots or to his practices, because we knew he would always do something spectacular that was worthy of being part of the highlights. I cannot recall a time when we sent a camera crew out and they came back disappointed."

Growing up in Honolulu, President Barack Obama played basketball at Punahou High School in the late 1970s, and he idolized Julius Erving, whose poster he once had tacked on his bedroom wall.

"My favorite player when I was a kid was Dr. J," Obama said in a 2008 ESPN interview. "He had those old Nets shorts with the socks up to here [pointing to his shin]. Those Converse Dr. J's, that was the outfit then."

Obama was once asked whether he would rather be president of the United States or Julius Erving in his prime.

"The Doctor," Obama immediately replied. "I think any kid growing up, if you got a chance to throw down the ball from the free throw line, that's better than just about anything."

I totally get it. After all, it is a whole lot easier to become the next president than it is to become the next Julius Erving. With all due respect to Doctors Zhivago, Livingstone, Spock, Seuss, Dolittle, Frankenstein, McCoy, Welby, and Ruth, the most famous Doctor of them all, in my mind, is Dr. J.

"Julius is among a group of players from the 1960s and the 1970s who epitomized style and cool," said Bob Costas, once a play-by-play broadcaster for the ABA's Spirits of St. Louis. "While he was colorful and dynamic, there was never any sense that he was trying to be an exhibitionist. Out there on the court, he was a stylist, not an exhibitionist, and that's a distinction lost on the modern athlete. This guy was so much cooler than 95 percent of the athletes playing today, it's a joke. He played the game with such style, such flair, but he never did it in a way that showed up an opponent, or to show off in front of a crowd. There was nothing about his spectacular game that lent itself to any of the nonsense that goes on in sports today."

In a February 1993 "On Pro Basketball" column in the New York Times, Harvey Araton, writing about Erving as he prepared for Hall of Fame enshrinement, wrote the following: "Those who know Erving well always said family came first [for him], be it the nuclear kind, the team he happened to be playing for, or the league his team was playing in. It was all just part of the game plan to seek out a troubled player or take a rookie home for Christmas, but it worked better way back when. In these dizzying days of global expansion and gargantuan endorsement contracts, of one-man corporations like Shaquille O'Neal rolling off the collegiate assembly line, it is almost impossible to imagine a superstar with the scope, the off-court grace, of Julius Erving."

Despite all the accolades and all the bows, the man who became known as Dr. J, an American icon whose soaring sojourns to the basket revolutionized the way the game was played around the world, suffered his share of bumps and heavy emotional bruises along the way. The tiny scar on the Hempstead hoop prodigy's bloody knee has long since disappeared, but much larger scars have never healed.

Julius and Archie at "the Garden"

It's hard to believe that it all started at the now-defunct Prospect School in Hempstead, a fugitive from the wrecking ball, where a couple of kindergarten students and best friends named Julius Erving and Archie Rogers were introduced to the game of basketball.

On the tired walls of the school's tiny gymnasium-which served as a coal bin in the early 1900s-hangs a dusty clock that ran out of ticks years ago and a faded sign that reads Maximum Occupancy Not to Exceed 150 Persons. Beneath a thirteen-foot ceiling are two baskets, each of them eight feet in height, and two deflated basketballs that remain frozen in time, one on each side of the court.

"My first dunk was at Prospect," Erving said. "By the time I was in ninth grade I was dunking on the regular baskets. I never had any trouble jumping. When I was six to seven years old, I was jumping out of swings in the playground. The roll, the parachute, all of it. We...