Dr. J Read online

  Dedication

  In loving memory of my parents, Julius Sr. and Callie Mae; my brother, Marvin Vincent; my sister, Alexis Alfreda; my stepfather, Dan Lindsay; and my son Cory Marvin Erving

  Contents

  Dedication

  Preface

  Part One

  Photographic Insert 1

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Photographic Insert 2

  Part Five

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  Mine is an American life, fully lived, rich with the spoils and temptations of success, and rife with the failings and shortcomings of succumbing to those same temptations. I believe that while what I achieved is only possible in the United States, my faults are my own, singular and personal. I am born with great genetic gifts of speed and strength and dexterity, and the opportunities of my country allowed me to gain wealth and fame through basketball. Yet my journey is more than that of an athlete. I am an African-American, living through tumultuous times in our country, navigating a cultural landscape that has been very much divided for much of my life; I am a husband, trying and not always succeeding to live up to vows of fidelity amid the seductions of celebrity and fame; I am a father, seeking to impart values and my belief in America to my sons and daughters, pulled too often by the demands of professional sports away from those children; I am a businessman, believing deeply in the system that rewarded me and now seeking to build another legacy.

  I am, of course, an athlete, a former basketball player, and while my achievements in that arena are my best known, they are only the mythic part of my story. My other accomplishments—of completing my college degree, of the pride I take in my children, of rising up and out of the Hempstead, Long Island, projects to become Julius Erving, founder and CEO of Dr. J Enterprises and the Erving Group, partner in the first minority-owned NASCAR team in the modern era, board member of corporations such as Saks Fifth Avenue, Meridian Bank, Williams Communications, and Sports Authority, and institutions including Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and Philadelphia’s Fairmont Park Commission—are those I wish to be measured by.

  I am an American man whose journey has been blessed by the great gifts that America offers—wealth, fame, championships, awards—and also scoured by the tragedies that are a part of the human experience. I have lost too many loved ones.

  I ask for no pity; I only want to relate what I have felt and seen.

  I have hurt too many people.

  For that I ask forgiveness.

  An American life, after all, is the sum of its parts, the successes and the failings, and mine has been rich with both.

  I want to be candid about my life. I want to recall with you everything that I have seen and done, and try to make sense of this ongoing journey. I am living a bountiful life, and while it has not always been easy, it has been exciting and, I believe, emblematic of our time.

  Mine is an American life, fully lived.

  1.

  Rise.

  I jump.

  I reach up both hands, my brown corduroys sagging, and I take flight, my blue Keds leaving the linoleum floor and my fingers reaching above the sill. I can’t see out the window. Jump again. Higher. I can touch the glass. And every time I jump, I know, I jump higher.

  But I can’t see out the window.

  “June, what are you doing?”

  “Nothin’.” I sit down on the floor. “Jumpin’.”

  I can smell what Mom is cooking: chicken, lima beans, spinach. The steam coming from the kitchen, the wet grassy smell of the greens. My mother’s voice singing a hymn:

  At the cross where I first saw the light

  The burdens of my heart rolled away

  It was there by faith that I first received my sight

  And now I’m happy all the day.

  Freda. Marky. Mom and me. We’re four of us. I’m the man of the house, Mom told me. I’m older than Marky, my younger brother, Marvin. He’s a baby, in his crib, wheezing. Still in a diaper. If I stand on tiptoes, if I jump, I can see through the slats to where he’s sleeping.

  And Freda—my older sister, Alexis Alfreda—she’s three years older than I am and she’s faster and stronger than I am and thinks she can tell me what to do but I’m the man of the house, I want to tell her. Can’t tell me to stop jumping, or take off my shoes or get up off the carpet or help Mom in the kitchen. Or she can, and she does, but I’m still the man of the house.

  “Jumpin’!” I tell Mom.

  We live on the third floor of 50 Beech Street, a brick public housing building called Parkside Gardens. Freda, Marky, and I all share one bedroom, a corner, with windows facing Beech and Laurel and I want to look out them, to see the kids playing in the sandlot across Laurel or roller-skating and riding bikes in the street. Because if Freda won’t take me out to play, I can’t go by myself, Mom said, ’cause I’m too small—but I want to see out that window so I jump.

  And every time I jump, I jump higher.

  I rise.

  Callie Mae Abney is Mom. She comes from Batesburg, South Carolina, third youngest of fourteen siblings, received her teaching degree from Bettis Academy, married a Batesburg boy: Julius Winfield Erving Sr., my dad, and then they left Batesburg, moved to Chicago, and then Hempstead, Long Island. They had me at Meadowlark Hospital, just two miles from here. My parents divorced when I was three. I’ve seen my dad about a half-dozen times since. But we live surrounded by family. There’s another family of Abneys, my mom’s people, right down the hall. There are kids in every apartment, and plenty of them don’t have fathers.

  Mom doesn’t have a teaching credential for New York State, so she cooks and cleans for a family that I never see. She comes home in the afternoon, and then cooks and cleans for us.

  Freda and I are in charge when she’s gone. Marky stays in his crib. We can’t go play until Mom comes back and so we watch TV, The Little Rascals, and then finally Mom is back and cooking and she brings out the plates and we say grace and eat, chicken and spinach and beans. I used to be chubby, but now I’m getting longer. My arms and my hands are stretching, my fingers long like Popsicle sticks, and Mom and Freda are talking about school, and I’m going to start school soon, Prospect Elementary, just a mile away, but right now, after we eat and drink our milk, I hear Joe Farmer in the hall. He’s two years older than I am and can go outside without anyone, without Freda, and I ask Mom if I can go play after supper because it’s still light and she says, “Go on, but stay with Freda and Joe,” and we’re gone, out the door, down the zigzagging steps. Joe and Freda can jump them but I can only take two at a time, leaping, and then we’re down on the ground floor, the concrete entryway with the benches and Joe and Freda are jumping over them onto the lawn and I have to slow down and climb them but soon, I know, I can’t wait, soon I’ll be jumping them, too.

  I will jump everything.

  There are at least twenty kids out in front of the building, in the play area with the strange basketball hoop, a metal rim mounted on a pole with three hoops in an inverted pyramid beneath it. The hoop on top is high up, and little kids can only throw a tennis ball through the bottom. Occasionally, I can throw a tennis ball through the top and then it falls and I have to chase it. The bigger kids play basketball on this rim, without a backboard, dribbling in the bald patch of dirt. No out of bounds.

  This community is mixed. There’s Ray, Richard, and John: they’re white kids. And then Joe, Juanita, Sonny Boy, Levi, Cleveland, and the rest of us black kids. We all play together, every game is both black and white and nobody picks teams by white or black or even boy or girl but by who’s good and who isn’t. Freda
is good. She’s the fastest kid in the whole project, boy or girl, so she’s picked for everything first. I’m fast, I tell the captains. I’m a good jumper. But they say I’m still too small and I never get picked for the real basketball games.

  Tonight, though, we’re playing Hot Buttered Peas ’cause Joe has got a strap and he says he’s gonna hide it and we all have to count. Everyone can play.

  “What do I do, Freda?” I ask.

  She says, “June, when somebody finds that strap they’re gonna say, ‘Hot Buttered Peas; come and get your supper,’ and you’re gonna run fast as you can back to the pole.”

  She points to our strange hoop.

  “You got that?” she says. “You run.”

  It’s finally getting dark and the heat of the day breaks, loses its hold, so that it is cool now and we are all huddled near the pole, hands over our eyes or heads leaning against a shoulder in front, like a congregation bowing to a basketball rim. We count. I feel my forehead against Freda’s hard shoulder blade, keeping my head pressed at an angle to keep the part on the right side of my hair, and I’m looking down, between her back and my front, to the dirt. Someone is counting. How high?

  I can count past ten, but I’m not sure how far past.

  And whoever is counting goes way past ten. I follow to twenty, which I know, and to numbers higher and it takes forever.

  “Freda,” I whisper. “How long?”

  “Shhhh,” she says.

  Finally, the huddle breaks up and we rise.

  “We run?” I ask Freda.

  “Nah, June, now we look. We look for the strap.” She turns to me, squinting. “Now June. When someone finds it, when someone says, ‘Hot Buttered Peas; come and get your supper,’ what do you do?”

  “When I find it, I’m gonna run!” I tell her.

  “June, when anybody finds it, you run, okay?”

  “I run!”

  Everybody is walking all around the front of the projects, combing over the earth clear up to Beech Street. They are looking down at the ground, behind benches, near the swings, in the bushes, behind the garbage cans. But they are also looking around, measuring their distance from each other, from the pole. I wander this way and that, imitating the other kids. But I don’t remember what I’m looking for. What does it look like? Who lost it?

  I kick at the ground with my Keds, poke my toe at a bottle cap, a rock, part of a nail, a Tootsie Roll wrapper. Someone once found a fossil of a clam in the sandlot across the street, the impression in the stone like the shape left by a spoon in a mound of mashed potatoes. Joe Farmer once found a mouse skeleton, and a quarter. With a quarter you can go to the movies and have enough left to buy pop, popcorn, and Mike and Ikes. Or that’s what Freda told me, but I don’t understand how the pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters add up, how you can divide a quarter into smaller parts. I only know that a quarter is the biggest coin, beside a Franklin half-dollar.

  “Hot buttered peas! Come get your supper!”

  I hear it and it seems like the commotion of everyone running at the same time. There is the patter of sneakered feet against dirt and concrete, of kids leaping over the benches and running. I begin running, too, but too late. Robert, who everyone calls Bo, has the strap and he is swinging it, shouting, whipping kids, stinging their legs. He looks like a pirate waving his cutlass, a cowhand flailing a whip. The kids are shouting as the strap makes a wicked, snipping noise against their pant legs, their backs. He goes easy on a few of the girls, takes care to avoid punishing those boys who might retaliate, and lets the strap fly on those poor little kids like me.

  “Come on, get your supper!” he’s shouting as he swings.

  I stop. I’m the only kid still standing, and between me and the safety of the pole is Bo and his strap. He lifts the whip from a boy’s back and turns to see who is left.

  No one but me.

  “Run, June!” Freda is shouting.

  Bo is smiling. “Can’t hide, June. Get your supper!”

  “Don’t wanna.”

  He swings the strap. “Supper!”

  Then he comes toward me.

  Bo is older than I am, bigger than I am, and faster than I am. He is stronger than I am, too, and he is looking forward to whipping me.

  I see Freda coming toward us. She is going to tell him to leave me alone.

  “Freda, don’t,” I say. I’m the man of the house, I think, and I can’t have my sister save me.

  She stops, seeming to understand, and now all the kids whose hands are reaching in, touching the pole for safety, are either looking at me and Joe Farmer or are rubbing their backs and behinds where they’ve been lashed.

  Bo smiles and takes a step toward me. I juke left, go right, he swings.

  I duck beneath the lash.

  I run. He swings again.

  I jump.

  I rise.

  Over the strap, and run to the pole where Freda hugs me safe.

  2.

  As soon as I can jump high enough to look out that window onto Laurel, I see what everyone is talking about. They are plowing up the sandlot. With each jump, I see the backhoes and diggers and dump trucks. There are rumors about what they are going to build. A swimming pool. An ice rink. A tennis court. A boxing gym.

  Mom just shakes her head when I tell her what I hear. What Joe Farmer or Juanita Hayden told me. Joe lives two doors down and he is an only child and he always has every toy as soon as we see it advertised on TV, a GI Joe, Tonka trucks, roller skates that shoot sparks, a Hula-Hoop. Juanita lives across the hall and besides my sister she might be the fastest girl in the projects.

  “They’re making a park, June, for you to play.”

  “How long’s it gonna be?”

  She tells me a few months and I’m disappointed. That sounds like forever. More than today, tomorrow, the day after that, more than until Sunday and church at South Hempstead Baptist Church down the block where my mom is deaconess.

  “When they finish the park, we all can play?”

  “Of course, June, every child can play there.”

  Marky is walking around, wheezing, chewing on a blanket. When he breathes, you can hear the inside of his chest crackling, like his lungs are made of paper. I tell him about the new park and how we won’t have to walk the mile to go to Kennedy Park anymore. I tell him what I see when I jump.

  “Can I play, too?” Marky says.

  “ ’Course,” I say. We all can play. There’s gonna be an ice cream saloon and a hockey rink and a race car track. Everything a boy could dream of will be in that park. Marky thinks this over, wheezes, nods. “Okay June,” then he goes back to chewing on his blanket.

  I walk along the wall, beneath the framed photo of Martin Luther King Jr. He’s a pastor like W. C. Evans at our church, who reads the psalms to us every Sunday while Freda, Marky, and I sit in the pews and I wear my best jacket, a blue blazer with gold buttons. The church ladies come by and pinch me and Marky, and pat Freda, admiring her fair skin. I’m the darkest and Marky is in between. Freda, if she had to, could pass, is what they say. Pass for what?

  But all I think about is the park. We can play football and baseball in the sandlot behind the house, and basketball on the strange rim in front of the projects, but with a park, then we might have a football field with lines on it, or a baseball diamond, or basketball rims with backboards.

  I jump again, to look out the window, at the men working there. They wear yellow hard hats and green uniforms with their sleeves rolled up, black pants, brown boots. They push and pull at levers controlling yellow and green bulldozers and diggers, the mechanical jaws of these machines ripping up the sugar maples and sedge and rush, the ground there I know littered with cigarette butts and broken glass. I’ve walked the trail in the shade of those maples with Freda, when she’s been sent on an errand to borrow a sweater from the Costa family. They have six girls, and plenty of hand-me-downs. When Mom is cooking she’ll shout out, “Freda, Freda, go on to Miss Pete’s and get a loaf of bre
ad.”

  Miss Pete’s is a store down the path that looks like a house.

  And Freda will sigh and get up from the TV and I’ll jump up, too, because I want to jump down those stairs with her and we’ll go.

  That night, though, Freda says she doesn’t wanna go. “Evlith is coming on.”

  Mom chooses me instead.

  “June, you go to Miss Pete’s. We need bread.”

  She hands me a quarter and I look at her and at Freda, unsure if this is something that I can really do.

  “You’re the man of the house,” Freda says, staring at me with her big hazel eyes.

  That’s right. I pull on my sweater, put on my sneakers, go out the door, and take off down the stairs, jumping as far as I can but still not reaching the bottom. I turn, jump down some more. Turn, jump. Turn, jump. And then I’m out the door and across Beech and running alongside the idling diggers and dozers, the silent machines still smelling of gas and oil and somehow seeming like sleeping monsters but I’m not afraid. I run. There are a few older kids coming toward me.

  “Hey, June.”

  I nod and keep going, crashing over sticks, stumbling in gouges in the ground. Berries grow here in the summer, black and red, and the red are sweeter but the black more common. Trees jut above, the branches pointing skyward in thickets. I run between the trunks like I do grown-ups’ legs after church. Those berry bushes will be torn up. Those trees ripped up. Everything. All of it torn, flattened, and the passage of time marked by gone trees, missing berries, a sheared section of high sedge that in summer can hide a boy.

  Up ahead I see Miss Pete’s, the blue ice sign, the red and blue Crown Royal poster, and there in the window is Miss Pete, wrapping cheese up in brown paper. Miss Pete’s got a mean-ass dog, a little black-and-white mutt that’s all growl and snarl and snap. He’s usually fenced in, but if he’s loose he’ll eat your shoe before he lets you into that store. I look both ways. Hound’s asleep.

  When I run into the store I am blasted by the white light, the smell of bread and pickles and fruit and cheese, the warmth of the interior after the cool of outside, the grown-ups smiling down at me. I pause by the baked goods, studying the cookies and cakes for a moment before remembering my mission. I wander down the aisle and then find the bread and bring it to the counter where Miss Pete stands, her brown eyes behind oval-shaped lenses, like pennies at the bottom of a glass of water, and makes change. I put the coins in my pocket, take the loaf, wrapped and soft, and I run back.