One in a series of stories remembering the 1982-83 76ers, one of the NBA's best teams ever.
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PHILADELPHIA — Let us consider what might seem a ludicrous and even unanswerable question: Was Julius Erving ever booed in Philadelphia?
Dr. J … booed? Even if it were true, an observant reporter would have had to mark the moment, a faint hope at best, and what reason would there be to believe that such an improbable incident happened in the first place? There have been only so many superstar athletes so revered and respected here that they rarely if ever had to hear the sound that defines the darker side of Philly fandom rain down on them. Brian Dawkins. Chase Utley. Bob Clarke — when he played for the Flyers, of course, not while he was managing them or advising their leadership.
Erving would seem to be among those select few, but the context and circumstances of his career here with the 76ers make him a special case, different from those other examples. Utley and Clarke won championships relatively early in their tenures here, and as a safety, as a defensive player and not a starting quarterback, Dawkins could do only so much, and people believed he could do only so much, to influence a game’s outcome.
Yet for the first seven years of his 11-year stint with the Sixers — from the moment he arrived in 1976 pretty much until the moment that they finally won an NBA championship on May 31, 1983 — Erving was the best, most important, most popular player on a team that routinely excelled during the regular season and tortured its fans and, really, itself during the postseason. One would think there could be no better formula for being a target around here.
It wasn’t just that the Sixers lost in the Finals to the Portland Trailblazers in 1977 (despite winning the series’ first two games). Or that they lost to the Los Angeles Lakers in the Finals in 1980 (despite Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s absence in Game 6). Or that they lost to the Lakers in the Finals again in 1982 (despite scoring more points in the series than Los Angeles did). It was that they fell short of the Finals in 1978, 1979, and 1981, each loss more excruciating than the previous one.
They were upset by an inferior team, the Washington Bullets, in ‘78. They rallied from a three-games-to-one deficit against the San Antonio Spurs, only to lose Game 7, in ‘79. And ‘81 … the mere mention of that Eastern Conference final … the Sixers winning three of the first four games … their opponent winning the next three by a combined five points ... that opponent being the Boston Celtics, of all opponents … hello, instant migraine.
And the backdrop of all that frustration, of course, was the slogan, coined by general manager Pat Williams and rubber-stamped by Erving after the Finals loss to the Blazers, that came to haunt the franchise: We Owe You One.
“It was definitely a roller-coaster ride,” Erving said recently after a Sixers shootaround at their headquarters in Camden, N.J. “You give your best, and you end up in debt to the city with a gesture that we came to regret. With two more trips to the Finals in six years, you come to realize that second isn’t good enough.”
The difference between icons
Through it all, though, Erving remained unscathed. As far as people here were concerned, he walked on air and water, and in the spring of ‘83, a strong sentiment shared by the team’s members and fans was that the Sixers had won for the city and for Julius. He experienced nothing like the public vitriol that Ron Jaworski, then the Eagles’ starting quarterback, dealt with at Veterans Stadium on Sundays in the fall and winter.
An aspiring scholar could write a dissertation on the contrast between the manner in which Erving was treated and the manner in which Mike Schmidt was, especially given the two stars’ broad similarities at the time: Each of them was the best player in his respective sport. Each of them was a three-time Most Valuable Player here. Each of them was so gifted and graceful that his athletic feats — a rock-the-cradle slam dunk, a 450-foot home run — appeared effortless. And neither won a championship in Philadelphia until Schmidt and the Phillies beat the Kansas City Royals in the 1980 World Series.
The difference between Schmidt’s relationship with fans here and Erving’s was so stark — and for Schmidt, still so much on his mind — that, when reached via text message, he declined to comment, saying that “things are great now and dredging up the past … is not for me.” So much for first-hand insight into why Schmidt was tormented and Erving was exalted. But there were obvious factors that contributed to the disparity.
Until the ‘80 Series, Schmidt’s postseason performance was dreadful; he batted .191 without a home run over his first 68 playoff at-bats. Erving’s production didn’t slack off much in the playoffs, if it did at all. Fans simply didn’t believe that he was the problem with the Sixers; they reserved their contempt for the franchise’s ownership and executives. And in an era when newspapers and nightly newscasts shaped public perception more strongly than they do today, Schmidt’s sensitivity and moodiness in his interactions with the media were a far cry from the patient and accommodating Erving.
“He had time for everybody,” Williams said. “It didn’t matter if it was you at the Inquirer or some high school sportswriter from Bala Cynwyd. Doc would give them the same amount of time and the same treatment. It didn’t matter if it was a New York Times columnist or a writer from South Jersey. And that has never changed. There was just a dignity about him, and even as an older man now, it’s the same. People understood that. They developed a real love for him.
“Plus, his flamboyant play, how could you not be impressed? I never saw him get after a referee. Never saw him mouth off to a coach. People just respected that kind of guy. The word you’re looking for is ‘class.’ When you think of Julius, you think of ‘class.’ ”
His teammates thought of him the same way. After training-camp practices at Franklin & Marshall College’s Mayser Gymnasium, Erving and Bobby Jones would sit at the top of a back staircase, watch their sweat drip and pencil down the staircase like an Etch A Sketch stylus, and talk in depth about the team.
“I found Julius to be a very incisive and alert and sharp guy who was concerned by what was going on and was willing to do something about what was going on,” Jones said in a phone interview. “I remember more than once, with me or with Mo Cheeks, during a timeout in the first or second quarter of a game, [coach] Billy Cunningham would be saying something to us, and Julius would say, ‘Billy, we haven’t gotten Maurice a shot yet. … Bobby hasn’t gotten a shot yet.’ Here’s a guy who was one of the leading scorers in the league. It really makes you appreciate a guy like that.
“More than once, I’d throw the ball out of bounds at the end of a game and we’d lose, or somebody would miss a shot, and inevitably, when we got into the locker room, he’d leave his locker, go to that guy’s locker, sit beside that guy, and say, ‘Don’t worry about it. We’ll get them next time.’ Some other guys would just curse you out. For me, that meant a lot.”
Erving attributed his graciousness to the mentors he encountered while growing up in a public housing project on Long Island. “I was a Salvation Army kid,” he said, “and there was always somebody around who came into my neighborhood who shook hands or gave talks or gave inspiration that you could be bigger and better than you are. …
“I was a very public person. Though not trying to lead or live the perfect life, I tried to be positively influential on others. That’s the way it was for me.”
His imperfections, however, did come to light over time, particularly his admission that in 1980, he had an affair with sportswriter Samantha Stevenson and fathered a daughter, Alexandra.
The scandal tarnished a reputation that he had taken care to burnish, and if it’s too cynical to say that Erving was a complete phony for his too-good-to-be-true veneer — his peers genuinely admired and loved him — it’s also naive to think that his desire to keep his image pristine was motivated solely by altruism. His willingness to chat up anyone who sidled up to him in the locker room, to fill their notebooks and feed their daily need for pertinent quotes, was an effective shield. “I’ve always been good at keeping secrets,” he wrote in his autobiography.
Of course, by the time that secret was revealed, the Sixers already had traded for Moses Malone. And they had charged to a 65-17 regular season in 1982-83 and a 12-1 record in that postseason. And in the closing minutes of Game 4 of the Finals, Erving had scored seven consecutive points to clinch a sweep of the Lakers. And he had retired four years later, in 1987. And there were no more crowds at the Spectrum, cheering his name.
The only imperfect moment
He was booed, actually. We know this because someone documented it.
The date was Saturday, May 18, 1985. Sixers-Celtics at the Spectrum. Game 3 of the Eastern Conference finals. And in a 105-94 Boston victory — a victory that gave the Celtics a 3-0 lead in a series they would win in five games — Julius Erving, 35 years old then, took 10 shots from the field and made one.
“They buried Julius Erving in boos Saturday,” the Philadelphia Daily News’ John Schulian wrote, “and the echo of their opprobrium was still haunting Larry Bird a day later. ‘Tasteless’ was the word he kept using to describe it. … ‘I don’t think there’s a finer person in this league than Julius Erving. He’s done so much for kids and so much for these fans, and when they started booing him, it was just very tasteless.’ ”
So once, at least once, Erving heard, directed at him, the sour sound that so many athletes in Philadelphia have known so well.
“I didn’t have my legs,” he said at the time. “I guess I was tired from all the games, all the excitement.”
Two years after he and the Sixers had paid the debt that they owed and captured that long-sought championship, age had brought on a tense and inevitable change in the dynamic between Dr. J and his devotees, and he knew it. An imperfect moment, maybe the only one in Julius Erving’s years here, for an imperfect icon, the only kind.
