At 8:04 p.m. on a cool October night in Philadelphia in 1976, longtime 76ers P.A. man Dave Zinkoff took the mic inside the Spectrum, the city’s venerable sports arena. With the house lights dimmed, a message appeared on the scoreboard: is there a doctor in the house?
By the time Zinkoff got around to officially introducing Julius Erving in this, his first NBA game, the din was so loud that, as a young sportswriter named Tony Kornheiser wrote in the next day’s New York Times, “There’s no telling exactly how Zinkoff pronounced the name, because his voice was swallowed by a tidal wave of cheers.” By Kornheiser’s reckoning, Erving stood there more than two minutes. Eventually, a fan handed him a doctor’s bag and, not knowing what else to do, Erving waved it around, triggering more cheers.
