Dr. J - the Special

Prett sure "Beat L.A." was "invented" by Blazers fans in 1977, but of course, our Eastern-centric media must give credit to all things Boston.

 

Yep. And boy did I hate Andrew Toney for that. The Boston Strangler usually did a number on Milwaukee too.

 

The Sixers get overlooked when everybody talks about the best teams of the 80s because they only won once... But people forget how great the Sixers were in 1983. I think they lost one playoff game and swept the Lakers in the finals.

It was a great team that has historically been overshadowed by the Lakers-Celtics rivalry.

 

That was Malone's "Fo, fo, fo" team, no?

 

Bucks were always right there too. For seven straight years from 80-81 to 86-87, they were taken out in the playoffs in either the Eastern semis or Eastern finals by Philly (4 times) or Boston (3 times). And during that stretch they never won less than 50 games:

80-81 60-22
81-82 55-27
82-83 51-31
83-84 50-32
84-85 59-23
85-86 57-25
86-87 50-32

 

In retrospect, that is when Don Nelson's refusal to make use of an actual big man first reared its head, although it wasn't really known until he got to New York and started in on Ewing.

 

Agreed. That Sixer group has been neglected by history. I now hear people mention the 83 Sixer title as if it was some sort of flukey anomoly in the middle of all the Laker/Celt titles. In truth, that Sixer group had a decade long run (from about 77-86) when they were consistently one of the league's 2 or 3 best teams (and with four finals appearances in 77, 80, 82 and 83). They were actually neck and neck right with the Celts/Lakers during those years. And the 83 Sixers weren't just any title team, that was one of the greatest teams ever.

Also sort of interesting how much the 80s Laker/Celitic "rivalry" has been played up and dramatized over the years, when in truth the Celts/Sixers rivalry is that one that was actually regarded as the league's most intense for at least the first half of that decade.

 

I was really looking forward to the Dr. J doc. If you're of a certain age (I'm 41), Dr. J wasn't just a great basketball player, he was akin to a superhero. Certainly among the sports stars of my childhood, he might have risen the highest.

It takes a bit of scene setting. I grew up in Milwaukee and my sports interest blossomed in the late 70s. Back then, as a kid, you were exposed to athletes via baseball/basketball cards, newspaper -- or more often -- magazine coverage, fleeting glimpses on TV and word-of-mouth.

I go back in time to that moment ... a snot-nosed quasi-urban/suburban white kid standing on the concrete not-so-much-a-jungle parochial school basketball court. No one, BUT NO ONE, had more word-of-mouth playground preeminence than late 70s Dr. J.

Hearing about something named Dr. J was truly a moment of wonder. What the hell was a Dr. J? Is he on Emergency? Oh, he plays basketball? OK then, why is he called "doctor"? Doctor of what? Doctor of J? What's a J?

It was mysterious, but even with just the gateway drug of his name, you knew it was probably something pretty cool.

Even the way his names spells out is silky to the max. Dr. J. The "Dr." followed by the "J" almost being an extension of his arm swooping around a defender for a layup or dunk. SportsJournalists.com's default font does a disservice to his name. The "J" should never be serifed. He was way too smooth for serifs.

Dr. J. That's better.

And it was Dr. J. Not Julius Erving. Not Doctor J. I'm not sure I knew his name was Julius or Erving for at least a year or two. He was Dr. J.

So the aura was already in place. (And keep in mind, this is long after his ABA peak years.) Then you saw him play.

Mind you, a kid like me -- aged 7-9 -- understood one thing and one thing only about basketball in that period ... dunking. No one dunked like Dr. J. Certainly not the late 70s Bucks who provided my gateway to basketball in person. Not even Marques Johnson, my childhood hero, who was more than a fair (mostly power) dunker himself.

There's no way I would've articulated it this way at the time, but to see a Dr. J dunk was to touch the face of God. He seemed to swoop out of and rise above the smoky environs of late 70s NBA arenas.

No player approached his status during that time in dunking, aside from maybe Darryl Dawkins, who got eternal playground respect for shattering backboards a little later on. I don't think anyone other than Jordan has ever approached Dr. J's status when it comes to combining the power aspects of dunking with the smoothness it takes for a 2-guard/swingman to get there.

On another note, I see a lot of documentaries on black athletes of a certain period and they often state how x-athlete opened up acceptance of him, his talent or his sport to a wider white audience. I don't doubt it in most cases, but often times, it comes off either as overblown or as a hagiographic trope that documentarians use to make the subject look even more regal than they already are.

Not so for Dr. J. I never really thought of it this way until today, but Dr. J really was the first black athlete I can remember that kids in my age group were exposed to and who was universally loved. He was from a P-Funk Wants To Get Funked Up world we wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise in a million years (the prevailing tunes coming from my mother's radio being Linda Ronstadt and Frank Mills' Music Box Dancer), and even if we just got a brief taste, it showed us there was a big, wide world out there where things were done a bit differently, and certainly, more funky.

He was a great role model for all races, but especially for white kids like me. Our first impression of a great black athlete was an overwhelmingly positive one. The flash drew you in, but Dr. J had substance and intelligence to match. He was a God damn honest-to-God superhero.

It annoys me, then, when I see lazy historians and inch-deep analyses by NBA experts who proclaim the Magic-Bird era to be the beginning of the NBA's modern era, etc. As if the era where Dr. J held sway was conducted in a church CYO court in front of a handful of people.

I don't mean that as a knock against Bird or Magic. They unquestionably increased the popularity of the league. And the NBA was much-better exposed in the 1980s and beyond, but Dr. J was part of the phenomenon too, and I think it's too often ignored that, without his level of stardom, there would've been no level of stardom for Bird and Magic to aspire to, or, for Jordan to achieve later. Dr. J was probably at least as popular as Bird or Magic were well into the 1980s. Certainly until he won a championship in 1983.

(And I'll agree wholeheartedly that the '83 Sixers are criminally ignored in the all-time champions pantheon. It doesn't help that Celtics-smoocher Bill Simmons is currently the most popular go-to writer when it comes to NBA history. Some of the shit he wrote about the Celtics' rivals of that era and others in The Book Of Basketball made me want to set the book on fire, piss on it to put it out, and then set it on fire again just for added emphasis. Then I wanted to set myself on fire for buying it to kill time on a flight.)

When the Bucks knocked the Sixers out of the playoffs in 1987, I cheered wildly, because it was an exorcising of sorts from ghosts of past Philly beatdowns of Milwaukee, but also, because, in that revenge-is-a-dish-best-served-cold moment, I felt good that the Bucks were the team to end it for the Dr. J era of the Sixers.

What a fool I was. I actually feel bad about it thinking back. That I could have spent one ounce of ill-will on Dr. J is just wrong. I wouldn't feel that way, even retrospectively, about Mo Cheeks, Andrew Toney, Moses Malone, Charles Barkley, Caldwell Jones, or for God's sake, Bobby "Bucks Killer" Jones, but Dr. J? Ouch. The proper emotion should have been happiness that the Bucks moved on (in hindsight, it was the end of an era for that team too), but a tinge of sadness that Dr. J wouldn't be.

Anyway, I saw the doc and I'm sad to report that it doesn't rise to its subject. Skips too much, glosses or ignores entirely some post-career, off-the-court stuff. It pales badly in comparison to the best ESPN 30-for-30 docs. (Though it does feature Dr. J in some epic, to-die-for 70s threads.)

But nonetheless, I'm glad the doc exists to expose a few new generations to what Dr. J was all about.

Like I said, if you're a certain age, Dr. J was the beginning and end. He was my generation's Jordan.

 

Yup. During that exact span they had seasons of 55, 57,59 and 60 wins. Lost in the conference finals in '83. '84 and '86. In '87 they lost Game 7 in Boston in the conference semis in a game they led nearly the entire first 45 minutes but were outrebounded something like 57-30.