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10 basketball nuggets I learned from "Dr. J: The Autobiography"

Here are 10 "windows" on the life of basketball Hall of Famer Julius Erving from gleaned from "Dr. J: The Autobiography," written with Karl Taro.

7. Brush with Olympics

AP
Bobby Jones (l.) embraces Julius Erving after the 76ers defeated the Los Angeles Lakers in four straight games to win the NBA championship, May 31, 1983.

  • By Ross Atkin Staff writer

Players in the collegiate Yankee Conference were so lightly regarded that Erving wasn’t invited to the US Olympic development camp in the early 1970s. UMass Coach Jack Leaman, however, talked one of the camp coaches into making Erving an alternate for the 40 players competing to make a touring national team.

As it turned out, he got to tryout at the camp and outshone many better-known players with his rebounding ability and his impressive dunks, which were banned in US college basketball at the time but legal in international play. Dr. J traveled overseas for the first time with the national team to Europe, and represented the US in Russia and Poland during the height of the cold war.

Arriving back in the US, he kneeled and kissed the tarmac at New York’s Kennedy Airport. His only regret in turning pro early is that it prevented him from playing on the 1972 US Olympic team, which lost a controversial gold-medal game to Russia in Munich, Germany. He thinks he might have made a difference in that narrow defeat.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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