Years ago, before my sons decamped for Philadelphia, I saw an interview with Sixers icon Julius Erving, who, as a teenager, had lost his younger brother Marvin to lupus. Dr. J. said that he always carried Marvin with him, which, he felt, gave him a slight advantage; His opponents were unknowingly playing both Erving brothers at once.
I found this story both moving and noble. Julius Erving told it with no hint of attention or sympathy-seeking. He was simply, almost sheepishly, sharing the fact that, after three days of crying at Marvin’s grave, he had chosen to keep his little brother with him wherever he went, forever, and that his presence — the weight of it, the joy of it, their continued identity as brothers — was 100 percent real to him. It was both a comfort and a responsibility, and undoubtedly, in the vast sea of athletic talent in which he competed, exactly the advantage that he claimed it to be — perhaps even the truly secret ingredient that had made him great.
Erving grew up in Roosevelt, a tiny Long Island suburb of New York City with an outsized impact on the U.S. and thus world culture. In addition to the good doctor, Eddie and Charlie Murphy, Chuck D and Flava Flav, Lafayette Afro Funk Band, whose pioneering breakbeats made them one of the most sampled groups in the history of hip hop, and, strangely enough, Howard Stern, are all from Roosevelt.
I lived in North Merrick, precisely opposite Roosevelt, both geographically and racially, on the Meadowbrook Parkway’s eastern edge — separated by a highway, but somehow a world away. We played them in football in junior high school. Right after they filed off the bus, a kid from their team yelled “We the Rough Riders. What’s your team name?’’
“The Bulldogs!” we shouted back.
“Bulldogs? Bullshit!” he declared.
My pediatrician was in Roosevelt. My dad’s beat with the Nassau County PD was there for a while. For a few nights in 1968, after the assassination of MLK, he gravely took down his riot helmet from the highest shelf in the hall closet, kissed my nervous mother as we kids watched wide-eyed from the stairs and drove off into the night toward the two lane bridge connecting the two communities to help quell the riots that had erupted there. My dad was indeed a big scary Irish cop, but he was no ignoramus; he once played Gil-Scott Heron’s Whitey on the Moon for me and told me, “He’s right, you know.”
Most of my friends’ parents had moved, fled, if you prefer, from Brooklyn and the Bronx, which had changed drastically before their eyes. The changes were both demographic and economic in nature. An influx of Hispanic families had roiled the previously European immigrant mix, and the advent of shipping containers, reduced the need for stevedores/longshoremen by up to 90 percent, obliterating a reliable source of income for unskilled laborers who had previously shaped up on the docks each morning, earning a living wage.
And so, after decades of fandom towards Dr. J, the athlete, I thank Julius Erving, the man, for his choice to share this intimate tale of deathless love, for teaching me a way to cope with crushing loss and rise stronger for it, and for helping me cough up and spit out some of the poison that I was fed, and swallowed, long ago.
They had come to the Island, each family creating its own miniature ponderosa-garden cottage there, hoping to raise their children in this new, ultra-safe social paradigm called suburbia. There would be shaded quarter-acre lots with driveway hoops and above-ground pools, beautiful new public schools with vast, grassy baseball and softball fields and basketball courts and well-equipped, modern playgrounds. For us, that is. Driving through Roosevelt, snide comments would be made about Cadillacs in front of houses in obvious need of repair.
Despite the fact that our walls were covered in posters of Julius himself, of Willis, Clyde, Earl the Pearl, Cleon Jones, Tommie Agee and Emerson Boozer, despite the fact that we sang along in the car on the way to the mall to the Supremes and the Temps and Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson and The Jackson 5 and Jimi Hendrix, although we laughed along with Flip Wilson and Red Foxx and Richard Pryor, that vision of suburban utopia did not include Black people as neighbors, implicitly, but also by decree, as in the case of both New York’s and Philadelphia’s suburban Levittowns.
I had worshipped Julius Erving. During my basketball-obsessed adolescence, he was swooping majestically through the stale air of the Nassau Coliseum, putting the sports world on notice that his brand of high-flying streetball was too thrilling to be confined to the secondary, cash-strapped ABA, near-singlehandedly compelling a merger with the mighty NBA, ultimately silencing all remaining doubters by winning a chip with the Sixers and securing a spot on the Mount Rushmore of the of a town rich in sports lore.
But he was also just a kid from Roosevelt. As a result, he was other, and, I guess, lesser in my eyes, such that I never made a serious attempt to fill in the blanks of his humanity. He was, at once, a superhero — the most transformational athlete I had ever seen in my life — and as flat as his two-dimensional poster on my bedroom wall.
And so I found myself disoriented by the tenderness, the vulnerability, the brotherly love that Julius displayed for Marvin. Hearing it added new images of life on the other side of the bridge to my mind. I could see them biking together, laughing and playing together, being kids together. Just like us. And so, after decades of fandom towards Dr. J, the athlete, I thank Julius Erving, the man, for his choice to share this intimate tale of deathless love, for teaching me a way to cope with crushing loss and rise stronger for it, and for helping me cough up and spit out some of the poison that I was fed, and swallowed, long ago.
I no longer have posters of NBA players on my walls, and don’t hoop much anymore. At 65, my crumbling joints prevent me from attempting to recreate the exploits of the likes of Brunson or Maxey, as would have at 16. But I’m still paying attention, and it seems like maybe more than a coincidence that that Joel Embiid, who, like Erving, lost his brother Arthur far too soon in life, and whose son Arthur makes all seven feet of the center light up in a way that no championship ever will, also carries the combined, weight of love and loss onto the court and into the world with him. Erving and Embiid are two among hundreds of athletes who transform grief into performance.
Something to remember not just as more and more Long Islanders and Philadelphians and Americans celebrate death-centered Halloween and Día de los Muertos this weekend — but also to consider the next time a person who seems inhumanly physically strong and skilled falls, fails, and gets back up again. For that matter, something to apply to ourselves. This time of year, we tend to feel a bit closer to those on the other side. May your beloved dead walk, and sit, and, yes, dunk, with you, and strengthen you, all the days of your earthly life.
Colm O’Callaghan is a Bronx-born, Long Island-raised, retired teacher of French and Spanish, a once-decent hooper, a bad yet avid guitarist, father of three Philadelphians, grandfather of two more, and husband of an upstate New York girl with deep Philly roots.
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