Jam boree

Sporting News, The, Feb 12, 1996 by Jackie Krentzman

The NBA Championship, 1983. Game 4, Sixers-Lakers. Late in the game with his team trailing by 2, Dr. J steals a pass from Kareem, deflects it up court and sweeps in from the left baseline.

Driving toward the basket with the ball cradled in his right forearm, Doc swings his arm forward, then back and jams home a windmill dunk over Michael Cooper. Cooper appears frozen, but then ducks out of the way as if a brick wall is collapsing on him.

The dunk ties the score, and Julius Erving goes on to score the next five points. But with the move, he punctuates the Sixers' NBA championship. It thrills the crowd, silences the Lakers for good, and creates converts all over the country, including a 14-year-old in Indiana.

"That play is what made me want to do what I do right now," Sonics star Shawn Kemp says. "I felt the excitement of dunking through him. It was all because of Dr. J."

The "House Call" dunk, as it came to be called, wasn't Erving's most famous dunk (well get to that later), but it would certainly become one of his most memorable, as Erving made the most of the national spotlight.

In 1983, Erving's move was an event. In 1995, it is a routine. Because today, on every playground and driveway, and in every gym and living room across America, basketballs are being jammed through hoops. Even toddlers are stuffing Nerf balls through plastic neon-orange rims. Everyone is dunking. We are obsessed.

"When you feel yourself go up above the rim for the first time and put the ball through, there's nothing like it," Erving says. "You want to do it again and again and again."

The ability to dunk on a 10-foot rim is what separates the ground-bound from the airborne. It separates the fan from his or her seat. "The dunk is a home run," Pistons Coach Doug Collins says. "It's the long touchdown pass to Jerry Rice."

So what's behind this obsession? For the past three months, The Sporting News has been asking players, coaches and executives their thoughts and opinions on the most controversial, exciting, unpredictable, electrifying move in all of sports -- the dunk.

Big bang

In the early 1950s, Jim Pollard, a 6-foot-3 forward for the Minneapolis Lakers nicknamed "The Kangaroo Kid," would entertain his teammates during practice by taking off from the free-throw line and dunking -- 20 years before Erving became a legend for accomplishing the same feat. Pollard was a novelty in his day -- a forward who played above the rim. "We knew when Pollard had been in the building," said Bones McKinney of the old Washington Capitols. "The tops of the backboards would be clean where he raked them."

No one knows who was first to dunk a basketball. It certainly wasn't Dr. James Naismith. The inventor of the game envisioning the dunk would be like Amos Alonzo Stagg envisioning the sack dance.

Bob Kurland, a 7-foot center for Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State) from 1942 through46 was the first player to regularly dunk in games. Many players were capable of dunking in the 1960s, but they didn't because it was considered boating. Wilt Chamberlain preferred the finger roll because he was hyper-conscious of the prevailing notion that he was an oversized brute with no skill. Oscar Robertson was one of the most athletic players of the decade, but he eschewed the dunk like most of his contemporaries.

"If you dunked on someone, you expected to end up on your butt later in the game," says former Warriors player and coach Al Attles.

In 1967, the dunk was outlawed in high school and college, primarily to curtail Lew Alcindor's scoring. But Alcindor was no less dominant as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, developing another devastating shot the sky hook.

The ABA popularized the dunk, but the move wasn't universally accepted when the leagues merged in 1976. "If someone dunked on you in the NBA, you had to fight them," Erving says. "But dunking was part of the game in the ABA. The ABA was like the AFL creative and innovative. So we didn't take dunking personally. When I came into the NBA, I remember Dave Cowens telling me, 'If you dunk on guys here, they'll try to take your head off.' I told him I'm going to still do it because cause it's a high percentage shot and part of my game. He was light though -- they did try to take my head off, but they didn't succeed."

Erving brought dunking into the national consciousness, but it was Michael Jordan who elevated it to an aft form. Larry Nance won the NBA's first slam-dunk contest in 1984, but Jordan set jaws agape when he won it in 1987 and '88.

Erving and Jordan epitomized the graceful, high-flying dunker. Darryl Dawkins made his mark on the game for his rim-rattling power slams. Drafted out of high school by the 76ers in 1975 as the fifth overall pick, Dawkins never developed into much of a player. But could be dunk. He shattered two backboards in a 22-day span in 1979, spawning the breakaway rim.

Dawkins' jams were as well-known for their monikers as their brute force. His first backboard breaker (which nearly shattered Kansas City center Bill Robinzine) was dubbed, "The Chocolate Thunder Flying, Robinzine Crying, Teeth Shaking, Glass Breaking, Rump Roasting, Bun Toasting, Wham, Bam, Glass Breaker I am Jam."