Darryl Dawkins was a good basketball player, but an all-time great character
COMMENTARY
I can’t recall another remembrance capturing a person’s wonderful but unusual legacy as perfectly with a single paragraph as this, from Friday morning’s New York Times:
Darryl Dawkins, who arrived in professional basketball as a gigantic teenager and became one of the game’s fiercest dunkers and most notoriously lovable characters, a backboard-smashing, referee-dissing, fun-loving manchild known to fans as Chocolate Thunder from Planet Lovetron, died on Thursday in Allentown, Pa. He was 58.
What I love about it – other than the wholly necessary reference to Lovetron, of course – is that it remembers Dawkins the right way: As a jovial, effervescent and hilarious character who happened to be an entertaining basketball player.
The word love, in some form (including the galactic version), is mentioned three times, while Dawkins’s unfulfilled promise as a player is not mentioned at all.
Dawkins was very good in a 12-year career. He had the talent to be an all-timer. There is a decided what-if element to his career, sure. But it should not define him, and while his unfulfilled basketball promise warrants mention later, it does not belong in the first paragraph of his epitaph. I’m so glad the Times got it right.
He’s a reminder that being a what-if is not always a tragedy.
Cam Neely was done with the Bruins at 30. But we tend to remember him fondly for what was, not what could have been had a vicious cheap shot not calcified his thigh.
Bo Jackson was a what-if, but by all accounts he’s lived a happy and adjusted life after the abrupt end to his dual careers. There’s no sadness there, just the feeling of wanting more.
Tony Conigliaro, beaned at 22, out of comebacks at 30, dead at 45 — that was an epic tragedy. Normand Leveille was a tragedy. Reggie Lewis and Len Bias.
Dawkins does not belong with them by any means or measure. By all accounts, Dawkins lived a life of happy self-awareness and had long ago come to grips with the way his career played out.
He never did sound like a man with regrets, just one who had countless good times that spawned great stories. “We were so busy having fun that sometimes we forgot to play,’’ he once said, when asked why those wild, loaded ‘70s Sixers teams never won a title.
Dawkins came into the NBA in the mid-‘70s as a preternaturally talented kid – think Shaq as a freshman at LSU, but with a better shot — out of a Florida high school. As we found out a generation or so later, it takes a supercompetitive freak to come into the NBA and fulfill all of your promise – a KG can do it, a Kobe, but not many others. Can you imagine coming in the reckless NBA at that time out of high school? It’s a victory in one sense – and tribute to his sense of self in another — that he escaped unscathed.
If he had the maturity and nature to work his ample butt off and become all that he could be, well, perhaps we would not remember him as fondly as we do.
We wouldn’t have loved him anymore had he won six MVPs and shattered a backboard on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s bald spot. He would have been too focused, too damn determined, to become such an enjoyable and unforgettable character.
He’d never have named his dunks, such as his most famous one, a backboard-shattering slam against the Kings in November 1979 that sent opposing forward Bill Robinzine scurrying for cover as glass rained down around him.
This is what he called it: “The If-You-Ain’t-Groovin’, Best-Get-Movin’, Chocolate-Thunder-Flyin’, Robinzine-Cryin’, Teeth-Shakin’, Glass-Breakin’, Rump-Roastin’, Bun-Toastin’, Glass-Still Flyin’, Wham-Bam-I-Am-Jam.’’
I never knew Dawkins’s scoring average or shooting percentage in any given season. But I knew the name of that dunk by heart in fourth grade.
Had he been focused on basketball — and focused on beating the Celtics at the pinnacle of that rivalry — maybe he’d never have imagined Lovetron at all. And who among us didn’t want to take a day trip there?
“Lovetron was a planet that I even thought about in high school,’ he once explained, “and everybody’d say, ‘Man, you crazy. It was just a planet in my own little mind that I could escape to.’ And it was a drug-free planet, you know. It was just, ‘you get your girl and you go off and y’all just chill out somewhere.’ And it was Lovetron. And it was a lot of fun for me. I started to talk about it in Philadelphia, you know, and I thought people would think I was crazy, but people said, “I like that!’’
Maybe he could have been more as a player.
But it wouldn’t have been the same, would it? There was no reason for regret, no reason to ask for more.
Darryl Dawkins was easy to love just the way he was.
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