Quote of the Day (Dr. J, on the Origin of His Flying Dunks)

“There's a sensation associated with flying. For me it started as a kid, in the park, jumping out of swings. Right next to my housing projects we had swings, and they were in a huge sandbox. It was white sand. So when you came home dirty, you had sand on you. There was ultimately a fence out there, and I always worried if I went too far I'd hit the fence. I always found a way to land. In the early days, when I was six, seven, eight, it was like a tuck-and-roll. I got to the point where I could jump out of the swing, land and nail it, like in the Olympics, when they do the vault. Height never bothered me. It was early training, and I didn't even know it.”—NBA Hall of Famer Julius Erving, quoted in Mark Bechtel, “Doctor, Reveal Thyself,” Sports Illustrated, June 17, 2013

At 75 years old—the age he attained yesterday—Julius Erving is a long way from that little kid on the swings. 

But, for those of us lucky enough to behold and gasp at his greatness in the Seventies and Eighties, he remains the prototype for so many electrifying players to follow, including Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley, Isaiah Thomas, and Dominique Wilkins.

Call him what you like—artist, acrobat, magician—but to see him once with the ball in his hand, torqueing his body midair on the way to the basket, means never forgetting what he meant to so many of us in our youth.

(For a fine summary in different moments in the career of the great small forward who so influenced pro basketball, see this 2008 post from David Friedman’s “20 Second Timeout” blog on “Great Julius Erving Stories.”)

Quote of the Day (John Henry Cardinal Newman, on the ‘Desire to be Great’)

“Do you desire to be great? make yourselves little. There is a mysterious connexion between real advancement and self-abasement. If you minister to the humble and despised, if you feed the hungry, tend the sick, succour the distressed; if you bear with the froward, submit to insult, endure ingratitude, render good for evil, you are, as by a divine charm, getting power over the world and rising among the creatures. God has established this law. Thus He does His wonderful works. His instruments are poor and despised; the world hardly knows their names, or not at all. They are busied about what the world thinks petty actions, and no one minds them. They are apparently set on no great works; nothing is seen to come of what they do: they seem to fail. Nay, even as regards religious objects which they themselves profess to desire, there is no natural and visible connexion between their doings and sufferings and these desirable ends; but there is an unseen connexion in the kingdom of God. They rise by falling. Plainly so, for no condescension can be so great as that of our Lord Himself. Now the more they abase themselves the more like they are to Him; and the more like they are to Him, the greater must be their power with Him.” —John Henry Cardinal Newman, “Sermon 22: The Weapons of Saints,” in The Newman Reader: Parochial and Plain Sermons, Volume 6

Quote of the Day (John Steinbeck, on ‘How Greatness Comes to a Man’)

"No one knows how greatness comes to a man. It may lie in his blackness, sleeping, or it may lance into him like those driven fiery particles from outer space. These things, however, are known about greatness: need gives it life and puts it in action; it never comes without pain; it leaves a man changed, chastened, and exalted at the same time--he can never return to simplicity."— John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday (1954)