Darryl Dawkins (born January
11, 1957 in Orlando,
Florida
) is a retired American
professional
basketball player, most noted for his
days with the Philadelphia 76ers
and New Jersey Nets, although he
also played briefly for the Detroit
Pistons and Utah Jazz late in his
career. He was nicknamed Chocolate Thunder for his powerful
dunks.
Biography
Dawkins averaged double figures in scoring nine times in his 14
years in the NBA, often ranking among the league leaders in
field-goal percentage. He also played in the
NBA Finals three times as a member of the
Philadelphia 76ers in the late
1970s and early 1980s. On the flip side, Dawkins set an NBA record
for fouls in a season (386 in
1983-84), and he never quite lived up to
the expectations that had been heaped upon him when he was drafted
out of high school.
"Many of us will judge him solely on what he could have been," said
Dave Wohl, who played against and coached
Dawkins, in
Sports
Illustrated. "Too many will be blinded by the flashes of
brilliance that never materialized into consistent greatness. There
were times when he teased us with a hint of how he could dominate a
game. And we went home in awe and yet sad because we knew of no
spell to make it happen more frequently. But few players could make
us feel that way even once."
High School Career
At
Maynard Evans High
School in Orlando, Dawkins was “probably the best high school
basketball player ever and one of the best people I ever met,” his
prep coach,
Fred Pennington, told
Inside Sports. The team won
the state championship in 1975, a year after the ABA’s
Utah Stars had plucked
Moses Malone right out of Petersburg (Virginia)
High School.
NBA career
Hoping to follow in Malone’s footsteps, the 18-year-old Dawkins
renounced his college eligibility and applied for the
1975 NBA Draft as a hardship candidate. The
Philadelphia 76ers made him the
fifth overall pick, behind
David Thompson,
David Meyers,
Marvin Webster, and
Alvan Adams. According to the
New York Daily News, when Dawkins made
his debut with the 76ers,
New York
Knicks guard
Walt Frazier took one
look and said, "I bet his teachers called him ‘Mr. Darryl.’"
With his size, speed, and touch, Dawkins was expected to take over
the league. But he handled the expectations in typical fashion.
"When I walked into the league, they wanted me to be
Wilt Chamberlain right away—without one
minute of college ball," he told the Daily News. "I can’t be Wilt
Chamberlain. Wilt is much taller than me."
A raw talent who needed time to develop, Dawkins languished on the
Sixers’ bench for his first two seasons. As a rookie in
1975-76 he played in only 37 games,
averaging 2.4 points in 4.5 minutes per game. The next year he
played a limited role during the regular season but began to emerge
during the playoffs. The Sixers advanced all the way to the
NBA Finals that year, and Dawkins
was called upon to help battle
Portland’s Bill Walton. The Trail Blazers won the series in
six games, but Dawkins earned respect among the Philadelphia
coaching staff with 7.3 points and 5.4 rebounds per contest in the
postseason.
In the
1977-78 season Dawkins
finally found a regular role, coming off the bench for nearly 25
minutes per game. Now a robust 20 years old, he averaged 11.7
points and 7.9 rebounds and ranked second in the league in
field-goal percentage at .575. With a club that included
Julius Erving,
George McGinnis,
Lloyd Free, and
Doug
Collins, the Sixers made another solid postseason run,
advancing to the Eastern Conference Finals before losing to the
Washington Bullets in six
games.
Prior to the 1978–79 season Philadelphia traded McGinnis to the
Denver Nuggets for
Bobby Jones and
Ralph Simpson. The move was made in part to
clear space for Dawkins on the Sixers’ front line, which also
included 6-foot-11
Caldwell Jones.
Over the next three seasons Dawkins and Caldwell Jones split time
at the center and power forward positions, and Dawkins had the most
productive stretch of his career. In 1979–80 he averaged 14.7
points and a career-high 8.7 rebounds, helping the Sixers back to
the
NBA Finals, which they lost to
the
Los Angeles Lakers in six
games.
Breaking the Backboard
In a game against the
Kansas City
Kings in November 1979, Dawkins threw down such a massive dunk
that the backboard shattered into tiny shards, sending the Kings'
Bill Robinzine ducking. Three weeks
later he did it again. A few days after that the NBA ruled that
breaking a backboard was an offense that would result in a fine and
suspension.
Dawkins named the backboard-breaking dunk "The
Chocolate-Thunder-Flying, Robinzine-Crying, Teeth-Shaking,
Glass-Breaking, Rump-Roasting, Bun-Toasting, Wham-Bam,
Glass-Breaker-I-Am-Jam."
[63476]
He named other dunks as well: the Rim Wrecker, the Go-Rilla, the
Look Out Below, the In-Your-Face Disgrace, the Cover Your Head, the
Yo-Mama, and the Spine-Chiller Supreme. The 76ers also kept a
separate column on the stat sheet for Dawkins’s self-created
nicknames: "Sir Slam", "Dr. Dunkenstein" and "Chocolate
Thunder."
Also, he claimed to be an alien from planet Lovetron where he spent
off-season practicing "interplanetary funkmanship" and where his
girlfriend Juicy Lucy still lived.
Postseason Disappointments
In
1980-81 season Dawkins’s
rim-rocking antics produced a .607 field-goal percentage, second in
the NBA to
Artis Gilmore’s .670.
Dawkins averaged 14.0 points and 7.2 rebounds for the year, but
Philadelphia failed to return to the Finals. The club met the
Boston Celtics in the Eastern
Conference Finals and lost in seven games.
The 76ers suffered another postseason disappointment in
1982 when they reached the Finals but lost
to the Los Angeles Lakers in six games. Frustrated with the team’s
inability to handle
Kareem
Abdul-Jabbar, Sixers management began to shake up the center
position. First Philadelphia traded Dawkins, who missed nearly half
of the
1981-82 season campaign
with injuries, to the
New Jersey
Nets for a first-round draft pick. Then the Sixers sent
Caldwell Jones and a first-round pick
to the
Houston Rockets in exchange
for
Moses Malone.
Injury-Plagued Final Seasons
At age 25, Dawkins joined a Nets club that included
Albert King,
Buck Williams, and
Otis Birdsong. He had two productive seasons
in a Nets uniform before injuries destroyed the rest of his career.
In the
1982-83 season Dawkins
averaged 12.0 points and shot .599 from the floor, ranking third in
the league in field-goal percentage behind Gilmore and
Steve Johnson. The next season he
poured in a career-high 16.8 points per game on .593 field-goal
shooting and grabbed 6.7 rebounds per contest. Dawkins also set a
dubious NBA record that year when he committed 386 personal fouls
for the season.
The
1983-84 campaign was
Dawkins’s last full season. Injuries limited him to only 39 games
in
1984-85, and then a
back injury in the
1985-86
campaign all but ended his career. At the time, Dawkins was
averaging 15.3 points and shooting .644 from the floor, but the
injury sidelined him for 31 of the Nets’ final 32 games and led to
abortive playing attempts over the next three seasons. With New
Jersey, then the
Utah Jazz, then the
Detroit Pistons, Dawkins kept trying
to come back, but his back wouldn’t let him. He played only 26
games from
1986-87 through
1988-89, finally retiring at the
end of the
1988-89 season at age
32. He attempted a comeback in 1994 attending Denver Nuggets
training camp and again in 1995 with the Boston Celtics. Dawkins
also spent several seasons after 1989, playing in the Italian
league for Torino,
Olimpia Milano and
Telemarket Forli.
Upon Dawkins’s retirement, many harkened back to a classic Dawkins
saying: "When it’s all been said and done, there’s nothing left to
say or do."
Post NBA career
Following his NBA career, Dawkins had a brief stint with the
Harlem Globetrotters, followed
by a season spent with the Sioux Falls Skyforce of the Continental
Basketball Association in 1995-1996. During this season, the
Skyforce games versus the Florida Beach Dogs were covered by ESPN
as Florida featured former NBA center
Manute
Bol, and ESPN could not resist the novelty of Darryl Dawkins
versus Manute Bol. In 2005, along with other former pro basketball
players, Dawkins auditioned for an NBA analyst position with
ESPN as part of the network's
reality series Dream Job.
He was the head coach of the
American
Basketball Association's
Newark
Express. He was also the player/coach of the short-lived
Winnipeg Cyclone.
He was the
head coach of the Allentown, Pennsylvania
-based Pennsylvania ValleyDawgs of the
United States Basketball
League until they folded.
On August 20, 2009, Lehigh Carbon Community College (located in
Schnecksville, PA) announced that Dawkins would be the head coach
of their men's basketball team for the upcoming 2009-2010
season.
Personal
Dawkins is the author of
Chocolate Thunder: The Uncensored Life
and Times of Darryl Dawkins (co-authored with Charley Rosen),
which chronicles his on and off-the-court life as an NBA star. In
the book, Dawkins writes of some of the racism he encountered
during his NBA career, playing alongside 76ers superstar
Julius Erving, and his off-the-court
experiences with drugs, parties and women.
Darryl Dawkins was briefly married to Kelly Barnes of Trenton, New
Jersey. Kelly Barnes Dawkins committed suicide on November 1, 1987
back home in New Jersey. Dawkins was on the road with the team at
the time. (The New York Times, November 8, 1987).
Dawkins appears in
NBA Ballers and the
ESPN NBA 2K games as a reserve member of
the '80s Legends East Team.
Trivia
- Dawkins has the record for most personal fouls committed in a
season, with 386 in 1984, which is seven more than his 379 fouls
the previous year, which ranks second all
time.http://www.basketball-reference.com/leaders/PF_season.html He
committed one more personal foul during his career than Michael Jordan, despite playing nearly 350
fewer games.
- In 1999, Saturday Night
Live named Dawkins the "Man of the Millennium" in a
"Weekend Update" sketch.
- In the 1989 film The
Big Bang, Dawkins reveals his beliefs and thoughts when
interviewed by the film's director, James Toback. One review refers
to Dawkins as, "the basketball star and self-proclaimed ladies'
man."
- Dawkins appeared in a Taco Bell
commercial alongside former NBA player Vlade
Divac as a work-league basketball player.
- The band Screaming Headless Torsos has a song named after him,
called "Darryl Dawkins' Sound of Love".
Notes
http://www.mcall.com/sports/all-dawk-cn,0,7590380.story
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