Darryl Dawkins

My buddy Lefty sent me a note about the passing of Darryl Dawkins at the age of 58.
Usually,this would be held for a cleaning of the inbox with a few different passings,but something struck me about Dawkins and I wanted to do a post on Dawkins and maybe more importantly,how influential he was in the sports world in his time,just as the sports media world was changing.

In many ways,Darryl Dawkins was the Forrest Gump of 70's and 80's pro basketball and he understood the importance of being media friendly as well.
Dawkins was the first player to come straight from high school to the NBA (Moses Malone came from the high school ranks a year before with his signing with the ABA Utah Stars) and it affected his game.
Dawkins had some productive seasons with the 76ers and Nets,but he never developed a game with anything resembling a shot as he depended on a few postup moves and of course-the array of power dunks.

Dawkins was so known for his dunks that you rarely saw Dawkins doing anything on his various basketball cards or posters of the day (Check EBAY,you'll see).
Dawkins also named his dunks which brought him even more attention.
That made Dawkins a popular player,but not one that lived up to what his potential could have been,
Dawkins and his slams broke two backboards,which led to the NBA rule against that and his resulting raps about the destruction were far ahead of his time.
Those descriptions made good copy for the writers and great stuff for the fans of a league that often was struggling for print lines and broadcast attention in the pre-cable days.
Dawkins made a lot of fans and sold a lot of posters in the days when endorsement opportunities were limited in the league for all but an elite few.

It wouldn't be a Dawkins story without talking about his "Home Planet" Lovetron (and surrounding suburb Chocolate Paradise) and his self-assigned nickname Chocolate Thunder.
It was one of the better nicknames and the Lovetron stuff was admittedly weird,but at least it was entertainingly so.
For the 1970's.it kinda fit in and Dawkins was one of the more remembered players of the day without being one of the better players.

Dawkins was there for the Sixers developing into the league's big three and was there as two of the biggest stars of ABA in George McGinnis and Julius Erving began their transition into the NBA with the Sixers making the NBA Finals in 1977.
Philadelphia won the first two games of that series before being brushed aside by Bill Walton and Portland in the next four games as Portland won their only title with peak Walton before the foot injuries robbed him of his prime.
Dawkins set more precedent in that series for his fight with powerhouse Maurice Lucas (ironically shown above being dunked on Dawkins) of the Blazers.
It was that fight (on national television no less) that began the NBA thinking about tightening rules that saw basketball almost to the level of hockey (small fines,sometimes no ejections) as far as fights go.
The league finally began to realize that men of that size throwing bad intentions punches with their bare fists could cause devastating results-a foreshadowing of just a few months later with the Kermit Washington punch onto Rudy Tomjanovich.

Darryl Dawkins might not have lived up to his potential,but he was still a pretty solid NBA player and was far from a bust.
Nine straight years in double digit scoring doesn't come from a bust,but one also couldn't say that he was a star with those numbers either,especially considering the attention that he received for those stats.
In the end,in so many ways,Darryl Dawkins was truly ahead of his time.....