Darryl Dawkins had a style about him.
It was unlike anything anyone had seen. The way he played basketball was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. He was a man before his time.
If Dawkins had Twitter, he would have exercised all 140 characters in artistic, creative, puzzling ways. If Dawkins had today’s marketing, he would be a superstar, whose exploits were told throughout the universe.
He was a revolutionary in marketing and in play.
When everyone was still playing below the rim, Dawkins would stop games with his insanely hard dunking. Literally he would shatter backboards and destroy rims. Then he would artfully name his dunk something ridiculous no one would remember. Just the way it made you feel and laugh at the absurdity of it all.
This was a man playing a boys’ game. Or at least that is what it looked like.
He was a revolutionary off the court too. He left Evans High School in Orlando straight for the NBA. No one had ever done that. No one would do that until Kevin Garnett in 1995.
The basketball world and basketball culture would not be the same without him. And it certainly lost something of itself Thursday.
Darryl Dawkins died of a heart attack Thursday at 58 years old.
Dawkins’ beginnings were extremely humble. He grew up in poverty and attended Evans High School. This was not the man who would become the funky dunker from the planet Lovetron.
Initially he was just a man-child dominating the high school basketball scene in a small city (and Orlando was small back then) trying to fit in. He was humble, giving credit to his teammates even though he averaged 32 points and 21 rebounds in Evans’ 1975 state championship.
He was just such a big, friendly guy. I don’t know anybody who played with him that had anything but good things to say about him.
Dawkins quickly made a name for himself in the NBA for his powerful dunks and his bravado and artistry in naming them. It was easy to see what a media favorite he would be. How could you not love a veritable meme generator’s worth of dunk names.
At modern NBA dunk contests, TNT would call on him to name the dunks he just witnessed. His complext names would perfectly describe the dunk in one take — something we could not always say for the guys who were doing the actual dunking.
His biggest moment came when he wrecked a backboard in Kansas City and came out with a paragraph’s worth of a name: “Chocolate Thunder Flyin’, Robinzine Cryin’, Teeth-Shakin’, Glass-Breakin’, Rump-Roastin’, Bun-Toastin’, Wham, Bam, Glass Breaker I Am Jam.”
He did not quite put Orlando on the basketball map. He was one of the few athletes to come out of the tiny city at the time. It was not for another decade the city would put itself into the ring for a NBA franchise. And even then it seemed like a long shot.
Dawkins averaged just 12.0 points and 6.1 rebounds per game. He is not a hall of famer and probably never will be. The way fans talk about his impacto n the game makes you think he could be one though.
This is a guy who helped invent playing above the rim. His teammate Julius Erving really helped usher that era completely into the NBA.
Dawkins really was a player from another planet. There was just nobody like him.
And there will never be another player like him again. Just so inventive, physical, dominating and playful. The basketball world and Orlando lost a favorite son.
