November 13, 1979: Darryl Dawkins Breaks a Backboard

November 13, 1979: The Kansas City Kings beat the Philadelphia 76ers, 110-103 at the Kansas City Municipal Auditorium. (Their usual home, the Kemper Arena, now known as the Hy-Vee Arena, was under repairs, due to the roof collapsing in June.) Phil Ford of the Kings led all players with 34 points.

But the Sixers produce a highlight: Darryl Dawkins, the man claiming to be from the planet Lovetron, scores a dunk so hard it breaks the glass backboard.

No one is injured by the falling glass. Fortunately, the Kings player guarding him ducked, so the glass only fell on his back. His name was Bill Robinzine, and Dawkins, nicknamed Chocolate Thunder by singer Stevie Wonder, named the dunk, "The Chocolate-Thunder-Flying, Robinzine-Crying, Teeth-Shaking, Glass-Breaking, Rump-Roasting, Bun-Toasting, Wham-Bam, Glass-Breaker-I-Am-Jam." He also invented the dunking term, "In-Your-Face Disgrace." And, while Dawkins didn't come up with this one himself, thereafter, any player looking bad during an opposing player's highlight, something worthy of being put on a poster, was said to have gotten "posterized."

Dawkins was not the 1st man to break a backboard in the NBA. During pregame warmups for one of the first games ever played by the Boston Celtics in 1946, Chuck Connors -- who also played baseball and became much more famous as an actor -- accidentally broke a wooden backboard with a warmup shot, forcing a delay in the tipoff, as a backboard was brought in from another arena in town.

Gus Johnson of the Baltimore Bullets, one of the NBA's earliest dunk artists, supposedly broke 3 in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which would make him the 1st to do it with a dunk in a game, but no film footage is known to survive.

A native of Orlando, Florida, Dawkins was the 1st player to go directly from high school to the NBA, the ABA having beaten them to it with Moses Malone. He broke a 2nd backboard just a few weeks later, on December 5, 1979, this time pulling the rim down, too.

He helped the 76ers reach the NBA Finals in 1977, 1980 and 1982, but he was traded to the New Jersey Nets, and they brought Malone in, and he led the Sixers to a title in 1983 without Dawkins.

Dawkins, like baseball great Satchel Paige naming his vast array of pitches, started naming his dunks, including the Rim Wrecker, the Spine-Chiller Supreme, and, creating an expression that became a description for big dunks in general, the In-Your-Face Disgrace.

He also gained nicknames for himself. Added to "Chocolate Thunder" were "Sir Slam" and "Doctor Dunkenstein." That last one, however, would become better remembered for Utah Jazz star Darrell Griffith.

Like the aforementioned Paige, his baseball contemporary Dizzy Dean, and Dawkins' own contemporary, football quarterback Terry Bradshaw, Dawkins figured out that if you've got a certain image, use it to your advantage before others can use it to theirs. Possibly inspired by the man known as Doctor Funkenstein, rock bandleader George Clinton and his "P-Funk Empire," with his "Mothership Connection" stage set, Dawkins began telling people he was from the planet Lovetron, where he had a girlfriend named Juicy Lucy, and practiced "interplanetary funkmanship."

(As far as I know, he never explained what "interplanetary funkmanship" meant. I would have liked to have found out. Clinton and James Brown were probably mad that they didn't think of it first.)

He played 14 seasons in the NBA, mostly for the Sixers and the New Jersey Nets, and won a title in his last season, as a backup with the 1989 Detroit Pistons. He played a season with the Harlem Globetrotters, played a few seasons in Europe, and retired in 2000, going into coaching.

By that point, dunking became not the province of enormous centers -- despite the backboard-wrecking actions of Shaquille O'Neal -- but quick guards like Michael Jordan and Vince Carter, and forwards like Dominique "the Human Highlight Reel" Wilkins.

But the legend of Darryl Dawkins never faded away, not even after he died of a heart attack in 2015, only 58 years old. Bill Robinzine wasn't even that lucky: In 1982, only 29 years old, still an active player, he took his own life.

*

November 13, 1979 was a Tuesday. There were 7 other games in the NBA that night:

* The New York Knicks lost to the Washington Bullets, 111-107 at Madison Square Garden.

* The New Jersey Nets beat the Atlanta Hawks, 101-82 at the Rutgers Athletic Center (now the Jersey Mike's Arena) in Piscataway. Calvin Natt scored 33 points for the Nets.

* The Houston Rockets beat the Chicago Bulls, 128-127 at the Chicago Stadium. The aforementioned Moses Malone scored 45 for the Rockets.

* The San Antonio Spurs beat the Golden State Warriors, 131-127 in overtime at the HemisFair Arena in San Antonio. George Gervin led all scorers on the night with 47.

* The Denver Nuggets beat the Cleveland Cavaliers, 116-110 at the McNichols Arena in Denver.

* The Los Angeles Lakers beat the San Diego Clippers, 137-91 at the San Diego Sports Arena (now the Pechanga Arena).

* And the Milwaukee Bucks beat the Portland Trail Blazers, 101-92 at the Portland Memorial Coliseum. Marques Johnson scored 34.

Baseball was out of season. Football was in midweek. There were 5 games in the NHL:

* The New York Islanders beat their arch-rivals, the New York Rangers, 10-5 at the Nassau Coliseum. Denis Potvin, Bryan Trottier and Billy Harris each had 2 goals. The Rangers had reached the Stanley Cup Finals the season before, beating the Isles in the Semifinals, but, this season, the Isles went on to win the whole thing, start a dynasty, and take over New York Tri-State Area hockey -- for a few years, anyway.

* The Edmonton Oilers beat the Washington Capitals, 5-3 at the Capital Centre in the Washington suburb of Landover, Maryland.

* The Vancouver Canucks beat the Atlanta Flames, 5-3 at The Omni in Atlanta.

* The Montreal Canadiens beat the St. Louis Blues, 5-2 at the St. Louis Arena, then known as the Checkerdome.

* And the Los Angeles Kings beat the Colorado Rockies, 4-1 at The Forum outside Los Angeles in Inglewood, California.

March 23, 1985: Bernard King's Injury

March 23, 1985: The man who may have been the best player in the NBA at the time sees that status came to a most painful end.

Bernard King and his brother Albert King came out of Fort Hamilton High School in Brooklyn to become basketball stars. Bernard had starred at the University of Tennessee, Albert at the University of Maryland. Each began his NBA career with the New Jersey Nets, but Bernard was 3 years older: By the time Albert arrived with the Nets, Bernard had been traded to the Utah Jazz.

In 1982, Bernard was traded to the New York Knicks. In the 1983-84 season, he caught fire. He scored 50 points away to the San Antonio Spurs. The next day, he scored 50 again, away to the Dallas Mavericks. He averaged 34.8 points per game in the Playoffs, helping the Knicks reach the Eastern Conference Semifinals.

On Christmas Day, December 25, 1984, the Knicks lost to the Nets, 120-114 at Madison Square Garden, but Bernard scored 60 points. At the time, he was only the 10th player in NBA history to do so. His brother Albert was still with the Nets, but was injured, and did not play. Micheal Ray Richardson, whom the Knicks traded to get Bernard, scored 36; Mike Gminski scored 27; and Kelvin Ransey scored 24.

'Nard kept going in that 1984-85 season. He was leading the league with 32.9 points per game, at a time when it had Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, George Gervin, Isiah Thomas, and a rookie named Michael Jordan. But the Knicks themselves were struggling, especially with injuries. 

They were 24-46 when they went into the Kemper Arena in Kansas City, just on the Missouri side of the State Line with Kansas, to play the Kansas City Kings, who were not much better at the time, going 27-43. Only 4,554 fans bothered to show up for a game that started with little meaning, but ended with a tremendous amount of meaning for the Knicks, and Bernard in particular, going forward.

The Knicks were trailing with 1:34 left in the game, and Bernard already had 37 points. Reggie Theus of Kansas City attempted a dunk. Bernard jumped to try to block it. But as he jumped, he yelled, "Oh!" As he came down, he yelled, "Oh, damn!" He crumpled to the floor, and started slapping it, in an immense amount of pain.

Knick broadcaster Marv Albert said, "Look out! King hurt himself as he gave the foul!" The crowd was small enough, and shocked into a level of sound so low, that not only the sound of Bernard shouting, "Oh, damn!" but the sound of his hand slapping the court was picked up by the MSG Network microphones. Hubie Brown, then the head coach of the Knicks, actually heard the injury, saying in an interview years later, "You could hear the crack. It was like a gun sound."

Ernie Grunfeld, who had been his teammate at Tennessee (where the media called them "The Bernie and Ernie Show"), and now was again with the Knicks, said, "It was devastating. My heart stopped, and I think everybody else's heart on the bench stopped, also."

The Kings won the game, 113-105, but hardly anybody cared. The most exciting player in the NBA was diagnosed with a broken tibia, a torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), and torn knee cartilage. No player, in any of North America's "Big Four sports," had ever come back from an injury like that before. As far as anyone could tell at the time, Bernard King, only 28 years old, was done.

The game was the 1st of 12 straight that the Knicks lost to close out the season. It put them into a much better position to win the NBA's 1st-ever Draft Lottery. They did -- and there are still people who believe this was fixed, to give the New York team the advantage and the NBA better TV ratings -- and selected Georgetown University center Patrick Ewing. Ewing kept the Knicks relevant as they climbed back up into the NBA's elite, and took them to 2 NBA Finals, but lost them both.

The Kings were not so fortunate. At the end of the season, they left Kansas City, and moved to Sacramento. The Kemper Arena was renamed the Hy-Vee Arena, and, though it still stands in 2022, was replaced by the Sprint Center in 2007. That building has been renamed the T-Mobile Center. The NBA has never returned to Kansas City.

But Bernard King returned to the NBA. He missed the entire 1985-86 season, and, through a lot of hard work by himself and the medical professionals around him, finally returned on April 10, 1987, a Knick loss away to the Milwaukee Bucks. He played just 6 games that season, and was released by the Knicks.

He was signed by the Washington Bullets, and played 69 of a possible 82 games in the 1987-88 season. He played all but 1 game in 1987-88, all but 1 game in 1988-89, and all 82 with the 1989-90 Bullets. He missed 1991-92 due to injury, then played out the string with the Nets in 1992-93, and retired.

He was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2013, and it's not clear that he would have made it had he retired right after his injury. He is now a studio analyst for the Knicks and for NBA TV, and remains beloved in Knoxville, Washington, and especially New York.

*

March 23, 1985 was a Saturday. There were 6 other games played in the NBA that day:

* The Boston Celtics beat the Washington Bullets, 104-98 at the Capital Centre in the Washington suburb of Landover, Maryland.

* The Atlanta Hawks beat the Cleveland Cavaliers, 91-86 at The Coliseum in the Cleveland suburb of Richfield, Ohio.

* The Milwaukee Bucks beat the Indiana Pacers, 140-129 at the Milwaukee Exposition, Convention Center and Arena, or "The MECCA." Since 2014, it has been named the UW-Panther Arena.

* The Chicago Bulls beat the Dallas Mavericks, 107-97 at the Reunion Arena in Dallas.

* The Golden State Warriors beat the Phoenix Suns, 123-109 at the Oakland Coliseum Arena.

* And the Portland Trail Blazers beat the Los Angeles Clippers, 126-123 at the Portland Memorial Coliseum.

Baseball was in Spring Training. The NFL was in the off-season, but the USFL was still in business. While most of the League played on the following day, on this day, the Arizona Outlaws beat the Los Angeles Express, 27-13 at Sun Devil Stadium in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe, Arizona.

And there were 5 games played in the NHL:

* The New Jersey Devils lost to the Philadelphia Flyers, 5-3 at the Brendan Byrne Arena at the Meadowlands.

* The Hartford Whalers beat their regional rivals, the Boston Bruins, 5-2 at the Hartford Civic Center. (It's now named the PeoplesBank Arena.)

* The St. Louis Blues beat the Minnesota North Stars, 4-2 at the St. Louis Arena.

* The Winnipeg Jets beat the Vancouver Canucks, 6-4 at the Winnipeg Arena.

* And the Calgary Flames beat the Los Angeles Kings, 4-3 at The Forum outside Los Angeles in Inglewood, California.

And in English soccer, North London's Arsenal fell 2-0, to Liverpool-based Everton, who went on to win the Football League.

Also, Maurice Jones-Drew was born on this day. The running back made 3 Pro Bowls playing for the Jacksonville Jaguars.