"There's the typical books, Moby Dick and, I guess in my adult life I began to read biographies more than fiction. I started to want to relate to other people's lives, things that had really happened"
About this Quote
Julius Erving draws a line between the books assigned in school and the books chosen in adulthood, moving from canonical fiction toward biographies. Naming Moby Dick as the emblem of the curriculum signals the distance many feel from required classics: monumental, allegorical, but not necessarily personal. Adulthood brings agency, and with it a hunger for stories that mirror the textures of real life. The pivot to biographies reflects a practical turn, the instinct to mine lived experience for guidance, consolation, and templates for action.
Relatability sits at the center of that turn. Fiction can widen empathy, but biographies promise recognizable constraints and consequences: families to support, injuries and setbacks, fraught decisions, unexpected chances. For a pioneering athlete whose talent thrust him into the glare of fame, the lives of others who negotiated visibility, pressure, and transition would offer concrete lessons. Biographies convert strangers into informal mentors, replacing myths with case studies. They demystify greatness, showing its scaffolding of habit, discipline, and failure.
There is also a cultural context. Erving came of age through the 1960s and 70s, when public figures were remaking notions of success, race, and professionalism. Reading about people who had really navigated those currents could anchor his own choices: how to lead, how to sustain excellence, how to evolve beyond the court into business and civic life. The preference for fact over fable suggests a temperament that values actionable wisdom over symbolic resonance.
Ironically, the journey he describes has made him the subject of the very genre he came to prefer. As Dr. J moved from ABA icon to NBA statesman, his life itself became a narrative others read for clues. The movement from fiction to biography is, in that sense, the movement from myth to model, from abstraction to example, and it underlines a broader human desire to see possibility mapped onto real terrain.
Relatability sits at the center of that turn. Fiction can widen empathy, but biographies promise recognizable constraints and consequences: families to support, injuries and setbacks, fraught decisions, unexpected chances. For a pioneering athlete whose talent thrust him into the glare of fame, the lives of others who negotiated visibility, pressure, and transition would offer concrete lessons. Biographies convert strangers into informal mentors, replacing myths with case studies. They demystify greatness, showing its scaffolding of habit, discipline, and failure.
There is also a cultural context. Erving came of age through the 1960s and 70s, when public figures were remaking notions of success, race, and professionalism. Reading about people who had really navigated those currents could anchor his own choices: how to lead, how to sustain excellence, how to evolve beyond the court into business and civic life. The preference for fact over fable suggests a temperament that values actionable wisdom over symbolic resonance.
Ironically, the journey he describes has made him the subject of the very genre he came to prefer. As Dr. J moved from ABA icon to NBA statesman, his life itself became a narrative others read for clues. The movement from fiction to biography is, in that sense, the movement from myth to model, from abstraction to example, and it underlines a broader human desire to see possibility mapped onto real terrain.
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