Arizona basketball legend Bob “Big Bird” Elliott will welcome world-renowned basketball figure Julius “Dr. J” Erving, a former teammate with the Philadelphia 76ers, for the latest Fireside Chat Series event organized by the African-American Museum of Southern Arizona.
The event will be Thursday at Palo Verde High School’s auditorium at 6 p.m. A capacity crowd is expected.
Those attending donated in blocks of $75 to the African-American Museum of Southern Arizona.
You can make a donation to the museum through the University of Arizona Foundation.
In the latest All Sports Tucson Talk, Elliott touches on his background with the iconic Erving, this being the fourth event of the Fireside Chat Series, the value of the African-American Museum of Southern Arizona (including its impact on recruiting) and how Arizona basketball is still a thriving national program after Fred Snowden and players like Elliott and Al Fleming started making Tucson a basketball town 50 years ago.
Elliott said he considers Erving a “big brother” for Erving accepting him as a roommate after Elliott was drafted by the 76ers in 1977.
Erving, a member of the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, joins Ruby Bridges, Stacey Snowden and Carlotta Walls as guests of the Fireside Chat Series.
Bridges, whose civil rights background is taught in schools to this day, was the first African-American student to attend a New Orleans elementary school when schools were segregated.
Snowden is the daughter of the legendary Arizona coach who was the first African-American basketball head coach at a major university when he came to Tucson in 1972.
Walls, part of the Little Rock Nine, was one of the first African-American students to attend Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas at the height of the civil-rights movement in 1957.
Erving will make his fourth appearance in Tucson, first since 1993 when he took part in the John Denver Celebrity Pro-Am portion of the Northern Telecom Open at Tucson National.
He attended a meeting here as a representative of the Spalding Company in 1988 and made a golf instructional video with Tom Kite at La Ventana Canyon in 1989.
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ALLSPORTSTUCSON.com publisher, writer and editor Javier Morales is a former Arizona Press Club award winner. He is a former Arizona Daily Star beat reporter for the Arizona basketball team, including when the Wildcats won the 1996-97 NCAA title. He has also written articles for CollegeAD.com, Bleacher Report, Lindy’s Sports, TucsonCitizen.com, The Arizona Republic, Sporting News and Baseball America, among many other publications. He has also authored the book “The Highest Form of Living”, which is available at Amazon. He became an educator in 2016 and is presently a special education teacher at Sunnyside High School in the Sunnyside Unified School District.
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