When Julius Erving burst on the scene in the ABA in 1971, he electrified basketball fans with an amazing outburst of drives and dunks the likes of which no one had ever seen.
Later, he explained his exuberance by saying that when he was at UMass, dunks were still banned (the NCAA banned dunks when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, then known as Lew Alcindor, was thoroughly dominating college basketball) and when he could dunk again, he was more than ready to do so.
Erving learned to dunk playing street ball in New York, and in this rare bit of video from 1975, he turned up at Bill Robinson Park in Harlem to play.