Dr. J’s mid-air pirouette and miraculous baseline scoop make their way into a poem about Black genius and racial justice

In the wake of the 76ers’ heartbreaking Game 7 loss to the Celtics earlier this month, many local fans have found themselves thinking back to past glories — the team’s 1983 championship, perhaps, or that magic moment in the 1980 final when Dr. J pirouetted in midair with his miraculous baseline scoop.

Well before this year’s playoffs, poet Ross Gay went down a YouTube rabbit hole with that famed Julius Erving play, analyzing it frame by frame and sparking a stream of thought about Black genius and the defiance of gravity. “I caught myself watching with such intensity and wonder,” Gay recalled over the phone from Bloomington, Ind., “I guess I started to wonder about what it was that I was looking at.”

It turned into his book-length 2020 poem, Be Holding.

In that graceful slam dunk, Gay, who grew up a Sixers fan in Levittown, discovered echoes of the Middle Passage and his father’s diverticulitis, a photo of two people falling from a collapsing fire escape, racial injustice, and the voice of Donny Hathaway.

“The reaching that makes of falling flight” is a key phrase that emerges in the poem.

“The poem asks so many questions, but the main question is how do we regard each other with love and tenderness?” Gay explained. “We so often don’t, so the question I’m interested in is ‘How do we practice beholden-ness?’ That’s why Allen Iverson shows up in the poem.”

A.I. and his infamous “practice” rant is one of myriad ways that Gay equates Philly sports with larger cultural and personal issues throughout “Be Holding.” Now the poem will come to life in an apt setting at Girard College, which is hosting a multimedia performance based on Gay’s poem on the basketball court of its historic armory.

The show, directed by local theater artist Brooke O’Harra with music by composer and UPenn professor Tyshawn Sorey for the contemporary music ensemble Yarn/Wire, will have its world premiere May 31-June 3.

At a recent rehearsal, O’Harra roamed the court in a blue hoodie, looking like a coach as she guided poets Yolanda Wisher and David Gaines and a group of Girard students through their paces, though it’s unlikely Doc Rivers ever shouted “hit those gerunds” at his players.

“I’m profoundly uninterested in the MVP mythology,” Gay said. “What I’m interested in is the ways that we collaborate into these moments of profound and unfathomable beauty.”

Although he now lives in Bloomington, where he’s a professor at Indiana University, Gay says that he remains interested in seeing the Sixers prevail again. “I feel like they’ll never win until they atone for trading Moses Malone [in 1986],” he said with a shrug. “They’re gonna have to ask the Red Sox how to do that.”

“Be Holding,” May 31-June 3, 7:30 p.m., Girard College Armory, 2101 S. College Ave., Phila. beholding.org/tickets