Columnist Dean Juipe: Perfect time for a father to apologize

Dean Juipe

Monday, July 10, 2000 | 9:53 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

As a suave and rather debonair member of the basketball Hall of Fame, Julius Erving has received thousands of fan letters and unsolicited memos over the years.

Getting one more can't hurt.

Dear Julius:

With all due respect, are you open to a little advice?

This week, today, right now, is the time for you to take the initiative and open the lines of communication with your estranged daughter. The timing is apropos, given the fact a memorial service for your late son Cory will be held Wednesday near your home in Florida.

We were all sorry to learn Cory was missing, as we did last month, and we were both sorry and relieved when his body was discovered late last week in a pond a mile from your house. He seemed to lead something of a tragic existence, and our sentiments are with you at this difficult time.

But this is also the perfect time to patch up your relationship with Alexandra Stevenson, a young lady on the Women's Tennis Association tour who is obviously befuddled by your lack of personal attention through the first 19 years of her life.

As the nation learned last year when an Orlando newspaper purchased Alexandra's birth certificate and verified that you were her father, you two have never been close. And, as detailed in the current issue of ESPN The Magazine, you may have sent a few dollars Alexandra's way via her mother, Samantha, yet you have never taken the time to even introduce yourself, let alone share some time with a girl you brought into this world.

Alexandra does care and it's obvious she is traumatized by your apparent indifference.

Why else would she be quoted saying such things as "I'm not his daughter" and "I don't want to be in the same sentence as him" and "I'm a good person to know and if he doesn't want to know me, he's missing out"?

This is an embarrassment a man of your stature doesn't need. For that matter, no father should ever take it lightly when his daughter tells her schoolmates "My father's dead, he died in the war" rather than admit her father is a rich man who has lived a princely existence while showing no interest in a child who was born as the result of a brief fling.

You and Alexandra are in a unique position. She has seen pictures and films of you, the great Dr. J, airborne and graceful as you went to the rim during your fabulous basketball career. And you undoubtedly have seen her in pictures and clips as well. But only twice -- once, by coincidence, when she was an infant and once when she was 8 years old and walked up to you at a basketball clinic you were conducting in San Diego -- have you ever laid eyes on each other.

For two days after the story broke last year, you denied you were Alexandra's father. "How weak was that?" she has been quoted as saying.

This is not right, and it wouldn't be right even if neither of you were famous.

But it's your stature and your reputation, compounded by the hurt she feels, that makes your current relationship with her doubly unacceptable.

You're 50 years old. You need to make amends. You need to set the proper example.

You need to pick up the phone.