Photo

Some of the many dunks of Darryl Dawkins, from left: as a Net against the Kings in 1984; for the Sixers against the Celtics' Robert Parish in a playoff game in 1982; and as a Sixer in 1979. Over 15 seasons, he averaged 12 points and 6.1 rebounds a game.Credit Photographs left and right by Larry C. Morris/The New York Times; center, Associated Press

Darryl Dawkins, who arrived in professional basketball as a gigantic teenager and became one of the game’s fiercest dunkers and most notoriously lovable characters, a backboard-smashing, referee-dissing, fun-loving manchild known to fans as Chocolate Thunder from Planet Lovetron, died on Thursday in Allentown, Pa. He was 58.

Tracey Sechler, a spokeswoman for Lehigh Valley Hospital in Allentown, confirmed the death. Robert Tyler, a family friend, said the apparent cause was heart failure.

One of basketball’s larger-than-life figures — though at 6-foot-11 and more than 250 pounds he was pretty large to begin with — Dawkins made his mark on the sport’s history in a number of ways.

Selected as an 18-year-old from Orlando, Fla., by the Philadelphia 76ers as the fifth overall choice in the 1975 National Basketball Association draft, he became the first player to make the leap directly from high school to the N.B.A. (He was not the first high schooler to turn pro. A year earlier, Moses Malone had jumped from high school in Virginia to the Utah Stars, a franchise in the American Basketball Association, which merged with the N.B.A. in 1976.)

With a sculpted physique, inordinate strength and an unusually accurate jump shot for a man his size, Dawkins was expected to be a star in the league for years to come, drawing comparisons to Wilt Chamberlain. He was mischievous and flamboyant — he was known to wear an electric lime-green suit — and fond of rhyming and hyperbolic fantasy musings. (He invented the Planet Lovetron business when he was in high school.)

But immature, not technically adept around the basket and resistant to the entreaties of his coaches, Gene Shue and later Billy Cunningham — “I was uncoachable,” he admitted years later — he began his career in the shadows of other N.B.A. big men like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bob Lanier and Wesley Unseld.

Even so, by his fifth season he was averaging nearly 15 points and 9 rebounds a game. And his coaches loved him anyway.

“It was hard to be mad at Darryl Dawkins,” Cunningham recalled in an interview with ESPN in 2010. “I mean, he would drive you crazy, but then he was a little boy inside. A little boy.”

Besides, no one, not even Chamberlain, could dunk like Dawkins, and on a November night in 1979, with the Sixers playing in Kansas City against the Kings, Dawkins rose over Kings power forward Bill Robinzine and his powerful dunk literally brought down the basket, shattering the Plexiglas backboard and raining clear pellets onto the floor, and delaying the game by 90 minutes. He gave the dunk a name: “The If-You-Ain’t-Groovin’, Best-Get-Movin’, Chocolate-Thunder-Flyin’, Robinzine-Cryin’, Teeth-Shakin’, Glass-Breakin’, Rump-Roastin’, Bun-Toastin’, Glass-Still Flyin’, Wham-Bam-I-Am-Jam.”

When Dawkins repeated the feat a few games later — “The-Chocolate-Thunder-Ain’t-Playin’, Get-Out-Of-the-Wayin,’ Backboard-Swayin’, Game-Delayin’ Super Spike,” he called that one — the N.B.A. responded by warning him that he’d be fined if he did it again, and later making it illegal to hang on the basket after a dunk, a dictum that became known as the Dawkins rule.

“Everybody says a dunk is only two points, but it gets your team hyped, gets the crowd all excited and takes the starch out of other teams, especially when you dunk on somebody,” Dawkins said in an interview with The New York Times in 2004. “And I always dunked on somebody.”

Dawkins played a total of 14 seasons in the N.B.A. The first seven were with the Sixers, with whom he went to the league championship finals three times and lost each time. (In 1982-83, the season after he departed, Moses Malone replaced him at center and the Sixers won the title, which they have not done since.)

He also played for the New Jersey Nets (now the Brooklyn Nets), the Utah Jazz and the Detroit Pistons. For his career, he averaged 12 points and 6.1 rebounds per game.

More notably, he led the league three times in personal fouls, testimony to his ferocious inside play (and possibly because the refs were never crazy about him), and because he dunked so often and shot well from midrange, his career shooting percentage, .572, is the seventh highest in league history.

Darryl Dawkins was born in Orlando on Jan. 11, 1957. He was raised mostly by his mother, the former Harriet James, though Mr. Tyler, his friend, said he remained close to his father, Frank Dawkins. He led Maynard Evans High School in Orlando to the Florida state championship in 1975.

After his N.B.A. career ended, Dawkins played professionally in Italy and spent a year with the Harlem Globetrotters. In recent years he coached professional teams in Winnipeg and in Allentown, where he met Janice Hoderman, who became his fourth wife in 2001.

A gentle giant in his later years, Dawkins also coached the basketball team at Lehigh Carbon Community College in Schnecksville, Pa., not far from Allentown, where he lived.

In addition to his wife, his survivors include their son, Nicholas, and daughter, Alexis; a stepdaughter, Tabitha; a daughter from a previous marriage, Dara; his mother; and several siblings.

A number of players, including Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett and LeBron James, followed Dawkins’s lead and entered the N.B.A. straight from high school.

Not long after Dawkins’s backboard-shattering spree, the league introduced the so-called breakaway rim, which yields to downward pressure and then snaps back to the horizontal, minimizing the potential for destruction.

“The first one was an accident, but I wanted to see if I could do it again when I got back to Philadelphia,” Dawkins recalled in the 2004 Times interview, referring to his most smashingly spectacular dunks. “All the fans were hollering, ‘You’ve got to do one for the home crowd,’ so I went ahead and brought it down.

“Everybody was in awe. Fans were running out grabbing the glass. People’s hands were bleeding. I felt like I was doing something no other human could do.”