by Asher Price
Wingate died in a plane crash in jungle hills in India at age 41. Lord Mountbatten, charged with overseeing Wingate’s operations, as if any mere human could do so, eulogized him as a “fire-eater.” Peggy Jelley, with whom he had a five-year affair in his late twenties, never married because “after Orde, all other men seemed uninteresting.” He had done some of his most fearless fighting in the Middle East, and after the creation of the state of Israel the country’s newly minted sporting and athletics center, near the Mediterranean city of Netanya, was named for him. Scientists at the center developed the Wingate Test, meant to evaluate the very qualities that made Orde Wingate such a badass—power and endurance.
Judging by the test named for him, I might have mutinied had I been one of Wingate’s soldiers. I didn’t vomit, but my legs afterward felt like only recently refrigerated pudding. My head hurt and my chest heaved. My results on the Wingate Test, as with everything else I did that day, were mediocre. For good or bad, I was a decidedly everyday athlete. My mean power was 607 watts; during the slog-through-the-mud part, which was meant to simulate the sort of explosion of power needed to do things like dunk, it reached 770 watts. The lab scientists offered some bizarre comparisons to explain my performance, apparently the only ones they had on hand: I was in the “very good” category of Israeli males my age, and my results “were consistent with those of female Division I basketball centers.” OK, there are recorded cases of women and Jews (like me) dunking. But not very many. (My colleague at the Austin American-Statesman Ralph Haurwitz tells a story of the week his daughter got into Harvard and his 15-year-old son first dunked. Another of our colleagues, also Jewish, joked: “What’s the bigger headline? ‘Jewish Girl Gets into Harvard’ or ‘Jewish Boy Can Dunk’?”) Part of me was a little disappointed. I was never a lousy athlete and I had secretly hoped that I would turn out, in this initial reckoning, to have hidden talent. But empirically, I had just learned, I was completely average. Clearly, if I could dunk at the end of the year, my achievement would be a testament to the malleability of the human body.
Before I left the Performance Lab that early summer afternoon, I suggested Polly and Jamie privately scribble down and seal their thoughts about whether I could ever dunk. Then, summer-camp-style, I’d open up the envelopes after a year had passed. I didn’t want them to reveal to me their doubts, but I wanted, eventually, a frank sense of their uncertainties. Polly waved my idea off. “I really think you can do this. I see people do things they think are impossible all the time here.” She then told me a story. She once asked an old coach of hers whether she ought to compete in a triathlon intimidatingly called Escape from Alcatraz. If she couldn’t make it across San Francisco Bay, she didn’t want to bother. “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re probably right,” her former coach told her.
That night Rebecca and I and a friend bought $15 last-minute tickets to the New York City Ballet. Sunk into the plush seats, my arms sore from my pathetic dozen push-ups, my legs as wrung-out as an old sponge, I found my weary eyes tracking the male dancers as closely as they could. Stage lights twinkled behind them. Peering out from the dark, I watched the clenching of their buttocks, their pinpoint balance, their controlled, precise jumps. Telescoped before me were decades of training, of dieting, of stretching. This, I thought to myself, would be a hell of a year.
2
Evolution and the Dunk
During his senior year with the Illinois College Blueboys, crew-cutted guard Jacob Tucker averaged more than 14 points and seven rebounds per game. He earned captaincy of the team and the respect of opponents. But it wasn’t for his basketball skills that the obscure Division III player became an Internet phenom. In March 2011, the 5′11″ Tucker put video of himself dunking over friends on YouTube. His jump was measured at an eye-popping 50 inches. The video went on to capture five million hits, and the NCAA invited Tucker to compete in its Final Four weekend slam-dunk contest. He won—and became a small-time celebrity. After throwing out ceremonial first pitches for the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago White Sox, he was signed by the Harlem Globetrotters. Under the name “Hops,” he now runs the pick-and-roll a thousand times a year to “Sweet Georgia Brown” with a 7′8″ dude named Tiny.
There are many ways to determine the greatest jumpers. There are the famous dunkers, like Michael Jordan and Dr. J, who won the adoration of millions on television. There are the inch-for-inch leapers, like wee Spud Webb. There are the artists, like Mikhail Baryshnikov and Anna Pavlova, the original dying swan, whose successes are measured in gasps, bravos, and applause. Then there are the Olympic-caliber athletes, like the Cuban Javier Sotomayor, perhaps the prettiest of jumpers, whose 1993 high jump world record of eight feet and one-half inch, set with a series of long, languorous strides in short shorts, still stands. Or Bob Beamon, whose 1968 Olympic long jump of 29 feet, two and a half inches, in the high altitude of Mexico City, took 15 minutes to measure because the optical device on hand wasn’t equipped to measure such a feat, and who, when he finally heard the news, melted to his knees in shock.
But for all the tremendous feats of these athletes, humans generally have terrible explosive powers, whether jumping or sprinting. “Humans are mediocre runners in several respects,” Dennis Bramble and Daniel Lieberman wrote in an influential 2004 Nature magazine article titled “Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo.” “Even elite human sprinters are comparatively slow,” they continued, capable of sustaining maximum speeds of 10.4 meters per second for no more than 30 seconds. In contrast, other mammals, such as horses and pronghorn antelopes, can gallop 20 meters per second for several minutes. Even at short distances, we’re pretty inefficient sprinters compared to our mammalian brethren: In top gear, our bodies demand roughly double the metabolic energy of similar-sized mammals. Compounding matters, human runners are less maneuverable and lack the many “structural modifications” of other mammals, such as feet in which the toes are on the ground and the heels are off (as is the case with dogs and cats) and short limb segments, that make them good sprinters and jumpers.
But what humans are good at—fabulous, really—is endurance running. That quality is unique to humans among the primates. It’s uncommon among four-legged mammals, too: Well-conditioned human runners have even been known to outrun horses over long distances. Anyone who is a dog owner knows that his or her dog is much faster in a short sprint. Even fat dogs. But take them for a long run on a leash on a hot day in the park, and they’ll eventually refuse to move. Panting, they’ll splat out like little polar-bear rugs on the sidewalk.
Stride length, skeletal strength, trunk and head stabilization, heat regulation—even reduced body hair compared to our forebears—make us distance-running machines. With each step, our collagen-rich tendons and ligaments store elastic energy during the “braking phase” and then release it through recoil during the ensuing “propulsive phase.” Your leg basically acts like a spring, coiling up and then releasing out. “We actually jump all the time,” Lieberman told me when I reached him at his Harvard lab. “It’s called running, which, in effect, is a series of very small jumps.”
But as evolution selected us for endurance running after we clambered out of the African trees and onto the plains, it de-emphasized explosive jumping ability. All animals—whole species as well as individuals—face this trade-off between slow-twitch muscles and fast-twitch muscles. You can’t be both a great long-distance runner and a great sprinter. And very long ago, Homo sapiens, or, more likely, our predecessor Homo erectus, made that swap. Our ancestors, chimps, remained arboreal, climbing from tree to tree and branch to branch, and studies show that other primates have much better jumping ability than we do. A 2006 paper by a group of Belgian scientists, for instance, found that bonobos have verticals nearly twice that of humans.
Yet this loss of jumping ability and the evolution of endurance running was crucial for human development. Before the advent 30,000 years ago of sophisticated projectile technology, such as
bows and arrows and spears, that would allow us to hunt from afar, long-distance running ability meant that we could chase our prey to exhaustion. Endurance running, write Lieberman and Bramble, may have “played a role in helping hominids exploit protein-rich resources such as meat, marrow and brain first evident in the archaeological record at approximately 2.6 million years ago, coincident with the first appearance of Homo.” (“Marathon runners may be a masochistic lot,” the Duke biologist Steven Vogel once observed, “but they don’t do anything physiologically perverse or historically novel.”)
In a sense, then, my dunking quest meant not only changing that balance on an individual basis but fighting against some of the very things that evolutionarily made me human. Which was exactly why, at the end of our interview, Dan Lieberman laughed and said that I was destined to fail.
—
In June, my New York City journalism fellowship over, I made the long drive, with wife and dog, back to Texas. Some people call Austin, my chosen hometown, the Velvet Rut—a place where people settle a little too easily into their comforts. Maybe it’s the hot, languid summers. The land of the lotus-eaters, my brother-in-law calls it, recalling the island whose distracting flowers steer Odysseus’ men toward oblivion as they forget their homeward purpose. Even the smoky-smelling meat takes its time getting cooked: In Texas, barbecue means exposing brisket and ribs to indirect heat for fourteen hours or more as they slowly transform into what Rebecca calls meat candy. This is her native seat—Rebecca’s parents have long taught at the university—and, once we wrapped up college and grad school, she wanted to come back.
Rebecca had moved around a lot as a kid, with her parents conducting research or doing visiting lectureships abroad or in California, but the family home in Austin, an oak-floored 1920s place with a backyard shaded by pecan trees, was always the touchstone. The moving around made the family very close, and Rebecca, the littlest and youngest of five kids, a little shy, always thought of herself as the runt. She’s not actually that small—she’s 5′6″, maybe 5′7″—and in private she’s something of a Muppet, pulling silly faces and impersonating Crocodile Dundee, but she still scrunches up easily, finding ways to curl up beside me even on a Greyhound bus. She’s the sort of person you could fit snugly into a pantry cabinet, if you ever had to put a person somewhere up high. And honestly, she really wouldn’t mind; she’s hardy and resourceful, as handy with knitting needles and a hammer as she is with a pen. If you prepared her a little bed and left her a book, she’d be satisfied for a long while.
We had met at Yale early in our freshman year—her twin sister and I shared a philosophy class; soon the three of us had a steady lunch date after the seminar—and by Halloween I was smitten enough that I allowed her to dress me up as a die-hard Dallas Cowboys fan. (Rebecca still spends her Saturdays and Sundays each autumn wearing Longhorns T-shirts and Cowboys jerseys, ever ready to chew out boneheaded, head-setted offensive coordinators on television.) I’m pretty sure that as a New York City kid I didn’t know Austin existed before I met Rebecca. If I knew of it at all, it was as a piece of trivia—one of those random cities you wouldn’t expect to be capitals: Frankfort, Kentucky; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Carson City, Nevada. When I first got here, just out of school, I thought I would stick around for only a year or two before seeking my fortune back east. I was hungry. Soon, I was seldom hungry, partly because I ate so much and did so little: the television, the Tex-Mex, the laptop, another juicy peach, a spoonful more of whipped cream, ice cream, too, another helping of barbecue. Austin grew on me. “I haven’t got one of those bellies that sag half-way down to the knees,” George Bowling, George Orwell’s narrator in his midlife crisis novel Coming Up for Air, tells us. “It’s merely that I’m a little bit broad in the beam, with a tendency to be barrel shaped.” I now had a chance to rediscover some get-up-and-go. But how much youthfulness did I have left in me? Besides the problem of evolutionary fate, I faced a more immediate challenge—my age. At the still-tender age of 33, was it too late for me to dunk?
“You are definitely on the cusp,” Susan Brooks, a professor of molecular and integrative physiology at the University of Michigan, told me. She specializes in muscle function—and failure—among older people. “When we talk in generalities—and there are exceptions to every rule—age 30 is right around peak in performance, in terms of body mass and strength. You are not by any means hopeless—bad stuff with muscle tissue doesn’t really happen till age 50.”
“But age 30,” she repeated, maybe just to depress me a little, “is when we start to see declines” in how efficiently cells process energy.
Each of us is born with a set number of muscle fibers, and those can change in length as we grow, or in diameter as we train. Or the fibers can shrink. They’re very plastic. You can modulate the size of those individual fibers throughout your whole life, especially through exercise. But around my age, and certainly by 50, some of those fibers will start to go away, in a process that isn’t very well understood by scientists. By the age of 85 you may have lost as many as half of your weight-bearing muscle fibers, like blocks pulled out of a Jenga tower. Typically, the fibers that get lost early are the fast-twitch type, the ones for explosive power. That’s why sprinters typically fade at an earlier age than marathoners. And why the average age of NBA players hovers around 27. Researchers have noticed this phenomenon even in some of the longest-living creatures on Earth—bivalve mollusks—and as different as they are from humans, they still tell us something about ourselves. The clamping closed or the fast release of a shell is not, in its way, unlike the explosive power needed to dunk a basketball.
Tendon elasticity—an important component of jumping—also narrows with age, as the quality of collagen changes. As we prepare to jump, in that second in which we lower our butts and push out our knees, we stretch our Achilles tendons by about 5 percent. That tendon stretch stores up the energy like a stretched rubber band before it’s released into the air. But we’re far less flexible as adults, of course, than we are as babies. And in our 30s we’re less flexible than we were as 20-somethings, meaning, ultimately, that we have less capacity to hoard energy before embarking on an activity like jumping. The early 30s is when the nerve impulses begin to quiet down: By the age of 55, my nerves will fire 5 percent less quickly than they do now. All of us, in short, are turning into earthbound statues by the day.
Still, the plaster is not quite set, and researchers have recently found that things thought to be beyond improvement can, in fact, change with training. The operative word here is “train.” And if I was going to dunk, my charge was to train like a madman. Jamie had just sent me an Excel spreadsheet with a regimen. “We’re so excited to be on this journey with you!” he wrote me. How do these guys always make pain sound so metaphysical?
—
The sanctum sanctorum of the University of Texas basketball program is the basement of the Denton Cooley Pavilion, a brutalist building adjacent to the Drum, the school’s basketball arena. I had scootered up on the sort of super-hot Austin day that reduces a person to the consistency of baking cookie dough. A glass cabinet held player-of-the-year trophies belonging to Kevin Durant, the NBA star and former Longhorn, and conference-championship bling belonging to the rest of the team. “Desire Creates Power” read a sign inside one of the cases.
I was there to see Todd Wright, the program’s strength and conditioning coach. The NBA player and former Longhorn LaMarcus Aldridge once said of Wright, “He had a plan that wasn’t like any other weight training. He looks at feet. Feet. Hips. Everything. It shows that he knows how the human body works.” An Austin American-Statesman article described his methods “to help a player learn to stretch parts of his body so complicated actions—the proper release of joints, the firing of muscles, the preservation of energy—are as efficient as possible.” If I was going to dunk, Wright might be my Yoda.
“He’s part of my family,” Durant once said. In a sign of how strongly his players and bosses believe
in Wright’s work, his pay is $235,000 a year. (The head men’s basketball coach, Rick Barnes, was among the state’s highest paid employees, with an annual salary of $2.4 million before resigning with his staff in March 2015. This being Texas, university football coach Charlie Strong is the highest paid, at $5 million per year.) I wanted Wright to help me, but first I had to get to his office, in the weight room at the base of Denton Cooley. Beyond the glass cases I found myself facing a locked glass door, one that required a special key code to get through. A clean-shaven young man wearing a burnt-orange polo shirt punched in some numbers and in I went. Perhaps UT’s weightlifting facility is the world’s safest, I thought, the Fort Knox of worthless metal.
Wright was intimidating, a bison of a man. Six-foot-four and brawny. His head was about the size of a small watermelon, and just as bald. Clear blue eyes stared out from heavy folds of skin. He told me to sit down. Like a dog, I shrank into a chair. To dunk, he said, you need to work on three things: ground reaction, overcoming gravity, and momentum. “These are the drivers,” he said gravely. I asked him what he meant by “ground reaction.” “We want you to push your feet through the ground as fast as possible,” he said. “We want your arches exploding.” That sounded painful. He had put together a theory of jumping improvement that involved jumping, hopping, leaping, and skipping, which he had boiled down to the ungainly contraction “juhoplepsking.”
He looked me over. “You definitely have the architecture of a dunker,” he said approvingly. I admit to a swell of pride—as if I were any more responsible for my height than for my name. We began talking basketball, and he naturally started mimicking players’ motions from his swivel chair. I was surprised at his grace. He demonstrated Dirk Nowitzki’s shot, leaning back in his chair, kicking out one leg, and then flying a very lanky arm straight back, almost behind him, and snapping his wrist through the air as he shot an imaginary ball. He looked like he was swimming backstroke.