Year of the Dunk

by Asher Price

  The chief giveaway that these were humans: their stupid T-shirts. “And your point is…” was written across the front of one. A pale-faced 50-year-old who looked like Lieutenant Data from the Star Trek TV show wore a shirt that said “What part of ‘shall not be infringed’ don’t you understand?” One youngish, pimply-looking guy doing triceps dips—as if that wasn’t enough, he had tied a chain to his waist from which hung a 25-pound weight—wore a cut-off tee that said, “Nice story, babe. Now go fix me a sandwich.”

  I tried not to stare. The beefcakes were just so damn beefy. Stone-faced men with stony bodies and bouldered shoulders. Women, too, with enviable flexibility. There was a martial artist who finished her workouts with roundhouse kicks and weird, low-to-the-ground cartwheel, helicopter-like flips. I got a little light-headed just watching.

  Going to the gym is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the introduction to his 1889 Book of College Sports, famed football coach Walter Camp derided the zeal of “the new Professor Dumbbell, who drags you willy-nilly through a complex system of chest measurement and pull-prescriptions.” Three-quarters of a century later, suspicion of the weight room persisted. I once heard Bill Bradley say of his basketball career: “There’s one thing we were told never to do: ‘Never lift weights. It’ll mess with your shot.’ ” He then deadpanned: “I was thinking maybe I could have had more wins if I had lifted weights.” Of course, the notion of self-improvement through weightlifting and gym work eventually won out. It’s big business nowadays. Aging baby boomers and the growing number of companies that encourage employees to work out means gyms are now more common than McDonald’s.

  Terry Todd, a stiff-necked, thick-muscled 70-something former Austin weightlifting champion who had kindly been giving me advice on my training, claimed that an “ideal workout” awaited me each time I set foot in the gym. The trick would be to find that workout, he said. Maybe, I thought, it’s like going to a video store. Somewhere in that mess of DVDs there’s one that suits your mood perfectly, from which you will derive the most satisfaction. But if you have nothing in mind beforehand, you might find yourself wandering around aimlessly.

  I was determined not to become one of the beefcakes striding around the gym. Impressive, yes, but too much. I had a purpose, I told myself—and getting all out of proportion was not part of the plan. Besides, it’s difficult to add muscle when you’re my size. I mean, that’s a lot of territory you’re trying to cover. That’s what I told myself, at least. And did I really want to add much upper body power? Big forearms are not going to help me get off the ground.

  My gym routine opened with a fast jog to loosen up. I ran a 7:30 mile on a slight uphill on the treadmill. Then I stretched, steadily dripping sweat onto my mat. I guiltily wiped it up, then did a set of plyometrics: a series of high-knees, skipping, and jumping. I would do 600 jumps—from a standing position, small, bouncy jumps from my ankles, the sort tennis players sometimes perform before they crouch down to receive a serve; then rapid jumps with only slightly bent knees, in which I tried to get as high as possible; box jumps, in which I jumped two-footed onto and back down from a platform, quickly, quickly, quickly, to develop my explosive ability; and, worst of all, because they really burned up my legs, power jumps from a quarter-squat position, springing into the air and landing back in the quarter-squat. In addition to workouts prescribed by Polly and Jamie, I followed a regimen I bought online called Air Alert that promised its followers a higher vertical. It seemed geared toward bullied teenagers: “Never allow others to interfere with what you strongly believe,” read a Zen-inflected booklet that included the regimen, trademarked as Habitual Jump Training. (“Jumping literally becomes effortless like that of a kangaroo.”) “Do not allow others to tease or mock your goals or training. Do not allow them to discourage you. Attending to the negative things people may say will convince you to believe that what they are saying is true.” The whole thing had a Karate Kid kind of feel.

  And then the lifting. I did heavy lifting with my legs on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, giving my muscles time to recover between workouts. (“Let your muscles rest, like fields left fallow,” advised Josh, the older of my two brothers and a former marathoner.) I worked my way up the squats, as Tyler, my guru from Central Park, had directed: Each time I showed up at the gym I completed five sets of repetitions at a weight five pounds heavier than I had completed two days earlier. I did single-leg presses, in which, supine, and with much grunting, I pushed a weighted platform away from my chest. I performed so many Bulgarian split squats and Romanian deadlifts that I began imagining that the people of those nations, even the babushka grannies, sported massive thighs and tended the fields in tight-fitting singlets. I did hip exercises, the kind that Polly and Jamie suggested, that had me shuffling from side to side with a giant rubber band tied around my ankles; I did glute bridges, in which I clenched and unclenched my butt cheeks, as if I were dry-humping an invisible creature; I did embarrassing things on an exercise ball, desperately trying to keep my balance as I writhed on top of it, or looking like a hairy, obscene, rhythmic gymnast as, back on the ground, I tried to trade the ball between my feet and my hands. In New York, Jamie had told me that we would “reawaken my glutes.” I wasn’t sure that was fair to them. All these years, they had slumbered nicely, cuddled up to one another like burger buns. Even asleep they had seemed to do a fine job. Who was I to rouse them? The glutes, along with my quadriceps, abductors, sartorius, semimembranosus, psoas, soleus, and gastrocnemius—among other muscle groups, each more scary-sounding than the last—would be “recruited” for the jump, explained Jamie, as if my body were a Times Square Army office.

  Now I seemed to be spinning back the biological clock, growing stronger, slimmer, fitter. Everywhere, I sweated. It was nicely air-conditioned in the gym, but I was like a square foot of rain forest, bearing with me my own zone of tropical precipitation. Undertaking my leaping exercises—up-and-down, up-and-down—I felt like a malfunctioning suburban sprinkler, the sort that pops up irrepressibly and shoots willy-nilly. I was hardly embarrassed; to me the sweat manifested effort, and I couldn’t help but feel some satisfaction each time I swept a towel across my ruddy face.

  —

  At home, I developed a special clothes-destinking system: I draped my freshly sweated-through shirts, socks, and shorts over our front-porch railing; hours later, when they were dry and starchy, I would move them to the hamper in our bathroom; finally, when I had a critical mass of dirty clothes, I would heave them into the washing machine. Despite my precautions, for months our bathroom held the gentlest whiff of boys’ locker room. Rebecca, God bless her, said not a word. She was in my corner: However quixotic she thought my mission, she deemed it worthy. A brother of hers, Ben, really could dunk, had even played pro basketball in Germany, and as athletic as I might hope to be, she had seen up close how much stronger and faster and taller he was, and the dedication required to improve. (As a teenager, Ben used to practice into the night on the hoop in their backyard, relentlessly thump-thump-thumping the ball on their little court and rattling the rim; one evening, having had enough, the next-door neighbor took out a shotgun and blasted out the lights. Even dyed-blue Austin is, after all, deep in the heart of Texas.) Her family was pretty much basketball-obsessed, and while Rebecca was always too stumpy-legged to really play, as a teen she briefly kept a diary, one with a Botticelli painting on the cover, documenting Michael Jordan’s heroics. In it, she kept track of Jordan’s box score, wrote about his dunks, and made rough drawings of the previous night’s key moments. She was fanatical about the man—during freshman year of college, a moment in time in which it was mysteriously acceptable and even common to find perfectly intelligent people taping up mawkish posters of, say, a shirtless stud cradling a baby, or of dogs playing poker, Rebecca, true to herself, hung a black-and-white poster of Jordan, arms outstretched, a ball palmed in one hand—a cherished object in a room so small you could touch all four walls while lying on her bed (which I was
known to do). Occasionally she wore a pair of old socks emblazoned with Jordan’s number, 23. The family had, among its VHS collection, two videos of Michael Jordan highlights. So when the United Center, Jordan’s home arena, was dismantled, she and her twin sister had a small bit of the gym floor shipped to Austin, as a gift for Ben. On it was a scuff mark, one Rebecca likes to think was left by Jordan on his way to the hoop.

  She wasn’t sold that I could dunk. But in some ways I was strapping her to my back: Even as she endured my kvetching about having to work out, my stench upon my return, my groans about my cramping, massing muscles—this was the closest she would ever come to dunking, too.

  —

  328 days to go: Morning sprints–6 × 25 meters; 4 × 50 meters; 2 × 100 meters, repeated twice–and evening lifting: Hamstrings nearly parallel when I squat now, even if I feel a bit like the Tin Woodsman. Squatting only the weight of the bar, 45 pounds. Three sets of 12 lunges, bearing 15 pound dumbbells. Two sets of 15 squat jumps. Weight: 192 pounds. Why does the carrot juice carton say “Not a reduced-calorie food”? Can I not even eat carrots? Jesus.

  Progress report: One night after work I decided to shoot around at a court down the street. A bit of relaxation after a muscle-bound week. Some guy dribbling around at the other end of the court challenged me to a game of one-on-one. He was my height, roughly, a bearded white guy in his mid-20s with some roundness at the middle. Cody was his name. He might have been me a couple of months earlier, a few pounds heavier and a few pounds less muscular. With much sweating, I had dropped more than 10 pounds and cut my body-fat percentage from 21 to roughly 17. Less to carry to the rim.

  After he checked me the ball, I danced around the top of the key for a minute, trying to figure out whether just to shoot, lazily, or do my usual back-myself-in-and-awkwardly-post-up maneuver, like a Mack truck reversing slowly into a loading dock. Or, I suddenly thought, I could drive. This was an unusual thought for me, given my normal on-court deference and overall slow foot-speed. What the hell, I thought, and crossed the ball over to my left, lowered my right shoulder, and, in a couple of quick, bounding steps, beat him, surprisingly easily, to the backboard. Basket. I caught the ball as it came through the net and handed it to him so that, again, we could engage in the ball-check ritual. I wandered back to the top of the key, rubbing the sweat from my fogged-up glasses, and he bounced it back to me. I drove again: another bucket. Again and again, to the left or right. I was getting higher up, faster, even if I was nowhere close to the rim. I began wondering: Was he that weak, or was I suddenly that strong? Had these leg exercises, these glute crunches, these squats, improved my jumping already? I beat him 15–2. He wanted to run it back, so I ran all over him, again, winning 15–6. A masochist, he asked me if I wanted to play again. No thanks, I said. And stepped to the side of the court to do three sets of 12 squat jumps.

  4

  Taking the Measure of the Man

  282 days left: No pasta or beer or much else in the carbohydrate department now for two months. Can’t say I mind it much: Down to 186 pounds. Today’s regimen: Three sets of 20 squat jumps; 300 ankle hops; 150 split jumps, changing which foot lands on a box and which on the floor; 140 jump-for-joys, as I call them, the sort of jumps where you go as high as you might; three sets of 15 lunges, with a 15-pound dumbbell in each hand; three sets of two pull-ups—six more than I could muster in late August; three sets of 15 push-ups; three sets of 10 hamstring curls at 65 pounds a set; three 30-second planks. Just beginning to muscle up.

  A visitor in the summer of 1867 to the Maine town of Belfast, tucked into the upper end of Penobscot Bay, might have found a group of young men gathered around a single muscular gymnast near an old farmhouse barn. There, at the center, in the body of 17-year-old Dudley Allen Sargent, the visitor would have seen a well-sculpted youth who had perfected himself to fight in a war he was too young to wage.

  A couple of years earlier, in the closing months of the Civil War, Sargent had read Anatomy, Physiology and Hygiene, an 1852 book by a now-long-forgotten Dr. Cutter that included this exchange: “Agesilaus, King of Sparta, when asked what things boys should learn, replied, ‘Those which they will practice when they become men.’ ” The practice, of course, whether in Sparta or in 1864 Maine, was for battle. “To develop my body became an obsession with me,” Sargent later wrote.

  He took up dumbbells, Indian clubs, and boxing, and systemized his gymnastics, all the while undertaking heavy-lifting farm work, rising at 6 a.m. in the winter and 4 a.m. in the summer to complete his hay-baling, lumbering, and wood-chopping chores. He began hosting gymnastics and tumbling demonstrations at his family barn, and soon he was drawing followers. As a pastime, Sargent would lie on the barnyard floor and wrestle against two or three boys at the same time who were charged with keeping him down. The local newspaper, the Republican Journal, described him as a “young Hercules.” Despite the press, the boys largely trained in secret, to insulate themselves from a frosty Maine sensibility that predictably turned against the gym work.

  I came across a public prejudice which I was later to know well and battle hard. Some parents forbade their boys to take part in any kind of gymnastics which they regarded as “monkey shines” and “gymkinks.” The gymnasium was regarded in the same light as were billiard saloons and bowling alleys. Whether this ill feeling was a survival of a Puritanical spirit that tended to stamp out all manifestations of life and joyousness, or whether its cause lay in the custom of the German turners of performing in cheap recreation halls and saloons, I cannot say.

  Eventually, Sargent fled to the circus, literally, to become a trapeze artist and tumbler. The Goldie Brothers circus was wearying, of course—among other things, a tiresome senior clown always stole Sargent’s buckwheat pancakes—and in less than a year he made his way back to Belfast, weighing whether he might go into law, the ministry, or medicine. A friend, returned from Bowdoin in the summer of 1869, told him about a possible vacancy in the directorship of the school’s gymnasium.

  Sargent was 20 years old, a former circus runaway with little money and no college degree. But he had shown himself to be a keen, serious student of the body in a period without any such discipline. Bowdoin took him on, and that fall, in his inaugural address, the president of the college, a Mr. Harris, told his charges:

  Other things being equal, the healthy man is the happiest and makes others the happier. He is the more pleasant husband and father, the more generous friend, the cheerer and helper of the sad, in every position and relation, the wholesome man. He radiates joy. Health, as the perpetual spring of animation and energy, is the first requisite of success. It must never be out of sight in the administration of a college.

  The speech evidently made an impression on Sargent. As the gym janitor, instructor, and director, he gained the respect of the students—at one point challenging a series of them to boxing matches, which he invariably won—and remade the modest gym, importing the latest weightlifting mechanisms from Germany. After a half-dozen years at Bowdoin, however, he went to Yale for a medical degree before moving on to New York, to open his own gym, at 24th and Broadway.

  But even as he began training New Yorkers, he longed to return to the academy, to press upon young men his particular form of physical education, which conflated physical health and hygiene with moral rectitude. The teacher of physical education, a term promoted by Sargent, aims “to make the weak strong, the crooked straight, the timid courageous,” he would write in one academic journal. “His aim is not only to keep them well and prevent disease, but to lift them to a higher plane of living, morally and intellectually, as well as physically.” Such a teacher should combine technical ability and scientific know-how with “a great deal of the moral earnestness and devotion of the Christian minister.”*1 He wrote to a host of universities advertising his services and urging them to consider the addition of physical education to their curricula. The letters back were discouraging. “For the most part, of course, these letters were polite and
courteous,” he later wrote, “but not one of them left a shadow of a doubt as to the absolute impossibility of establishing such a department in any of the colleges concerned.”

  Eventually, one school called upon him—Harvard. In 1879, he was named director of the university gym, a job he would hold for the rest of his life. The university became a platform for his search, through physical education, to discover the true potential of his students. He dedicated himself to a field known as anthropometry, which sought to calculate, through a mass of tables, human capability.*2 In time, he gained a reputation, along with a beard and a serious mien, for his curriculum and his innovations, including a primitive rowing tank, “so geared that a four-mile boat race might be rowed in a hundred-foot gymnasium,” as one of his protégés described it.

  Prolific and dedicated, fixated on capturing the statistical measure of the man, Sargent late in his career grew “overtired and fagged out by trying to do too much,” a friend wrote. But in 1921, at the age of 72, with death still several years off, Dudley Sargent, then a man with a long white beard that looked as if it belonged in the nineteenth century, made one final innovation: the jump test. That year, in the American Physical Education Review, he published a paper, titled “The Physical Test of a Man,” that codified the vertical jump and gave it a sheen of scientific seriousness. “In popular estimation,” he wrote, “it takes so many inches and so many pounds and a certain size chest girth to make a man.” But there remained a mysterious “unknown equation” of athletic capability, one that ought to account for power and efficiency and that could be practically tested and numerically expressed. (After all, no one glancing at Spud Webb’s chest girth would think he had the capabilities he did.) The jump test he conceived would reveal that previously unknowable relationship. It was a discovery “so self-evident that any fool ought to have thought” of it. “It is so simple and yet so effective for testing the strongest man or weakest woman or child that one feels almost like apologizing to the general public for mentioning it,” he wrote. It was in that paper, in a sense, sprung from the cold-eyed, empirical confidence of the twentieth century, that the modern sports industry—the NFL combine, the poking and prodding of athletes, the statistical obsessions of baseball—was born. In it lies the notion that if you peer closely enough at a person, you can discern his true, mathematical composition.