Year of the Dunk

by Asher Price

  The jump, wrote Sargent, required strength, speed, and something more ineffable, which he gropingly called energy.

  First, no one would deny that the ability to project one’s weight 20 or 30 inches into the air, against the force of gravity, requires strength on the part of the muscles engaged in the effort. No one would deny that the effort would have to be made with a certain degree of velocity or speed in order to create impetus enough to carry the body twenty inches above its own level in the standing position. Further, no one would deny that back of the requisite strength of muscle fibers and rapidity with which they are made to contract there must be energy, “pep,” “vim,” vitality, or whatever it may be termed which drives our internal machinery. Overlapping all, of course, is the skill or dexterity with which the jump is executed. [Italics in original.]

  After years of inspecting young men; of training them to make the most of themselves, very much as athletes as well as moral beings; of amassing reams of statistics on human potential, he settled on the measurement of the jump as the single telling factor of a person’s physical makeup.

  —

  “Damn, I hate jumping,” whined Jamal Carter, a 315-pound, dreadlocked, baby-faced 23-year-old. No one was listening. Carter was seated on a corner of artificial turf, his squat legs sprawled out ahead of him, stretching with a bunch of other elephant-sized men, as he prepared for the vertical jump test at the Houston Texans’ Methodist Training Facility. These were, or hoped to be, NFL prospects.

  Each year, the nation’s top college football players are invited to Indianapolis to work out for scouts from each of the NFL’s 32 teams. Then there are the regional combines like this one, for the second- or third-tier players. Ones like Carter, who had recorded a decent 21 tackles in nine games as a senior at Jackson State. Or guys who dropped out of college or were thrown off their teams or were five years out of school but thought themselves great sandlot players. Teammates from Wichita, Kansas, had piled into a Hyundai Sonata to drive the 600 miles—one way. All of them had ponied up the $250 in admission and found their way to Houston with the hope of being discovered. All to be shouted at over a long morning as they participated in the same tests and drills as the players who had a more realistic shot in Indianapolis. The tryouts included the vertical jump test, the one that Dudley Sargent had landed on to get the measure of the man. The stakes could not be greater for the players, who wanted to display their potential, and the teams hoping to divine it. On the line, in the players’ minds, at least, were millions of dollars in contracts, and millions more, for the teams, wrapped up in jersey sales, television deals, and, ultimately, victories. Mike Hagen, a handsome, polo-shirt-and-khaki-shorts-wearing 50-something scout with the tired gait of an ex-athlete, called these tests “measurables.” The underlying notion was that beneath all that raw flesh, scouts could latch on to the true potential of the athlete. “This isn’t about playing football, this is about being an athlete,” Hagen told me.

  In what I took to be nervousness, the players were mostly quiet, almost solemn, as they stretched and prepared for a series of drills. The odds of success, measured in an NFL contract, for Carter and the 528 other athletes showing up in Houston—one of 10 regional combine sites—were slim. In 2012, 1,999 kids worked out at the regional combines; only four were ultimately drafted by NFL teams. “There is no unheard-of player under a rock,” Sean McKee, a bright-eyed and leprechaun-like NFL official, told me. “The analysis nowadays is so deep and thorough. But everybody here thinks he’s the one that’s been under a rock—that his talent is undiscovered.

  “We offer closure,” he continued. “No one has ever looked these guys in the eye and said, ‘It’s not happening. Go get a job, support your family.’ ”

  Sargent’s vertical jump test—along with the 40-yard dash (also known as the “dash for cash”), the shuttle run, the broad jump, the bench-press test—would determine whether actual talent lurked among this crew of massive bodies. “It all correlates,” Eric Lougas, a wide-shouldered, wide-faced football coach from Atlanta, brought in to help run the combine, told me. “Show me a guy with a good vertical, I’ll show you that guy running a good forty-yard dash.”

  The only real scout on hand was the junior man from the hometown team. Chris Blanco, a Pumas-wearing Californian, a recently minted law school grad wearing a loose-fitting Houston Texans hoodie, stood with a clipboard, barely bothering to make notes as one would-be player after another tried the 40-yard dash. I asked him if I would be able to tell the difference if Andre Johnson, the All-Pro wide receiver for the Texans, were doing these drills. “No doubt,” he said. “He just moves different from these guys. Totally smooth, totally efficient. Almost all these guys look like they’re trying.”

  The players, wearing black uniforms—some sized as large as XXXL—rotated, over the course of a couple of hours, between the different workout stations. The place was oddly quiet, muffled like a mitten, despite the huge men stomping around. In the vast, hollowed-out belly of the practice facility bubble, they appeared to me as a thousand Jonahs, each mumbling a prayer for his salvation. So much—contracts, money, esteem—rode on the outcome of just a few tests.

  Gathered in a corner of the practice bubble by the facility’s concrete loading dock, one group, including Jamal Carter, prepared to jump. One at a time they stood next to a tall vertical staff hinged up high with a host of perpendicular rods that were ready to swing with the slightest nudge. This device is called a Vertec. The aim is to touch the highest possible rod. Eric Lougas, the friendly football official from Atlanta, stood above them on a stepladder, going through the instructions.

  “First I’m going to measure your reach with your arm straight above your head,” he said, striking the role of a benevolent teacher. “Then you’re going to get two jumps. Don’t swing the hell out of your hand, because if you do, what does that mean? It means you’re using all your energy to bring your hand all the way back. Just tap it.”

  Soon it was Jamal’s turn. He rolled his neck back and forth and peered up at the Vertec. Then he went into a half squat and rolled his way up: 18 inches. About my vertical, except he had at least 120 pounds on me.

  Lougas used the stick like a croupier to reset the rods.

  Next up was Tommy White, a handsome six-foot-tall, 210-pound cornerback who had graduated from Grambling two years earlier. He had told me he’d spent the last two years as a vegetarian while dedicating his life to working out and practicing yoga. He stepped beneath the Vertec and rocked down and up, down and up, down and up, and each time I was sure he would jump. Finally, he exploded into the air with a wail and snapped the rods.

  “Thirty-eight inches!” Lougas boomed. “Now let’s get forty! Get forty!”

  The other athletes, none of whom had been paying attention, were now suddenly into it.

  “C’mon, bro!” shouted one.

  “Get on up!” shouted another.

  Forty inches would turn heads among scouts. Calvin Johnson, the star wide receiver for the Detroit Lions known as Megatron, had notched a 46-inch vertical at the NFL combine.

  Again, White went into his up-and-down, springlike gyrations, as if he were trying to fake us all out. Again, he yelped as he heaved upward. Once more: 38 inches.

  I thought White would be pleased, but he looked deflated.

  “I could do better,” he told me.

  That seemed to be a theme, to a man. Each of the athletes I interviewed claimed to have performed better in his own workouts, at his own gym. Disappointment lingered in the air, pressed out through the cold mechanism of assessment.

  —

  Presiding over this mass of men was Coach Stephen Austin, a small, trim tyrant. “We are guests at this facility,” he told the players, assembled on bended knee before him. “If when I get to the restroom I see as much as a piece of tissue on the ground, there’s going to be trouble. Demeanor, focus—we evaluate everything; it’s as important as your athletic ability.” Privately, I very much doubt
ed that anything much mattered other than those “measurables” of athleticism. “This is serious business,” Austin continued. “This is a day you’re going to remember for a long, long time.”

  That part I believed. Besides participating in the jumping and sprinting tests and some football drills, before men in clipboards and polo shirts who unfeelingly jotted down notes that could shape their lives, the players had to strip down, one by one, and stand in front of a video camera, whose operator slowly panned up and down their bodies, front and back. There was a peculiar cast to the whole thing, of young men, almost all black, being examined by a group of largely white men, of being poked and prodded, and of being told to strip to their underwear so that a young white man could videotape their physiques. On the auction block, slaves had to, among other things, jump for their would-be buyers. A Sargent test before Sargent was even born, and another act of humiliation, surely, in a life of humiliation and worse. Beyond the degradation, it was meant, along with looking at teeth and musculature, as a crude way to test their potential. The film clips, I was told, would eventually be uploaded to the Internet, sortable by player, and I imagined team executives sitting before the glow of their computers, in a dark room, gazing at the physique of one man and then another.

  At a lunch buffet reserved for the scouts and NFL staff, I started chatting with Austin. I asked him where he had been a coach. No, he told me, he was merely acting the role. “I’m a businessman,” he said. “I play many parts.” He had started his company in the late 1980s, one of many to scout out college kids as football became big business. “My big innovation,” he said—and here I waited for something profound, some insight into the mix of qualitative and quantitative examination—“was pre-registration.” I glanced from side to side as I tried to figure out if I was missing something. Evidently, little had been tabulated about the prior experience of the players—what college football conferences they had played in, for instance. So he kept and built up data so that players could be compared as apples to apples. I didn’t quite understand, since a vertical is a vertical is a vertical, but I think his point was that the consequence of all this pre-registration was that he could distribute tables to general managers and football teams.

  “You ever really read what I send you?” he told me he once asked Ozzie Newsome, a big man, a former football player, who had become one of the few black general managers in the league. They were in Newsome’s office, and like a cloud passing on a sunny day, Newsome pushed himself, sitting in a swivel chair, to the side, and gestured toward a shelf of binders that were behind him.

  “All the time.”

  Austin told this story with obvious relish: Newsome’s Baltimore Ravens had become Super Bowl champions only a couple of weeks earlier, and Newsome had been credited with building the franchise through savvy scouting.

  Evidently the key was pre-registration.

  —

  At the end of the day, the players assembled again on bended knees before Austin. They had carefully aligned themselves at midfield, between the hash marks, as they had been instructed by Lougas, one of Austin’s underlings. “If you don’t want to make Coach Austin mad, do as I tell you,” he whispered to the athletes. These would-be players, it was clear to me, would do anything, small as it might be, to move to the super-regional. I knew Jamal Carter wasn’t going to make it—I saw him icing his hamstring, which he had popped during the 40-yard dash. And Tommy White had rubbed Coach Austin the wrong way by taking a little longer than the others to get into a three-point stance before starting his dash: “What is this guy, a prima donna?” Austin shouted to no one in particular. Tommy compounded matters by complaining that the officials had not recorded his correct time—he insisted that he was consistently faster. (Of the dozen or so players I interviewed, only one, I would later learn, made it past the Houston event. He was invited to a Washington Redskins minicamp before getting cut.)

  “You need to have a second dream,” Austin told them. Then they heard a couple of spiels. An NFL officer told them about officiating opportunities. “Whether you make the NFL or not, there are other job opportunities so you can be involved in the game,” she told them, touching on the necessity of clock operators to a group still unready to recognize the shortcomings of their own potential. “Officials maintain the integrity of the game. And you can be officiating the rest of your lives.” The players remained politely quiet, even if many of them appeared to be staring into space. And then a chief with the Navy SEALs, a sponsor of the regional combines, spoke warmly about military camaraderie. He was tall, broad-shouldered, curly-haired, and wearing camouflage. “You guys have what the SEALs are looking for,” he said. As the group finally disbanded—“We’ll call you if we want you to come to Dallas,” the site of the next round of tryouts, Austin told them—several of the players came up to the SEAL chief. “How much does it pay?” they wanted to know.

  There was something admirable, touchingly sincere, and maybe a little desperate about these men. Most of us surrender our rockstar dreams at an early age. They still wanted to see what they could make of themselves even as the realities of the world bore down on them. Just as I was packing up to leave, a player came up to me, a slender, muscular kid. He wanted me to take a look at a DVD he had prepared of his football highlights; he hoped, I realized, that I was an agent or maybe a scout—another white dude with a notepad who might offer a bit of help. No second dream—not yet, at least.

  —

  Dec. 26, 242 days left: Back to 188 on the scale. Oy gevalt. No big surprise: Christmas Eve dinner of cuminy pork loin in cognac cream sauce with pears; Brussels sprouts broiled with onion and bacon; Linzer torte, baked by yours truly, with fat dollops of whipped cream. Why should I run from my Austro-Hungarian destiny? Squatting 120 pounds, more than twice my starting weight.

  Progress report: Setbacks. A New Year’s Eve scooter accident—braking suddenly on a rain-slick road—left me tumbling along the concrete like a stuntman; I was largely uninjured, save a bloody elbow and a bruised left hip. And then, three days ago, I tweaked my back while squatting. I wasn’t lifting much—roughly the weight of a small woman lying across my shoulders—but I’m laying off the weights for a couple of weeks.

  * * *

  *1 The relationship between morality and physical robustness was a common thread in Sargent’s time. “Even if the day ever dawns in which [muscular vigor] will not be needed for fighting the old heavy battles against nature,” William James, the psychologist and brother of Henry James, wrote in his 1911 Gospel of Relaxation, “it will still always be needed to furnish the background of sanity, serenity, and cheerfulness to life, to give moral elasticity to our disposition, to round off the wiry edge of our fretfulness, and make us good-humored and easy of approach.”

  *2 He derived, through some odd mathematics, a “vitality coefficient.” In an 1887 treatise on the principal characteristics of the human body, Sargent describes the vitality coefficient as equal to the respiratory-height coefficient multiplied by the organic health coefficient. Got that? The same pamphlet, which gives directions for measuring abdomen depth, limb girth, and chest expansion—to determine said coefficients—offers health tips. “Rub vigorously after a cold bath; secure a fine glow, becoming thoroughly alive.”

  5

  A Natural History of Leaping

  In 2003, Malcolm Burrows, a professor at Cambridge who specializes in the nervous system of locusts, was leading some of his students in field research in the lovely English coastal town of Wells-next-the-Sea when he decided to ask them to capture some froghoppers, also known as the spittlebug for the frothy liquid in which their babies immerse themselves. They are wet, incontinent creatures. “There are constantly little drops of water coming off them,” Burrows told me. “So when you’re in the forests of northern Canada and it feels wet, that’s because they’re peeing on you all the time.” Burrows had read recently about the jumping exploits of fleas, and he wondered how the common froghopper, which he had not
iced quickly flitting about, stacked up. Students being students, they obliged. Armed with narrow-holed butterfly nets, they managed to capture some of the bugs. At the lab, Burrows put one of the froghoppers in front of a high-speed camera that captured 500 frames per second. The first frame spotted the insect; the rest were blank. After he upgraded to a 5,000-frames-per-second camera, only five frames caught the creature.

  It turned out that with a combination of an ingenious catapulting mechanism and an advanced energy-storage-and-release system, the froghopper had jumped incredibly far incredibly quickly. “Froghoppers have relatively short and light hind legs that are powered by huge jumping muscles and a novel locking mechanism that allows force generated before the jump to be released rapidly,” Burrows later wrote in the journal Nature. When it prepares to jump, the froghopper pulls its legs in and they lock in place by means of Velcro-like pads between them. As the massive muscles slowly contract, the insect stores the potential energy in its very skeleton, in a pair of curved structures shaped liked archery bows. That skeleton is composed, in part, of a rubberlike material called resilin, known for being the world’s most efficient elastic material. Before each jump, the skeleton bends and bends and then—thwap!—it releases, the legs extend, and the froghopper goes flying.