Year of the Dunk

by Asher Price

  There are two ways of looking at Fosbury’s innovation. The prosaic way is that his breakthrough was possible only because of the evolution of the landing material on the other side of the bar. For decades, piles of sawdust and wood chips offered meager cushioning to those launching themselves skyward. But just as Fosbury got going, equipment manufacturers introduced primitive foam-landing pads, making it at least conceivable to a scrawny Oregon teen that he could throw himself over the bar and land on the back of his neck and shoulders.* Regions of the world that lack the foam landing pad continue to use bygone methods of high jumping. (High school jumpers in rural Kenya, lacking any cushioning surface save the ground itself, favor the Eastern cut-off, a contortion of limbs and twists that last garnered a world record in 1895. In fascinating YouTube videos, the jumpers land on their feet, keeping them happily safe.)

  Another way to think about Fosbury’s breakthrough, the way I prefer to think about it, is as a story of individual creativity. Even if Fosbury didn’t realize, as a 15-year-old in a proto-hippie enclave in southwest Oregon, exactly what he was doing—that, in a bit of genius, he had figured out a way to yank himself above the bar even while leaving his center of mass below it—even if he didn’t realize all these things off the bat, he had the chutzpah to describe a new kind of parabola. Fosbury had more or less instantly rewritten his potential, from a kid with pedestrian capabilities to one for whom a world record was within reach. Some sort of jumping ability was always there, deep inside Fosbury, but it needed some creative courage to reveal itself.

  There are some lessons here for the would-be dunker: the fast run-up; the placing of the plant foot slightly ahead of the body to reduce forward momentum; the emphasis on pushing against the ground to drive yourself up (the harder you push against the ground, the harder it pushes back up against you, as Sir Isaac Newton, renowned for his jumping facility, put it); the possibility, finally, that a tall, skinny kid of no great apparent talent might find himself achieving greater heights than he thought possible.

  But try as I might, I can’t drum up a novel way to dunk. While Fosbury ingeniously figured out a way to hoist his entire body over an ever-higher bar that day in Grants Pass, he wasn’t necessarily leaping any higher. I, on the other hand, do have to jump higher than I ever have before. As a human projectile keen on dunking, once I leave the ground there is little I can do to change my trajectory.

  —

  Jumping is safe, warned Arthur Chapman in his biomechanics textbook, unless it is done “in a room with a low ceiling.” Yes, Arthur, again, thanks very much for that. For some guidance on form, and to practice in a space with higher ceilings, I headed to San Marcos, just a half hour south of Austin, to the warehouse-like gym of Charles Austin. Austin is no ordinary jumper: As a 29-year-old, he won the gold medal in the high jump at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. He cleared 7′10″. Put another way, he lifted his entire body over your front door. That mark remains the Olympic record. His gym, So High Fitness, is plastered with life-size photos of Austin preparing to jump, soaring, and bowing his head to accept another medal. Can’t blame the guy. He’s still competitive—cocky, even—and muscly; he still looks like he could clear at least 7 feet. In fact, he tells me he could. I ask him how often he works out now: “Just enough to maintain this,” he says, glancing down at himself admiringly. He tells me with obvious pride and sincere anxiety about how his sons will overtake him. His middle son, Allex, started out gangly, clumsy. Now he’s on the track team at Baylor. “He’s a bigger, better version of me,” Austin told me. “I hate telling him that, and I don’t so often.” Last year, before heading off to Baylor, Allex won the state high school high jump contest with a mark of 7′2″.

  “ ‘Dad, I don’t understand why your records are so impressive,’ ” Austin says Allex told him.

  “ ‘Clown, what you talking about?’

  “He tells me: ‘I won state twice in a row.’ I said, ‘You kidding? You think I care about state?’ ”

  He laughs—he laughs at just about everything—as he tells this story. The youngest of 10 children, Charles Austin had grown up poor, black, and fatherless in the small, steamy South Texas town of Van Vleck. (“One thing that bothered me was seeing dads there cheering on their sons,” he says, clearly angered still at his father’s absence. “I know I’ll be there for my kids.”) His mother raised Charles and his siblings on a maid’s salary. Part of his own narrative as a disciplined self-starter is how he became a student of track and field—without hiring a coach. “Most people paid crazy money,” Austin said. (As he told me this, the irony of my paying him $100 an hour for a few training sessions wasn’t lost on me.) “I sat there and watched other people working out. I picked the best sprinter, I looked at the arm action, how the feet strike the ground. How relaxed the hands are and whether the wrists are tight.”

  At the end of my first interview with Austin, he asked me to show him what I could do. “You can touch the rim, right?” I was nervous. I’d have to jump for one of the world’s top jumpers. I hemmed and hawed. “Well, yes, but, you know, I’m not warmed up. I haven’t stretched or anything.” He smiled broadly. “Let’s see it.” So we stepped out of his office and onto the adjacent basketball court. I put down my pen and pad, squinted at the hoop, leaned backward to size it up, and then took a short run-up, leapt, and—managed to touch the rim. I was relieved.

  Then I turned to see Austin doubled over, chortling. “If you can touch the rim cold, with that kind of form, I can get you to dunk,” he said. It was a backhanded kind of encouragement, of course, yet I couldn’t help laughing with him. I gathered my notebook and prepared to go. He stepped closer to me and leaned in conspiratorially. He told me that one reason he likes to work out is that he likes to “look nice,” especially for his wife. He said he likes it when she comes up behind him and feels his strong, naked buttocks. He had a big grin on his face now and, not knowing what to say but feeling a need to say something, I nodded: “Yeah, but I’ve got some hairy buttocks.” He stopped smiling, lightly pursed his lips, and nodded sagely back.

  * * *

  * There was widespread trepidation among high jumpers those first couple of years at imitating Fosbury. In the High Jump Book, Dwight Stones, Fosbury’s successor as the U.S. high jumping king, recalls athletes and coaches of the late 1960s worrying that the flop “would foster a generation of broken necks and damaged vertebrae…I was reluctant to intentionally adopt an unorthodox method of jumping if the injury potential was greater than with traditional jumping.” But the chance of victory is persuasive: By the Munich Olympics, four years after Fosbury won on the world stage, 28 of 40 high jumpers used the flop. Today, virtually all elite jumpers use the method.

  6

  The Rise of the Dunk

  Feb. 4, 202 days to go: Weight is down to 185, emerging from post-Christmas funk. Body fat at 15 percent, down from 21 percent last August. Breakfast is light now: Grapefruit and a bowl of nonfat Greek yogurt, with just a teaspoon of black cherry jam mixed in. And roughly 21 pieces of fruit: Apples, prunes, grapes, bananas, and mangos. Squatting 135 pounds, carefully. The usual jumping exercises, and lunges with 17.5-pound dumbbells. Three sets of five pull-ups. Night-time sprints, beneath the buzzing orange magnesium lights of the deserted middle school track a couple of blocks from my house; 10 200-meter dashes, two minutes’ rest after each rep. (The middle school, named for a Confederate soldier, counted Ann Richards as a teacher before she began her political career. I summon her steel.) Then four sets of 30 squat jumps. The heads of imagined book reviewers float before me, urging me on: I’m becoming convinced, in the cold heat and loneliness of late winter wind sprints, of a relationship between my leaping ability and the quality of my writing.

  One afternoon during the summer, a bunch of us were playing against some older kids in the Carver schoolyard. I had grown to six-foot-eight but the older guys were still beating me up every time I got close to the basket. And whenever I called a foul, they’d say, “
Shut up, bitch. I barely touched you.” I got so mad that the next time I got the ball I just jumped as high as I could and stuffed the ball through the hoop. Everybody just stopped and stared at me. Then somebody said, “Do you know what you just did?”

  “What? What? What?”

  “You just dunked the ball, man!”

  Thus begins the career of Chocolate Thunder, also known as Darryl Dawkins, a mountain of a man who gained fame in the late 1970s for shattering backboards with his tremendous dunks. As part of my dunking research, I had become a connoisseur of the basketball player autobiography, a genre in the universe of sports books distinct for its meditations on sex, race, and hardship. I would skim them quickly, flitting past stories about broken homes, absent fathers, and how Mormon girls were surprisingly easy. I learned to roll my eyes at another claim by Wilt Chamberlain that he concentrated at basketball just as he concentrated at sex because he wanted to be the best at whatever he did. I was looking for a single trope: the moment of the first dunk.

  I wanted to catch that early spark that lit the bright flame of their careers. From our perspective, basketball players appear to be naturals, given their size and the ease with which they explode to the basket. But what is it like for them? Accounts of their first dunks provide a way for these players to wrestle with the larger question of how much of their ability was natural on the one hand—something of which they are reasonably proud—and how much was the result of sweat and effort on the other. The latter explanation fits into a narrative, often moving, about growing up in, and striving out of, poverty—especially black poverty—in America.

  In Charles Barkley’s autobiography, his mother, a husbandless maid who cleaned the homes of well-to-do whites and worked in the school cafeteria, recounts his persistence with a jump rope she bought him: “I thought he was going to jump that rope to death.” Still, he needed to work hard to build up his legs to make the high school basketball team, “so one day I decided to try and jump over the chain-link fence around our house from a standing start, back and forth, like a jumpin’ jack…Just being able to clear a three-and-a-half-foot fence was like a high, a rush,” Barkley writes.

  “Man, this’ll work,” I thought.

  So, I did it again. And again.

  I didn’t care how dangerous it was, but my fence-jumping used to drive Granny crazy. She tried to warn me that if I made a mistake and missed, I could mess myself up for life, “as for having children you know,” she used to say. So she’d sit on the porch and watch me, like sitting there was going to make a difference if I fell. She sat there watching me for two or three hours, back and forth.

  His first dunk, which came his senior season, was not only the moment when he lost his “basketball virginity” and “reached manhood”; it was also something more profound, a signal that he could leap out of the context in which he was born, a ticket out of impoverished Leeds, Alabama. “That’s also when I started looking at basketball as a way to get to college. I knew my family would never be able to afford it, but it wasn’t until I made that dunk that I thought I would have an opportunity to win a college scholarship.”

  You can see, in these stories, how the advent of dunking marked a shift in the game itself—a generational change, a racial change, a change that valued creativity as much as mechanics. In Wilt, which carries the subtitle Just Like Any Other 7-Foot Black Millionaire Who Lives Next Door, Chamberlain remembers that his high school coach, in the 1950s, didn’t know what to make of him after his first dunk. “You should’ve seen the look on his face. The old coach looked like I’d just jumped through the basket myself, feet first.” John Wooden, the legendary straitlaced UCLA coach (in fact, he was so obsessive that he taught freshmen players how to tie their shoes properly to avoid blisters), discouraged his players from dunking. “That’s not necessary,” he once told an interviewer. “If I want to see showmanship, I’ll go see the [Harlem] Globetrotters and I’ll enjoy it.”

  The dig was an enduring one, that black players somehow valued style over substance. In White Men Can’t Jump, a worked-up Woody Harrelson tells Wesley Snipes’s Sidney, “You’re just like every other brother I ever met. You’d rather look good and lose than look bad and win.” Dunking, to put it bluntly, was seen as a black way of scoring. The charge leveled stodgily against the move was one of showboating, as if the dunk couldn’t be both beautiful and practical, entertaining and competitive. After the NBA finally integrated in the early 1950s, white sportswriters began railing against the dunk because it turned basketball into “aerial dogfights.” No wonder: “The remaking of basketball in the shape of the African American aesthetic,” the sociologist Gena Caponi-Tabery has written, “is an obvious case of subversion of the dominant culture by subordinate African Americans.”

  At the time Chamberlain stupefied his high school coach with a dunk, the sport was only a half-century or so removed from when the “basket” of basketball was an honest-to-God peach basket in a gym at the International Training School for Students in snowy Springfield, Massachusetts. In December 1891, charged by the YMCA superintendent with inventing a game for young men (“a class of incorrigibles,” the superintendent called them) that they could play indoors by newly invented electrical light, James Naismith, a 30-year-old Canadian who had recently moved down from Montreal, readied the gym for his new game of “basket ball.” He instructed the school janitor to nail two peach baskets to the lower rail of the gym balcony, which doubled as the running track. That rail happened to be 10 feet off the ground—a completely minor, semi-arbitrary architectural fact that, 125 years later, endured as the bane of my existence.

  The first game, nine versus nine, finished with a 1–0 score—no word on whether that was a dunk. Basket ball was a hit from the get-go, and it quickly spread through the YMCA network. By 1898, the first professional league had formed, and in 1909, the first international game was held. Naismith went on to coach at Kansas, and one of his players, Phog Allen, would become Kansas’s most famous coach. By Allen’s coaching heyday, in the 1940s, white dunkers started making names for themselves. The first of these was George Mikan, who began his career at DePaul as a clumsy, bespectacled oaf before learning to dominate inside. His greatest rival: Bob “Foothills” Kurland, a seven-footer from Oklahoma A&M, who dunked early and often. His was such a presence around the basket that officials devised the goaltending rule, specifically designed to prevent Kurland from grabbing opponents’ shots off the rim. Allen, maybe because he didn’t like that Kurland played for a rival, maybe because he was old-fashioned, groused about dunking. “He would say the game was overrun with ‘goons,’ as he called them,” Matt Zeysing, the basketball Hall of Fame archivist, told me. The crankiness was common. “Basketball is for the birds—the gooney birds,” the venerated sports columnist Shirley Povich wrote in Sports Illustrated in 1958. “The game lost this particular patron years back when it went vertical and put the accent on carnival freaks who achieved upper space by growing into it. They don’t shoot baskets any more, they stuff them, like taxidermists.”

  By that point, Chamberlain was an undergraduate at Kansas, and dunking was fast becoming associated with blacks. Allen tried to get the rim pulled up to 12 feet in the 1950s, even using the higher rim in some exhibition games. Chamberlain himself, whom Allen recruited to Kansas in 1956 just before retiring, is said to have dunked on the 12-foot pilot rim. (In 2007, Dwight Howard, then the center for the Orlando Magic, dunked on a 12′6″ basket in the NBA Slam Dunk competition.) As with Kurland, basketball officials changed the rules to put a stop to one of Chamberlain’s patented moves: Just as he released a free-throw attempt, he would run toward the basket and jam home any miss. Now a player cannot cross the free-throw line until his or her shot has struck the rim or backboard.

  Thwarting dunking became a theme of rule-making during the 1960s. Looking back, a half-century later, to a period in which white Americans were grappling uncomfortably, to put it mildly, with an expansion of civil rights, racial anxiety seems
the obvious subtext to all the grumbling about dunking. It was a maneuver increasingly connected to black exuberance of the type white officials wanted to suppress. The slam dunk gave the players an opportunity to momentarily seize power and express outrage, Caponi-Tabery observed. When Lew Alcindor, later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, showed up at UCLA to play in Wooden’s program, such was his height and wingspan that he upended the established order with his dunking ability. His first year at UCLA, he led the freshmen to a 16-point victory over the varsity team, then the national defending champions. In 1967, at the start of Alcindor’s junior year, the NCAA banned dunking. The stated reason was to save athletes from injury and to protect rims from damage. “Clearly, if I’d been white they never would have done it,” Jabbar later wrote. “The dunk is one of basketball’s great crowd pleasers. And there was no good reason to give it up except that this and other niggers were running away with the sport.” Muffling Alcindor was just a pretext for a wider undercutting of black athletes, Hunter College assistant basketball coach Robert Bownes told Pete Axthelm for his 1970 book The City Game. The dunking ban “wasn’t put in to stop seven-footers,” Bownes said. “It was put in to stop the six-foot-two brothers who could dazzle the crowd and embarrass much bigger white kids by dunking. The white establishment has an uncomfortable feeling that blacks are dominating too many areas of sports. So they’re setting up all kinds of restrictions and barriers. Everyone knows that dunking is a trademark of great playground black athletes. And so they took it away.”