Year of the Dunk

by Asher Price

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  My body back then was plotting an opposite trajectory from the one it was now charting, tearing itself apart instead of building itself up. As a sedentary cancer patient at an outpatient chemo ward, I soon endured a steady intravenous drip of medicines, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily. I was pumped full of water, too, to make sure the chemotherapy toxins didn’t linger about my organs or bloodstream too long, for fear of lasting damage. I peed frequently, shuffling, stooped, to a bathroom with the burping, wheeling drip tethered to my black-and-blue forearm. By the end of each week, I felt a little more like an octogenarian and less like a 26-year-old. I took slow turns around the garden, my arm interlocked with Rebecca’s as I hobbled along. In the shower, my hair fell out, sticking to the soap like metal flakes to a magnet. My face grew puffy from the steroids I took to blunt the side effects. I stopped shaving because I didn’t have to—my beard stopped growing. Too weak to do much good, I ceased showing up at the newsroom. I grew weirdly sentimental, crying at scenes of death during episodes of M*A*S*H and the old movie Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Nauseated, vomiting on and off, I gather I was the closest I’ll ever get to those first-trimester blues. I lost any real exuberance, emotional or physical, and if you had asked me just then if I might ever dunk, I would have thought you were being cruel.

  8

  A Dunk Contest

  184 days to go: 12 pieces of chewing gum chewed, to keep myself from eating the food floating before me: Someone brought to the newsroom a box full of palmiers, crusty and golden and crunchy. I’m squatting 155 pounds. Back to 183 pounds on the scale. Is God punishing me for my birthday carrot cake? Or that meatball sub I ate last night: It wouldn’t have been fair to the bread not to eat it along with the meatballs.

  Could Abe Lincoln dunk?

  In the darkness of the theater, watching Daniel Day-Lewis play the president, most moviegoers, I’m sure, were captivated by the vote-getting needed to abolish slavery. But I began wondering whether Lincoln could have dunked, had basketball been invented when he was a young man. As far as I know, none of the many Lincoln biographies speculates on the matter. On the one hand, he was 6′4″ and grew up a rail-splitter. He must have been a strong man. And you get the sense—maybe it’s just because of the Lincoln Memorial—that the guy had big hands, big enough to palm a basketball. On the other hand, he doesn’t look like the dunking type: thin of bone, and narrow-kneed. Preoccupied, certainly. And did they even jump back then? I mean, beyond Lincoln’s seriousness and studiousness and presumed disinclination to jump; I mean, why would they have jumped after childhood? They were not playing pickup baseball or basketball, after all. Did adults even play sports before the late nineteenth century?

  These were the sorts of thoughts that occupied me in the early spring. I was in Houston for the NBA’s All-Star weekend. To be more precise, as most fans gathered in Houston’s Toyota Center, a sleek decade-old stadium large enough to seat more than 18,000 people, I found myself across town in the 25-year-old George Brown Convention Center, attending the Developmental League All-Star festivities. The D-League is basically a minor league for the NBA. Drafted players too green to play for the mother ship end up in towns like Bakersfield, California; Fort Wayne, Indiana; or Canton, Ohio, where they stay warm for the big time. Houston had dressed up the convention center nicely. Outside the heavy black curtains that separated off the makeshift 5,000-seat arena, fans crowded into a carnival of cotton candy, basketball relics (one display included Michael Jordan’s University of North Carolina sneakers), and amusements meant to show off the game. I had dropped by for the Boost Mobile Dream Factory Dunk Contest: I figured even if the players didn’t have quite the skills to play in the NBA, they were still just as athletic. Told from a young age that they might have NBA-level talent, they were on their own quests, enduring yeoman salaries and coach-class travel for that moment in which, they trusted, their true selves would be spectacularly revealed. Being named a D-League All-Star struck me as a kind of backhanded recognition; most of these players would have gladly traded this spotlight for the anonymity of the NBA bench.

  The dunk contest is, in many ways, a silly affair. Divorced from a game situation, it does not have to abide by the rules of basketball, such as dribbling. But that makes it a freely athletic event, one that puts emphasis on creativity. “I developed the dunk shot because it was a challenging thing to learn to do,” Julius Erving, one of the great in-game and out-of-game dunkers, once told Black Sports. “After you learn to do it one way, it’s a challenge to learn to do it another way and right on up. There’s an infinite number of dunk shots which I don’t possess. And there are psychological considerations, too. I wouldn’t like to start feeling that I’ve done all that I could do and the coming years would be a matter of repeating what I’ve already done.”

  No one left her seat at halftime of the D-League All-Star game. If anything, the small arena grew more crowded: It was time for the dunk contest. In each round, each of the half-dozen participants had a minute in which to complete a dunk. Despite the buzz, the dunkers themselves appeared lackadaisical. When they missed, they slowly gathered the ball and repositioned themselves. They didn’t show any urgency, and I couldn’t tell whether they didn’t care, or didn’t want to seem to care. Or maybe they were just regathering themselves after an explosion of effort. The emcee, a young, upbeat, blue-jeans-wearing guy with slicked-back hair, was growing increasingly urgent and disbelieving with each round (“Fifteen seconds left!”) as the dunkers appeared increasingly nonchalant. One, Dar Tucker, of the Reno Bighorns, moved with the opposite of purpose. He kept slowly retying his shorts, as if no one was there.

  The dunks were, of course, amazing: One guy dunked a ball tossed by another player from up in the stands; another dunked over a seven-foot teammate; in a third dunk, the player stood away from and behind the basket, lobbed the ball in the air, ran, picked it up off the bounce, and windmilled it in. “Houston, make some noise!” the emcee kept shouting. Yeats once summed up youth as a series of “moments of glad grace,” and I felt I was witnessing one such moment after another.

  And then, glancing to my right, only several feet away, I noticed a very familiar-looking black man, lanky, handsome, older, cap pulled down, leaning against the very same banister as I was. He had with him a retinue: a couple of grandkids, maybe, one a seven-year-old with a mini-Afro, a wife, a daughter, a brother or friend. Only a few weeks earlier, at the presidential inauguration, George Stephanopoulos had confused Bill Russell for Morgan Freeman, and I didn’t want to be that guy. But my mind was buzzing with recognition, racing through the possibilities. Not Denzel Washington, I was sure of it. And then I got it: “Is that Dr. J?” I whispered to an usher next to me. He grinned and nodded. I leaned past the usher, extended my hand, and told Dr. J I didn’t want to bother him but that I was a big fan. “Thanks,” he said.

  Ugh. Of course I wanted to bother him. I walked just past him. And then I stopped. My knees weakened. Maybe it’s just that it had been a long day—I was dehydrated and tired—but I started getting nervous and tingly. After all, here was Julius Erving himself, and I couldn’t let this opportunity slip by. Could he lend me special advice, some heretofore-overlooked bit of know-how, that would help me dunk? But there he was, with his family, enjoying himself, a guy who a hundred thousand times or more is asked about the myriad mysteries of basketball. I lingered, trying desperately to figure out how, actually, I could bother him. An arena camera crew came over, and suddenly the emcee said: “We have a special guest in the stadium tonight: Dr. J himself!” And the bright light above the camera flipped on and Dr. J appeared on the jumbo television floating above the court, his cap doffed as he acknowledged the crowd, which offered, I swear to God, the biggest cheer of the night. I looked up on the Jumbotron, and there I was, just behind Dr. J, looking up at said Jumbotron. Of course, I wasn’t paying any attention anymore to the dunks on the court. Little balls of sweat were forming at the edge of my scalp. With each second of lingering I
felt like it was getting more and more obvious to Dr. J and his group that I was floating just behind, weirdly. I had become a stalker of dunkers.

  One of the dunkers, for his final dunk, leapt over a table. The camera crew had moved on, and, desperate to spark a conversation, I half-shouted to Dr. J whether he approved of props. He glanced up from his iPhone: “No, I’m not so crazy about them,” he said. Okay, I thought, I’ve made a connection! But I was frozen. The whole thing was so asymmetrical: I wanted desperately, sincerely, to chat with him, and for all he knew I was just another dude wanting a photo.

  Then Julius Erving and his family shifted toward the exit, and I knew I had to make my move. I sidled up to him: “Dr. J,” I said, “I’m actually a journalist working on a book about the history and science of jumping…” “Jumping, huh? Sounds interesting.” And then, something he must say daily, something that gives hangers-on just enough hope: “Get in touch with me at Doctor J Enterprises dot com, and we’ll see what we can do.”

  I turned my attention back to the dunk contest, which was wrapping up. The cosmic weirdness of my afternoon was suddenly compounded when I realized that Darryl Dawkins, Chocolate Thunder himself, was a judge. I actually had a copy of his book, from the library, at home, and I was certain that I was one of the very few people in the world who had bothered to borrow it. He looked like a bigger Michael Jordan, if such a thing can be said. A massive shaved bald head and enormous, wide shoulders. He was stylish, too. He wore, yes, chocolate-brown pants and a blazer that looked like ostrich leather but, on closer inspection, was a kind of cotton with a meticulous tie-dye pattern. Chastened by my weak-ass effort with Dr. J, I tailed Dawkins after the dunk contest. And then I stood meekly aside as a 19-year-old posed with him for a picture, his hand resting around her waist, not all that far from her hip. I wondered what his wife and adult daughter, both done up, made of the scene as another young woman came up to him. Maybe it was half BS, but I remembered that much of his book was about the ease with which he had bedded women. “No matter how pretty or sweet-smelling your wife (or your girlfriend back home) was, there was always a girl on the road who was prettier, smelled sweeter, had that certain walk that made her ass pop, and knew how to come at you,” he wrote of his time as a pro.

  Still, in front of me in Houston years after his career had ended, he appeared to be a genuinely down-to-earth, earnest family man. He smiled and patiently had his picture taken with little kids. And then, when the crowd finally subsided, he sat with his wife and daughter as the D-Leaguers played the second half of their all-star game. He picked an aisle seat, and I wondered whether it was a self-defense mechanism, to prevent punters from crowding him. That’s where I came in. I crouched by his seat and told him about my determination to dunk as the announcer kept shouting the score over the PA system. He smiled, but appeared completely uninterested—and unmoved that I had actually read his book. I had the same sort of feeling that I had had with Dr. J: I’m earnest, I’m serious, I need to talk to you; and these guys, fair enough, had other things to do. He told me to contact him through the Brooklyn Nets. Odd, in a way: Here I was, face to face with the man in some convention center in Houston, and I’d have to call up Brooklyn to get in touch once he was back in Georgia. (Neither Dr. J nor Darryl Dawkins returned my messages.)

  The dunk competition over, I sidled up to winner Tony Mitchell of the Fort Wayne Mad Ants: okay, a real-life dunker, one who had just won the slam-dunk contest, one I would not be cowed by, and not a big enough celebrity not to talk to me. He had just been given mini–rubber bouncy balls—all the All-Stars had—to throw into the stands. In the shadow of the rim, I asked him if it felt peculiar to dunk in an artificial situation in front of several thousand people and not in the rhythm of a game. To me it seemed like the difference between gymnastics and rhythmic gymnastics. I’m a tall guy, but I strained to hear him: “I’m just trying to be a role model, to put on a good show.” I looked up at him. It seemed to me a non sequitur. “Did jumping so high come naturally to you, or was it something you had to work at?” “It’s all about having a good time,” he said, and he was kind of looking past me, into nothingness. I suddenly understood why sportswriters, beaten down by years of answers like these, start asking clichéd questions. As with so many other things that afternoon, I sensed a separation between words and action, between my world and the one to which I aspired. I was trying desperately to work at dunking, to articulate, in my own mind and body, all the things I would need to do to execute it; like studio musicians who can sight-read and perform a fresh composition, these dunkers need only tell themselves whether they would go with the tomahawk or the windmill jam. “Years of athletic training teach this; the necessity of relinquishing doubt and ambiguity and self-inquiry in favor of a pleasant, self-championing one-dimensionality which has instant rewards in sports,” Frank Bascombe, the eponymous narrator of Richard Ford’s novel The Sportswriter, tells us. The implication, of course, is that there is a wide chasm between the crippling deliberation a writer faces and the natural ease of athletes. Considering this difference, I remembered what Dr. J had once said, that as a kid he had felt “these different things within me, certain moves, ways to dunk.” The line imagines talent as a kind of natural underground reserve, restlessly awaiting a fissure—an opportunity to escape to the surface. And for the rest of us, the ones who do not feel an innate bubbling-up of talent? I’m not sure what Dr. J would have been able to tell me, other than you can’t drill your way to oil if there’s none down there to be found.

  There’s a saying that you can’t teach height, and standing there, peering up at Tony Mitchell, I understood its truth, that there’s something incommunicable about talent. So I left him, making my way off the hardwood, beneath the basket, through the maze of the NBA-related carnival and the throb of amped-up hip-hop and into the Houston sunshine, pleased to make my way back to Austin.

  —

  180 days left. Just past halfway! I am the proud owner of a two-pound jug of Dymatize’s “Elite Gourmet” strawberries & cream-flavored powder, the “perfect blend of Ion-Exchange Whey Protein Concentrates, Whey Protein Isolates, and Whey Peptides, combined with Milk Protein rich in natural micellar caseines & caseinates plus added calcium caseinates.” Translation: I’m going to get HUGE! To max out my muscle-building protein (you find yourself using phrases like “max out,” “push it,” and, admiringly, to the mirror, “You the man,” when you lift enough weights), the gym people advise me to down these protein shakes. So I’ve decided to greedily chug Dymatize, mixed with nonfat milk, before and after my workouts. It tastes like strawberries and cream just like Yoohoo! tastes like chocolate.

  Progress report: The good news: by early spring, feeling yet stronger, I could easily jam a tennis ball on the rim at the basketball court down the street from my house, at a Boys & Girls Club. The “Dream Court,” according to the circular logo set into the floor at midcourt: “Be Great” was stamped on each backboard—and I felt mighty good. Even as I had put on muscle, I had slimmed down, dropping two pants sizes. I looked fit. A thick blue artery made itself visible, running the length of my left biceps, and Rebecca had made impressed noises about my abdomen. I had eliminated alcohol from my diet, not that I was ever a lush, and there was an overall sobriety to my approach: monklike, purposeful. I wasn’t all that much fun that year. Rebecca sportingly—and helpfully, as chief chef—joined me in these salad-heavy days. (Maybe she was just abiding by her oath: “In sickness and in health, in lean times and in fat.”) We avoided going out with friends, partly because we didn’t want to be led into temptation. My cheeks grew drawn, baby fat gone. I took a pleasure in the asceticism—in being trim and strong, but also in the mission of it. Even in front of the television, I’d try to palm the ball. I found myself alert to the point of restlessness. I needed to take advantage of every day I had left—now six months to go in my project. I had no “cheat days.” I didn’t go to the gym on the weekends, but on Saturdays I played soccer and on Sundays I
played basketball. Diet-wise, I was always disciplined. I grew to have a distaste, if not quite a revulsion, for sweets. I more or less had no dessert. It was like I was trying a new religion. Something abstemious and, on the face of it, unhappy. But I had become a devotee. I had long been a shambling, distracted type, the social sort that would cry out on forest hikes at everything worth remarking on, needing my enthusiasm confirmed by another, and now I felt closer to the rigidity and quiet, solitary pride of purpose of a Marine. I was sipping more from the cup of life, even if it was filled only with water. Sure, I was tired, but also bright-eyed. “I didn’t know you could get that high,” a teammate of mine shouted after I leapt up and grabbed a seemingly overthrown basketball. I didn’t know I could, either.

  And here I was, dunking an object—even if it wasn’t exactly as large as a basketball. Size matters because the larger the diameter of the ball, the higher you have to hoist it over the rim. But working my way up—a strategy recommended by Todd Wright, the Longhorns strength coach—had the advantage of improving my jumping technique: the smaller the ball, the easier it is to squeeze, and the more confidently you can swing your arms to gain a bigger leaping motion. Your arms’ swing speed, in turn, naturally dictates the cadence of your foot turnover; the faster the armswing, the quicker the cadence, propelling you faster and, thus, higher. Partly this is because your arms counterbalance your legs, allowing you to speed forward without toppling over; partly it’s because the upward–downward piston motion of your arms as you run adds to the force and quickness with which your feet strike the ground and leap up again. (For these reasons, it’s tough to run for a bus while carrying shopping bags or shouldering a purse because you can’t really chop your arms up and down. You can get a lot more speed if, like a schoolboy, you’re wearing a backpack.)