by Asher Price
I had a thrill of exultation as the ball, having been pushed through the rim, bounced up satisfyingly from the pavement. Excited by my progress, but wanting to be scientific, I got my stepladder and tape measure from home and brought them back to the court. I climbed to the top of the ladder and, face-to-face with the “Be Great” stenciled on the backboard, I held the rim for balance as I dropped the tape measure down like a pendulum. It swung briefly before settling its weight on the ground. I peered at the result: The rim was 9′10″ off the ground—two inches short. I blinked with disappointment. I stood there on the top step and rolled my eyes up to the sky, cursing the universe, cursing the Boys & Girls Club and its false dreams, and cursing myself. The goalposts had moved on me. I came home, shoulders hunched, and slammed the front door behind me. Our house, an old Craftsman bungalow always restless on its foundation, shook. “Goddammit,” I shouted to a surprised Rebecca. “The fucking rim is fucking short.”
I wasn’t the only one finding that my self-worth and identity were intimately tied to dunking ability. In March, a few weeks after I went to the dunk competition, news came out of Chicago that Derrick Rose, the stony-faced point guard of the Bulls, had been finally cleared to play by team doctors. Eleven months earlier, in the 2012 playoffs, Rose, known for his springiness and hard-driving ways on the court, had torn the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee during a relatively simple maneuver known as a jump-step, one he had probably executed a hundred thousand times in his career. Despite the medical clearance, however, Rose decided to remain on the Bulls’ bench, wearing an elegant series of suits, through the end of the season, in May. He frustrated Chicago fans and talk-radio-show hosts, who said they couldn’t understand his unwillingness to help his team. But Rose had his own medical standard, reporters learned. He had told the Bulls that he would not suit up to play until he could confidently dunk off his left foot “in his mind.”
About the same time, Brooklyn Nets guard Deron Williams, a 6′3″ All-Star, was dealing with a much smaller medical malady of his own. His ankles wobbly, doctors prescribed plasma therapy, a treatment in which his own blood was spun in a centrifuge and then injected into the injured area. A week later, in February, Williams made an improbable confession to journalists. “I can’t dunk,” Williams said. “I can’t jump. Even if I tried, off one leg I can’t dunk. I can dunk off two, but if I just tried to dunk off my left leg, I can’t dunk.” The writer suffering from a creative block; the aging mathematician losing her facility for numbers; the ballplayer robbed of hops—talent can depart softly or in a snap.
But it can return, too, and for Williams it did. Following an April playoff game against the Rose-less Bulls in which he performed a reverse dunk, he updated reporters asking about his health. “I think the dunk showed it,” Williams said. “My legs feel good, my ankles feel good right now. I’m excited.”
That’s how I told myself to feel—I was jumping higher than ever, after all. I admit to the pleasure of achievement. I had managed something quite real, something measurably better than anything I had done before. And something to build upon. I was a certified dunker. Of sorts. Even if it was just a tennis ball and even if the rim was just a wee bit short.
9
Girl on Fire
166 days to go: After two weeks of consuming daily servings of Dymatize’s “Elite Gourmet” strawberries & cream-flavored powder—“a flavor and texture profile beyond belief”—I learn of an unfortunate, known side effect: The powder that brags of “instant mix-ability” doesn’t mix so well with my gastrointestinal tract. So out with the whey protein powder. It’s just not fair to Rebecca. Or to me, really. And, in my effort to further ratchet down my carbs, I’m officially resigning as an eater of oatmeal. Just grapefruit and maybe a sausage—for protein—for breakfast. And a glass of nonfat milk. And a small serving—make that two servings—of nonfat yogurt. With a teaspoon of fig jam mixed in. An avocado and tomato salad for lunch. Small helpings of hummus throughout the day. And bits of fruit, of course. Dinner of pork loins in a smoky Mexican salsa machaca. Squatting 165. Using the 20-pound dumbbells for the lunges. Four sets of four pull-ups. I’m comin’ for you, rim!
The ride to Waco is a straight shot up I-35, past the Vietnamese and South Asian neighborhoods of north Austin, past the cookie-cutter suburbs of Round Rock and Pflugerville (whose newspaper is the Pflugerville Pflag, and whose festivals include—I kid you not—Spring Pfling, Deutschen Pfest, and the Pfall ChiliPfest; you can imagine how they spell the name of their weekly farmer’s market), past the Ikea, past the pickup truck dealerships and then the limestone quarries. After the town of Temple, known for its VA hospital, and not far from the major Army installation of Fort Hood, the road flattens and the landscape empties out into a quilt of cotton fields.
About 75 miles out of Austin, one gets to McLennan County, a notch in the Bible Belt. Fire-and-brimstone territory. Rebecca and I headed north in early spring, and as we crossed the county line we found ourselves passing enormous stacks of timber that had been set afire, like funeral pyres for giants, sending columns of smoke twisting skyward. Surely it was just a range-clearing burn, but the effect was suitably Old Testament. Our destination was Waco, home to Baylor, a Baptist university so committed in its beliefs that models in the art school remain clothed. The school’s sexual-misconduct policy includes “homosexual acts”—alongside sexual harassment, incest, and adultery—as “misuses of God’s gifts.” Its president is Kenneth Starr, renowned as the special prosecutor who investigated the sexual proclivities of Bill Clinton. What had put Waco on the map for most Americans were the Branch Davidians, the messianic religious group that had holed up in a compound just outside town with an arsenal hefty enough to kill four federal agents and hold others off for nearly two months during a 1993 siege—before 76 of the Davidians were killed in a fiery final showdown.
Beyond a downtown that includes a handful of mid-century office buildings, relics of a time when cotton was booming, the town is a quiet, steamy, low-slung place, home to feed stores and farm equipment dealerships. You can find the Dr Pepper Museum here; above it, on a rarely visited floor, is the Beverage Executive Hall of Fame, an homage to what American capitalism can do with the wonders of carbonation.
We had come to see Brittney Griner, the six-foot-eight All-American whose Lady Bears were scheduled to play the Lady Longhorns of the University of Texas. The previous season, Griner had led Baylor to a record of 40 wins and zero losses and the national championship. This year was shaping up as no less successful, and if the Baylor team won tonight they would clinch the Big 12 conference championship. I didn’t care: I wanted to see her dunk. Partly I thought Griner might act as an odd kind of mirror to my own efforts, a vision in what the unexpected looks like. That would be its own inspiration, even if Griner’s dunks looked on television like the most natural thing in the world. Partly I felt that seeing this woman dunk would offer refreshment, by simple virtue of stripping the layers and layers of machismo the dunk had acquired in our culture. But, I would learn, a woman’s dunk grows plenty of layers of its own.
She had dunked 13 times in her college career, more than any other woman in the history of competitive basketball. I had read that her hands are nine inches long, from the base of the hand to the tip of the middle finger, and nine and a half inches wide, allowing her to palm the ball easily. (My hand is only five inches long by five and a half inches wide; cake-decorating hands, a friend calls them.) I also had learned that she wears size-17 shoes and has a wingspan of 7′3½”. I had expected, then, to watch an unwieldy Goliath who more or less artlessly manhandled competition. During her sophomore year, after all, Griner was suspended for two games for throwing a punch at a Texas Tech player, breaking the girl’s nose.
We were down on the floor during warm-ups, mingling with the college band and the press corps and the VIPs and the contestants called upon for the in-game breaks—the tricycle racers and the baton twirlers. Coolers of Dr Pepper were everywhere. T
here were a lot of very tall women—it was homecoming for the Baylor Lady Bears—but Griner, taking sleepy warm-up jump shots, was unmissable. It was the way she moved: She had that athlete’s way of efficiency masquerading as laziness; a kind of ease composed of no unnecessary motion. Griner smoothly caught the ball; sprung up; released. That was it. She had a long Modigliani face and dreadlocks dropping down her back. She was ever so slightly pigeon-toed and small-stepped, the way many athletes are. I’m slightly splayfooted with big, clunky steps: If I manage to dunk, I thought, it will be the most strenuous thing I have ever done.
With the game about to start, the teams retreated to their locker rooms. No dunks yet from Griner. We made our way to our seats just before the introductions. A crew of 50 elementary-schoolers performed a “jumping jamboree,” hopping on pogo sticks while jumping rope in a series of exquisite routines. There was something spectacularly un-self-conscious about them, even as they performed in front of the amped-up crowd. They were boys and girls, big and small, chubby and stick-thin, and all of them very capable jumpers. It made you think that we’re each born great, and then somewhere along the line we fritter away our greatness.
The lights went down, the smoke machine whirred, and overhead on the Jumbotron appeared a highly produced video of Kim Mulkey, the coach of Baylor, addressing her attentive players. “Congratulations on your championship,” she said. “Now it’s time to get back to business.” As she continued in this vein, the video cut to shots of the players pumping iron, or, one, bespectacled, in the classroom, taking notes. The game was a sellout, and the crowd stood now—old men and young women, boys, mothers, college students, virtually all dressed in dark Baylor green—and stomped their feet, making the arena feel like the inside of a bass drum. Some of them pawed the air as if they were restless bears. I felt a shiver and Rebecca’s eyes grew moist: “So much being made of a women’s athletic event,” she said. She had grown up going to women’s basketball games at the Drum, the arena at the University of Texas. Rebecca was taken there by her father, who had long preferred women’s ball precisely because they don’t jump—not like the men. He is a man fond of telling stories about growing up in Middletown, in upstate New York, in the late 1950s, stories that invariably include both the first and last names of their characters (“Harry Golumboski”), and for him the Lady Longhorns play something closer to the grounded, fundamental game of his youth. Or most of them do. The smoke took over the floor as the announcer, calling out the players, reached “BRITTNEY GRINER!” and the crowd, still on its feet, went berserk. Rebecca was torn in her rooting interests: “I don’t want to be disloyal because Daddy’s a Lady Longhorns fan!” she shouted in my ear as she clapped in spite of herself. A women’s choir from a Baptist church sang the national anthem and it was finally game time.
Griner had had a relatively unproductive outing the last time she’d played UT, two weeks earlier, scoring only 14 points. But she had recorded a dunk, and the next day’s newspaper made sure to mention that near the top of the story. No wonder: Only seven women have ever dunked in the history of college basketball. The simplest explanation is that women just tend to be shorter and don’t jump as high. Female college basketball players have an average vertical leap of 19 inches—just about my vertical—and the male players have one of about 28 inches. Similarly, researchers at the University of Missouri studying medical students in their 20s and their spouses found that the average guy outjumped 95 percent of the women. The reasons, according to a range of scientific papers, have their roots in muscle composition and hormones. When females hit puberty, their takeoff force actually decreases, just as the boys’ increases. Puberty, not coincidentally, is when males begin producing more testosterone, a naturally occurring steroid that helps build muscle mass. The testosterone also increases the size of motor neurons, which recruit muscle fibers to contract. Henneman’s size principle, named for a 1960s researcher who examined triceps contractions in cats, holds that to move a load—such as propelling your body into the air—motor units (which make up motor neurons and their associated fibers) are recruited from smallest to largest. Practically speaking, that means smaller slow-twitch, fatigue-resistant muscles, ones used for walking or jogging instead of jumping or sprinting, are activated before their fast-twitch counterparts. This makes sense: Walk before you run, the saying goes. Scientists call this recruiting of muscles in the exact order of the capacity to exert force “task-appropriate” recruitment. Think of it as moving through the gears of a car as you accelerate. The chief benefit of this internal gear-shifting is that it minimizes exhaustion—or engine wear, to stick with the car metaphor—by using the fatigue-resistant muscle fibers first. For some of us, our ratio of muscle composition heavily favors fatigue-resistant, slow-twitch muscles over the fast-twitch ones; we can’t truly knock it into fifth gear. Slow and steady wins the race, we’re told, but that doesn’t mean you can dunk. Usain Bolt or Brittney Griner, meanwhile, because of some mix of hormones and genetics, have a muscle ratio weighted toward fast-twitch muscles.
But some doctors and researchers offer a competing explanation for the difference in male and female jumping ability. While individual muscle fibers are larger in men than in women, female muscle tissue does not differ from a male’s in its initial potential for force development. In other words—and this is a theory Rebecca ascribes to—perhaps females are so socialized from birth, in a thousand and one ways, including, most obviously, being dressed up in pink and being told they’re adorable (as opposed to being complimented on, say, their strength), that any inclination to jump high is wrung out of them. It’s a theory almost impossible to test, since a newborn girl would pretty much have to be raised in a cave to be inoculated from societal pressures.
Griner was no cave dweller. She grew up in Houston, and by the time she was in high school she was a standout player. In her senior year, she dunked 52 times in 32 games, including seven dunks in one game. In another game, she recorded 25 blocked shots. In short, she was playing an above-the-rim game while everyone else was below the rim. The afternoon we were in Waco, Griner methodically took over the matchup with the Lady Longhorns; by halftime she had recorded a double-double—20 points and 10 rebounds. For all its potential power, her game struck me as delicate. Lots of little drop-steps and then turnaround jumpers, with quick half shots only a few feet from the rim. She reminded me of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. So much touch. Even Texas’s own giantess, a freshman named Imani Stafford, who is 6′7″, appeared to have a wingspan too short to contest Griner’s shotmaking. “Brittney does what Brittney does,” Stafford said after the game. “She definitely has a big body. You think you have an open shot and you don’t.”
The student band shouted “Dunk it!” just about every time Griner got the ball, but she was often triple-teamed by a storm of Lady Longhorns, their arms flapping like rain against a cross-country semi-truck. Then she would pass to an open teammate for an easy bucket or quickly spin away from the extra defenders and scoop the ball against the glass and into the hoop. I thought this must be the treatment that the earliest male dunkers got: the double-teaming, the shouts of encouragement from the crowd, the sense of a player distinct from the others.
Baylor clinched the Big 12 Championship in that game. At the final buzzer, white, gold, and green confetti blew everywhere. After posing with her team with a trophy, a huge, toothy Julia Roberts smile spread across her face, Griner ran and dove across the confetti-strewn gym floor, as if it was a backyard Slip ’n’ Slide. She lay still for a second, absorbing the feel of the vast buzzing space spreading over and around her—a space that, in that moment, was all hers—and then, before getting up, silly, giddy, she made snow angels. The press gaggle crowded about her, taking photos as she acted her age, a kid having fun. The Alicia Keys song “This Girl Is on Fire” blasted over the PA system, and there was little doubt to whom it was dedicated. (“She’s just a girl and she’s on fire…Filled with catastrophe, but she knows she can fly away.”)
I had wanted to ask Griner, in the media room afterward, whether she would have rather taken the lighter performance with the dunk that she had turned in two weeks earlier, or the overwhelming one without the dunk. Or, I thought I might ask her what she made of the comments by Geno Auriemma, the coach of the University of Connecticut women’s team, that the hoop ought to be lowered to nine feet to promote dunking and excitement in the women’s game. But Griner was a no-show. “She’s probably far from the arena now,” her coach said. “She must be hungry and went to get something to eat.” A sports reporter covered his mouth with a notebook and whispered to me that Griner’s guarded around the media. “She knows people say some cruel things about her.” “What kind of things?” I mouthed back. I had no idea what he was talking about. “Her masculinity,” he said.
Many of us are unsettled, too often unattractively so, when someone operates outside the boxes in which we expect them to perform. Back at home, it wasn’t hard to find mean-spirited comments about Griner tucked beneath online videos of her highlights. In an odd, unkind way, the very attributes of her game that are cherished among young males—foremost among them, the ability to dunk—appeared to be held against Griner because she is female. It’s an ancient taunt leveled at assertive ladies: “Women are soft, mild, pitiful, and flexible; / Thou stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless,” Richard, a would-be king, sneers at Margaret, who has taken up arms to defend her husband’s throne in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 3. Griner was a latter-day virago, distinguished because of her heroic, “manly” abilities and demonized for the same qualities.