Year of the Dunk

by Asher Price

  But Coyle told me he was unwilling to put performance down purely to muscle makeup. “Remember,” he said, leaning forward in his swivel chair, “we talk about neuro-musculature. It’s not just the muscle makeup but how quickly your cerebral cortex can send signals down through the spine to work.” Training ourselves to send quick impulses to our muscles to do work, especially the kind of rapid work involved with fast-twitch fibers, is possible, he said. For a runner like Coyle—a runner who only really got going late in college, with nearly seven years of instruction behind him—it wasn’t only muscle makeup that mattered. It was also the economy of technique, the ability to convert oxygen to energy. And, of course, the coaching.

  Coyle told me a story about a group of heart-disease patients he worked with in the late 1970s at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis. These were 50-something men, recovering from serious heart problems—“Parts of their hearts were dead,” he said. “They thought their lives were over.” Coyle’s job was to train them as intensively as they could withstand. Calling on his old running days, he began prepping them for long-distance jogs, starting with just a few hundred meters. Some of them were able eventually to run 10K races, farther than Coyle himself had covered competitively, and a couple went on to complete marathons. “It’s amazing how much the body can improve,” he said, shaking his head even now, beneath the gently humming lights of Bellmont Hall.

  —

  The notion that humans can improve in measurable ways is now enshrined in the academy, tested daily in labs like Coyle’s: Just about every university today has some sort of department dedicated to kinesiology, a field built on the inherently optimistic, essentially American premise that humans have all sorts of room to improve on their apparent potential. An equality of physical opportunity. The field has its own journals and it gives out doctorates. And, of course, every high school in America seems to have its own weight room and its own phys-ed teacher, dedicated to making kids think they can transform their flesh, like their minds, into something useful. Or at least to making them sweat awkwardly for 25 minutes before showering off in a grotty locker room. Nineteen twenty-four, the year Dudley Allen Sargent, the inventor of the vertical jump test, died, marked the first time a course in teaching physical education was offered at a teacher-training department. By 1930, a quarter of schools in a national survey said they had a physical education program; none had one at the beginning of the century. In a sense, the buildup of the business and study of self-improvement is the benign legacy of an age of hubris, one that saw humans increasingly confident in their abilities to classify everyone around them. This was a period when education “was consumed with a passion for precise measurement,” Harold Rugg, the now-forgotten progressive educator, wrote in his 1941 memoir That Men May Understand. “We lived in one long orgy of tabulation. Mountains of facts were piled up, condensed, summarized and integrated by the new quantitative technique. The air was full of normal curves, standard deviations, coefficients of correlation, regressive equations.” At the outset of this age stood an idiosyncratic institution, the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory, whose elite researchers had the gall to carry out a singular mission: to pin down the breaking point of men. (They weren’t particularly interested in women.)

  —

  In 1927 a plump, red-bearded, suspenders-wearing, pipe-smoking Harvard biochemist named Lawrence Henderson had an idea: He would collaborate with American corporations to research ways to wring efficiency from American laborers. Known lovingly by his colleagues as Pink Whiskers, Henderson was a pompous gourmand who favored the word “superior” and who compulsively ranked things as relatively meaningless as types of denim overalls. He saw himself as “a modern-day Socrates,” one of his former colleagues later wrote; it was a role he performed beautifully. With young scientist-devotees clinging to him, Henderson led the laboratory on a series of tests meant to get at the empirical limits of human capability, as if a human were a type of metal with specific boiling, melting, and freezing points.

  Henderson’s right-hand man was, in many respects, his opposite: a workaday, crew-cut-wearing research scientist named Bruce Dill, who, orphaned at age eight, cut a character austere, subdued, Presbyterian. For his meticulousness, his objectivity, his honesty, and his curiosity, he was remembered by a colleague as a “scientist’s scientist.” He was also, like Edward Coyle after him, something of a willing human guinea pig, a kind of comic-book hero who urged other researchers to bypass the usual tests on chimps or other creatures and run their experiments on him. (In my experience as a onetime reader of comic books, that person usually turns out to be the headstrong villain—Dr. Octopus, for one, or the Green Goblin—but by all accounts Dill was a wholesome, patriotic American.)

  Thus, after Dill and other researchers conceived of the 40-40-40 Club, to honor investigators who lingered in a chamber that simulated conditions of negative-40 degrees Fahrenheit and altitudes of 40,000 feet, and undertook arduous 40-mile walks, Dill himself, physically courageous and unflagging, became the first member. (He stuck it out in the “cold room,” as it was known, for 20 minutes.)

  Besides the cold room and a hot room, which could reach 115 degrees, the 800-square-foot lab, tucked into the basement of a redbrick colonial building on Harvard’s campus, was equipped with an X-ray machine, standard treadmills, and, for God knows what purpose, a dog treadmill. Reading the lab members’ research accounts, you can’t miss their cheery, Sargent-like optimism in their own capacity to pinpoint the extent of human capabilities. What were our parameters, as a species, they wondered, and what happened if we overstepped those boundaries? The lab’s researchers accompanied pilots on flights from California to Hong Kong to monitor their alertness, and collected the perspiration of sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta. They studied the relationship between fatigue, recovery, and lactic acid accumulation among Harvard football players. They devised a formula—“the Hobbling Effect”—to calculate, in units of energy, the encumbrance of heavy garments worn in the snow. They established, after a spate of deaths during the building of the Hoover Dam, that sweat pouring off laborers in the Nevada desert had half the salt content as sweat produced by Bostonians during a Massachusetts winter, leading the researchers to recommend that copious amounts of salt be added to the workers’ victuals.

  By 1942, Henderson had died, and Dill had enlisted in the military. Competition for money within the university, territorial battles between the business school and the lab over corporate sponsors, and academic politics crippled the lab’s work. Five years later, the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory was disbanded, its equipment and records absorbed by the school of public health. The lab had lasted only 20 years, but its alumni fanned out across the country, sowing the seeds of the lab’s optimism to the Arctic, where a Fatigue Laboratory biologist studied circadian rhythms; to Florida, where a Fatigue Laboratory cardiologist studied the effect of weightlessness and acceleration on human balance as he prepared astronauts for manned space flights (his research led to the development of drugs to combat motion sickness); to the Army, where the lab’s chief technician served on a committee called Nutrition for National Defense; and to office parks everywhere, whose chairs and desks were inspired by the research of a Fatigue Laboratory alum who is remembered as “the founding father of ergonomics.” Encouraged by the example of the Fatigue Laboratory, universities around the country began establishing their own human performance labs.

  —

  Edward Coyle told me to clamber aboard one of the “power/cycles”—stationary bikes hooked up to computers—that were standing around his lab. He had made a name for himself creating an abbreviated version of the Wingate Test to test the fast-twitch abilities of humans. He has counted among his clients the San Antonio Spurs basketball team, the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team, NASA astronauts, and, of course, University of Texas sports teams. With players tracked over the course of a season, he can look at the results to rank talent and guard against overtraining. “If that rating goes d
own, something’s the matter,” Coyle told me, as I slipped my feet into the cage-style pedals.

  Nearly two decades earlier, Coyle’s most famous client strapped himself into the very same stationary bike, sucked on one of those plastic straws, and blew the VO2 max ratings off the charts. At the time, Lance Armstrong was just a brash second-tier cyclist from Texas, still unknown to the general public and still cancer-free. Over seven years, Coyle tracked Armstrong’s improvement, growing as close as one could hope to an athlete whose eyes were on a prize much bigger than anything that could be had in Texas. In a 2005 peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Applied Physiology titled “Improved Muscular Efficiency Displayed as Tour de France Champion Matures,” Coyle argued that Armstrong dramatically increased his power output by remaking his body after cancer and becoming a more efficient cyclist. Around the same time he wrote that article, Coyle served as a witness for Armstrong in a suit against Dallas-based SCA Promotions, which refused to pay him bonuses, citing doping suspicions.

  “You tested Lance, right?” I asked Coyle.

  “He was off-the-charts amazing,” he said, as if the cloud that had cast a shadow on Lance’s Tour triumphs had spared his research lab.

  I could understand the unwavering loyalty to Lance. He had boosted my own spirits and offered some practical help in my darkest moment. The weekend I was diagnosed, in 2006, I telephoned my editor at the newspaper: I wouldn’t make it in that week—cancer and all. Not a bad excuse. He said he’d tell Fred, the managing editor. By Tuesday, I was down to one testicle, swaddled, and anxiously undergoing follow-up tests to find if my cancer had spread. That day, I got an unexpected email:

  Asher,

  Hi, it’s Lance Armstrong here. I heard yesterday from Fred about your situation and wanted to drop you a line. Of course I’m well familiar with what you’re going through and am hoping for the best. I’m confident you’ll be fine! I would recommend (after the pathology report) a trip to see either Dr. Larry Einhorn (Indiana) or Dr. Craig Nichols (Portland) to get a truly world-class second opinion. I can help with this if need be. I’m in Johannesburg, SA right now but home on the weekend so just let me know if I can help. Otherwise, hang tough and keep livin’ strong!

  Best,

  LA

  It felt like an unexpected reprieve, a get-out-of-school note in the middle of the week. This was early 2006, remember, when Lance, an Austin resident, was at the height of his popularity—when he was still engaged to Sheryl Crow and the official winner of seven Tours de France. I was like the cliché of the sick kid visited by the famous baseball player who promises to hit a home run. I soon learned my cancer—a particularly aggressive strain—had spread to my lymph system.

  I called Einhorn’s office to see if he’d be free. Not for about six weeks, unfortunately, his nurse told me. That seemed an eternity: I didn’t want to sit on my hands while a nasty disease was rapidly working its way through my body. So I wrote Lance back, asking for his advice. Within an hour, this answer:

  Asher,

  No worries at all. I have already emailed Dr. Einhorn and told him you’d be calling. If there are any problems then let me know.

  Take care,

  L

  Einhorn’s office could fit me in the following week, the nurse said this time.

  As with so many things in my life, I was lucky to know someone who happened to know someone. But my sense is that in thousands of ways large and small, Lance had given some hope or help to a person unexpectedly facing their mortality. The following October, already rid of cancer, I participated in my first Livestrong Challenge, an easygoing race that raises money to fight the disease. Besides the siblings, parents, friends, and children of cancer victims, there were the survivors and the patients: bald kids hanging out in the backs of pedicabs; wigged women jogging with their families; and people like me, just happy to be on my feet. As I crossed the finish line with Rebecca, I was given a survivor’s yellow rose. The race gave us a sense of traction, of fight and engagement, against an often random-seeming disease. We felt relief, yes, but we were moved also by the realization that many of those around us were at less fortunate points in their story than I was, and that this meant that what we, as a group, were celebrating was not so much a lucky escape—a happy ending—as something more essential to the character of each one of us, and less dependent on providence.

  In the lead-up to Lance’s confession to Oprah, I wrote a personal essay, a defense, in the newspaper. Some commenters had appeared gleeful about this latest turn of events involving Lance and doping allegations. “From Hero to Zero,” read one online headline. Not surprisingly, I had a different take. The sanctimonious epithet that followed Lance around was “arrogant,” as if that’s not a trait commonly found in the best athletes. Arrogance is part of what makes great athletes great: They play, they jump, they cycle with the expectation of greatness. Early in Michael Jordan’s career, his coach supposedly scolded him that “There’s no I in ‘team.’ ” Michael’s response: “But there is in ‘win.’ ” (Charles Austin, too, was a sort of peacock. Once, as I huffed-and-puffed through some sit-ups, he began yammering on his Bluetooth. “All y’all were on all that stuff and I still beat y’all. It don’t matter what you were on—I still won. I still won.” “Who’s he talking to?” I asked Terrell as I rolled over. “There’s no telling,” said Terrell with a smile. “He’s like this every day.”) It takes arrogance, surely, to take on an opponent as blindly formidable as cancer. It takes arrogance to parlay inborn physical prowess into the idea that one man can make a difference against such an overwhelming Goliath.

  That arrogance had a dark side, of course. In January 2006, Armstrong said in sworn, now cringe-worthy, testimony: “I would never beat my wife, and I never took performance-enhancing drugs.” None of the testimony at the time turned up eyewitnesses to Armstrong’s doping, and SCA paid Armstrong $7.5 million (which the company is now trying to get back from Armstrong). But in 2008, with scientists who had testified for SCA trying to throw doubt on his journal article, Coyle was forced to acknowledge an error in his calculations. His most famous academic article was now caught up in the controversy. Still, even with Armstrong’s 2012 confession, Coyle felt a loyalty to Lance, despite the admissions of cheating and worse. You are left with these two very different men: Lance, with a reckless, ruthless drug-taking regime, designed to boost his natural talent, and Coyle, dutifully jabbing himself only to record, for the sake of science, his solid but far more modest capabilities. Coyle was Daedalus, the master craftsman, seeking to improve performance through science; Lance, a phenomenal talent, one who justifiably became a hero because of the work and money he devoted to fighting cancer, was an Icarus-like protégé who, in a fit of hubris, had soared, with man-made aids, too close to the sun. In his grief, Daedalus busied himself with his work, determined to unravel, with human know-how, the sorts of mysteries that bedeviled the ancients. The same could have been said for Coyle.

  Now here I was, in the exercise machine myself. “Go, go, go!” shouted Coyle—echoing Polly in New York City—as I struggled to rotate the wheel from a standstill. Finally, after a solid second of muscle recruitment, I pushed through. My result: 5.3 watts per pound, which put me just below the average power of a female college rower—and significantly lower than a men’s college basketball player. With just a couple of months to go, I was grounded enough, I had learned, that there was no chance I would melt near the sun.

  13

  So, Can White Men Jump?

  46 days left: I catch myself lingering in the mirror a couple of beats longer than necessary—the vanity that comes with a newly shaped body. I can squat 265 pounds. “Bring the heavy” is the expression some of the other weightlifters use—and that’s as much as I can muster. But to coax explosiveness out of my muscles, I concentrate now on the weighted squat jumps—three sets of 20, at 75 pounds—and the usual sets of lunges, leg presses, calf raises, and upper-body work. This saves my right knee some aching: It pref
ers quick action with lighter weight, like a lottery winner choosing yearly payments over a lump sum.

  When, some years ago, my brother-in-law Ben dunked in a game on West Fourth Street, in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, a passing businessman pressed his face to the chain-link fence to cheer: “Nice to see one of us doing that!” When people say white men can’t jump, they aren’t being completely literal, of course. Dunking is a stand-in for style, and the stereotype is that white guys, shuffling about in their Asics and khakis and polo shirts, are incapable of coolness. When the businessman cheered Ben on, he was appealing to something beyond tribal identification and loyalty—though there was, ridiculously, plenty of that, too. The comment was pregnant with envy. The sociologist Gena Caponi-Tabery has argued that the slam dunk, like a piece of jazz, is a form of expression that embodies characteristics of the African-American aesthetic: improvisation, virtuosity, and defiance. Whether it’s a riff by Miles Davis or hang time by Michael Jordan, the moments that linger in our minds involve some exceptional, stylish individual skill that combines these traits. If you can dunk, in other words, you can at least lay a tenuous claim to coolness.

  But the businessman’s comment also tapped into the conventional wisdom that some things, genetically speaking, are closed off to most of us. “Look, man, you can listen to Jimi but you can’t hear him,” Sidney Deane, played by the smooth-as-silk Wesley Snipes, tells the countrified Billy Hoyle, an especially honky-looking Woody Harrelson, in White Men Can’t Jump. Rebecca, who can quote the movie backward and forward, reminds me that Billy does eventually dunk (“But it looked fake,” she says with a light shake of the head)—and we can all hear Jimi, even if we don’t get the lyrics quite right. But when word got around that I was trying to dunk, smiles spread across faces: “White men can’t jump,” friends would say, as if it was my first time hearing that. “You look like a desk guy,” one acquaintance told me doubtfully, and I couldn’t help wondering if it was my hue to which he was alluding.