Year of the Dunk

by Asher Price

  Nothing. Not. A. Thing. They didn’t help at all. I found myself reaching no higher on the rim than I had before. I didn’t feel any spring. I tried them again each night that week. The company says that “certain athletes have found that the more they wear Athletic Propulsion Labs shoes and understand what it [sic] can instantly do for them, the more benefit they seem to derive.” Forget for a moment that that makes no sense—what kind of instant benefit takes time?—I was finding that compared to leaping in my plain old Nike high-tops I was getting no higher. Unlike Dorothy’s, my new slippers were not taking me where I wished to go. I felt like a fool, having put store in a fantasy. I had asked the girl out, and she had indeed turned me down, like a bedspread.

  I wondered about the NBA ban that started the Athletic Propulsion Labs craze in the first place. The company’s website has a section titled “Science of Jumpology” that pulses with phrases like “the resultant effect” and “integrated response curve,” but had the league actually tested the APL shoes? Tim Frank, the league’s head of basketball communications, told me that no player or team ever actually came to the league with a request to use the shoes. League officials had met with Athletic Propulsion Labs at the company’s request; company officials made claims about how their shoes could improve jumping ability; the league went ahead and banned the sneaker.

  Athletic Propulsion Labs asserts that “independent testing” at an unnamed U.S. university verified the company’s data: According to the company’s website, the university researchers found that eleven of the dozen participants “jumped higher instantly” in the APL shoes than in conventional sneakers. Could it be that the shoes were magical, and it was I who was defective? I asked John Porcari, a professor of exercise physiology at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse who tests advertising claims by exercise equipment manufacturers, for advice. He told me to ask APL for a copy of its scientific study. Examine how it was designed, he said: Did the researchers randomize the sequence in which jumpers tested the sneakers? Did the wearers jump first in conventional sneakers, giving them time to warm up before trying the APL ones? “You can design a test that gives you certain results,” Porcari said.

  He added: “The company should have nothing to hide. They should want to give it to you.”

  —

  “I’m in world-class shape,” Mark Goldston told me, when I reached him, mid-workout, at his Beverly Hills home. He himself had once argued that Americans work out as part of a “narcissistic” urge to look good—not exactly profound, but at least a bit of candor from a sneaker executive. Now 58, Goldston works out nearly three hours a day. “I’ve got eight percent body fat!” he said, with some giddiness.

  He was charmed by my dunking ambition, and immediately nostalgic for the great dunkers of his youth. He was a big Dr. J fan. And he told me about the search for his holy grail. I asked him what made him so sure the Athletic Propulsion Labs sneakers could help their wearers jump higher. He recited the information on the website about the stunning test results.

  “Could I could see the raw data for myself?” I asked.

  “Sorry, that’s not possible,” he said. “The university made us sign a nondisclosure agreement.” The university—a “leading West Coast university” was as specific as he was willing to be—“told us they can’t take part in ‘commercialization’ of a product—they can’t be seen to endorse a product,” he continued.

  “Well, how about you at least send me a copy of the report with the names of the university and researchers redacted?”

  “Can’t do that, either. It’d violate the terms of the nondisclosure agreement.”

  As a newspaper reporter, I’ve run across instances of companies forcing university researchers to sign nondisclosure agreements—everyone from tobacco companies to solar energy corporations that want to suppress data or present it in a favorable way—but never the other way around. Mark Goldston at least conceded that the NBA probably didn’t undertake its own tests, instead relying on claims the company itself made based on research it had commissioned—except, of course, the company wasn’t willing to release the actual research results.

  Before we got off the phone, I shot him one last question: So, if these shoes had been around when you were 20 or so, could you have graduated from a volleyball to a basketball? Could you have closed that two-inch gap?

  Either because he’s a true believer or a very savvy marketing man, he didn’t skip a beat: “There’s zero question in my mind that I would have been able to dunk.”

  15

  Jumping Secrets of the Ninjas

  July 25, 31 days left: My fruit fast lasted exactly 35 hours. Who doesn’t have an appetite for apples? I refuse to apologize for eating a banana. Besides: a piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association, brought to me by my trusty nutritionist, Rebecca, showed that increased fruit consumption lowers body weight, because all that fiber makes us feel full and improves our metabolism. Shred that, Wolverine!

  In the months following my cancer diagnosis, several friends privately revealed to me problems with their testicles, partly to express empathy, which I didn’t really need, partly to get advice, which I couldn’t really give. These revelations were usually in the form of phone calls, sometimes from people I hadn’t heard from in years. The conversations started with some pleasantries and then, invariably, the tone would turn more confidential. “Listen, I want to ask you about something,” a friend began. “What did the swelling feel like?” He was sure one of his testicles was bigger than the other. Another thought he detected a bulge after the family dog had leapt onto his lap. Following my treatment, I wrote an account of my cancer experience in the newspaper. One reader emailed about his testicular pain after sex. “Cancer?” he asked.

  I was reminded of this as word got around about my dunk project. Friends of friends approached me, as if I were a therapist, to tell me about how badly they had once wanted to dunk and how, even now, they wondered whether they ever could. One, a guy like me in his early thirties, told me animatedly that he had long dreamt of slamming the ball home, and videotaping it to prove his manhood. As a comeback to just about anything, he could whip out the imaginary tape: “I could just say, ‘Oh, yeah? Well, take a look at this!’ ” Now, stuck with a table-waiting job, he told me that the couple of hours he spends working out are the best of his week. “I live for that time,” he said. He’s a married man, and I found this admission a little sad. Another friend of a friend, a Mexican-American who grew up poor, to parents who were cotton pickers, in one of the colonias of rural South Texas, told me about his own brief dunking past. As a senior in high school he was thin as a cornstalk—6′1″ and 130 pounds (“when wet,” he says)—but athletic as hell. He played on the school tennis team and had to do so many jumping drills to improve his agility that he was eventually able to dunk. He told me dunking was a better feeling than winning at tennis. A single moment of absolute thrill, and I wondered whether I would ever feel it.

  Given how much of my life was now given over to it, jumping became an obvious thing to talk about at parties. “Tell them about your dunking!” an Austin hostess would say. Then, somewhat timidly at first—I know, I know, this sounds silly, I would mumble—and then, with more confidence, I would hold forth. “The science of jumping?” someone would inevitably say, while giving a little hop. “You must, you just must, study Baryshnikov,” said another, delicate in her movements. “I insist.”

  At one such shindig, a woman in her 40s was just explaining to me that her husband, a young, handsome doctor, had spent that very morning at the Mormon temple, baptizing the dead, when the host popped over and asked how the dunking was coming.

  I said it was coming along, but I was uncertain about my chances.

  “Have you tried jumping over hemp?” the Mormon woman chimed in.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “I mean, a hemp plant,” she said, as if that would make things much clearer.

  She saw that I was totall
y confused.

  “Suzuki says that to jump higher, the ninjas used to jump over a hemp plant each day.”

  “Who is Suzuki?”

  “He’s the famous violinist,” she said.

  Why would a violinist care about jumping?

  Suzuki, she explained, had written a book about nurturing talent, and in it he recalled the habit of the ninjas of jumping, daily, over a slow-growing hemp plant. As it grew, imperceptibly, their leaps steadily, quietly, grew higher with it.

  The story put me in mind of my 12-year-old, book-obsessed nephew, Dovid, and his advice about jumping higher: Jump over a stack of books; each day add a book to your stack. This was the Jewish version of the ninja tactic, apparently.

  “Can I legally even get a hemp plant?” I wondered aloud.

  And then the Mormon doctor, clean-cut, with beautifully trimmed black hair, wearing a white polo shirt and khaki shorts, leaned in: “I hear that if you ask where you can pick up some basil at a head shop, they can help you out.”

  16

  Carrying Capacity

  22 days left: Battling knee soreness, I stick to light weights and short sprints. After a long stretch and a plyometrics set, I do a dozen sprints of 25 meters apiece. At the gym: hamstring curls, calf raises, leg extensions, and 85-pound squat jumps. I retire to the sauna—my sweet relief—and crease open my novel, Moshin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, careful not to sweat all over it. A tattooed man, shirtless with sneakers and shorts, asks me for the book’s best advice. Fair enough.

  In early August, only a few weeks from the finish line, I headed back to New York for a final examination.

  After I took off my shirt, Polly, now an old friend, gestured up and down at my body: “Just look at him,” she said warmly. I might have blushed. “You look like a new man.” I was thinner for sure, and more powerful. My body fat was at just 8 percent, down from nearly 21 percent at the start of my year. On the Wingate test, I now clocked a peak power output of 932 watts, a solid 20-percent increase since the first time I oafishly stumbled into Polly and Jamie’s lab. I was approaching the quick-twitch power of—wait for it—the 1999 Israeli national basketball team. My people! My standing vertical, meanwhile, had gone from 18 inches to 21 inches—still merely mediocre, but an overall 17-percent increase in my jumping ability. There’s still some spring in these bones. And, even better, my leaping vertical—which harnessed the momentum of a quick sprint into upward force as I leapt off my right foot—was about 27 inches. Now I could get my full hand above the rim, a far cry from when I strained just to touch it. Yet still too short—if only by an inch—to dunk a full-sized basketball on a full-sized rim.

  I had a couple of weeks still left—but my legs were starting to break down.

  —

  In my regular life I write about environmental issues for the daily newspaper in Austin. The environmentalists I interview like to talk about “carrying capacity,” or how much life a given plot of land can naturally sustain, in terms of habitat, food, and water. They argue that it’s unnatural to build suburbs atop environmentally sensitive areas. Take the increasingly fragmented Texas Hill Country, for instance, home to endangered songbirds and salamanders—and now a fast-growing suburb of Austin. Once upon a time it was one of the poorest areas of the nation, a land of rocky soil and inhospitable drought, until a young congressman named Lyndon Baines Johnson, a native son, steered money in the 1930s to the building of enormous dam projects that brought along electricity. With its thin soil and scarcity of water, environmentalists argue, the Hill Country is not meant for the crush of roads, swimming pools, homes, baseball fields and all the other things that materialize in a twenty-first-century burg.

  The human body has its own carrying capacity. Even the greatest athletes among us are circumscribed not only by forces like gravity but also the muscle mass, bone density, and connective tissue of their bodies. The pinnacle of the 2013 season for Matt Harvey, the 24-year-old pitching ace of the New York Mets, arrived on August 7, when he threw his first complete-game shutout, baffling the Colorado Rockies with his torrid fastball. Already he had started for the National League in the All-Star Game and had hurled two near no-hitters. But not long after that game against the Rockies, his elbow began to bother him. The diagnosis: He had torn a ligament. He had thrown so hard that his arm just broke. Harvey, the flamethrower, would miss the entire 2014 season following ulnar-collateral ligament surgery, better known as Tommy John surgery, for the pitcher who originally underwent the procedure in the 1970s. The surgery is remarkably successful, and horrifically common—as many as one-third of starting pitchers now undergo Tommy John surgery to keep their careers going.

  Glenn Fleisig, research director at the Birmingham, Alabama–based American Sports Medicine Institute and an expert in pitching mechanics, tells me that we’ve reached the limit on how fast humans can throw a ball. You can improve the mechanics, the conditioning, the nutrition, the muscle mass of an athlete. But at some point the tendons and ligaments are too weak to support the superhuman whiplash movements; the body just doesn’t have the carrying capacity. “You get a good athlete, not me or you, some minor leaguer, he seems athletic or studly and we signed him from New Jersey or Venezuela or wherever, he throws 85—and we want him to throw 95,” Fleisig tells me, and at this point I’m wondering how he can tell, just by hearing my voice, that I’m not a good athlete, that I’m not studly. “The limiting factor is not how strong he makes his muscles, it’s what your ligaments and tendons can take. These guys are not coming in with broken bones or torn muscles—it’s the torn ligaments that are the problem. The ligaments and tendons are taking maximum loads of over a hundred pitches in a single outing.”

  Fleisig tells me that while pitchers have generally maxed out, sprinters and jumpers have lots more room for improvement. He makes the observation that his colleague, James Andrews, a famed orthopedic surgeon (he’s that guy every famous athlete visits after an injury), “does not have sprinters who blew out knees and hips” hanging around his waiting room.

  There were obvious ways I could have extended my own carrying capacity. “Steroids” is a dirty, unctuous word, one that conjures episodes of surreptitious injections into teammates’ butts. For me, they once served a nobler purpose, fortifying my body as chemotherapy toxins broke it down. But I eschewed pharmaceutical assistance this time around. Beyond my physical squeamishness, I worried I would somehow change my very character, fall prey to an awful fit of ’roid rage. I didn’t want to hulk out that badly.

  So what is the natural carrying capacity of athletes? How fast, given maximum conditioning and talent, can we run or swim? How high can we jump? How far can we throw a ball? Absent a natural or artificial physical evolution, would the athletes of the future perform any better than they do now? Some have tried to get at the answers. A Chicago doctor has predicted that one day we could see a 7′2″ superathlete with freakishly long arms and an eye-opening 51″ vertical dunk on a 14′5″ rim. In a 2010 article in the journal Mathematics and Sports, a professor at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania calculated with 90-percent certainty that the speed limit for the 100-meter dash lies at 9.4 seconds. Making such calculations is slippery business: The professor conceded that before Bolt’s world-record dash of 9.58 seconds in 2009, he would have predicted a fastest-possible time of 9.62 seconds. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

  I wondered if, boiled down, we were like the mathematical limits we had learned about in high school, with that arrow pointing to a finish line it never quite reached. A life spent approaching a goal but never quite arriving.

  —

  After getting the look-over from Polly, I met with Steve Doty, the Hospital for Special Surgery researcher who had first taken an interest in my project, at the hospital coffee shop. Doctors in scrubs padded around, pouring milk into little bowls of cereal.

  I told him of my worry that I was coming up just short.

  “You could always try limb le
ngthening,” he said.

  Medieval punishment wasn’t such a bad idea, I supposed, if I could dunk at the end of it. Everything has a silver lining. “You mean the rack?” I laughed.

  “No, we actually do limb lengthening here,” he told me, “for patients who have had birth defects or serious accidents.”

  There are instances of cosmetic leg lengthening—men at 5′3″, say, who want to be closer to 5′9″. These typically involve the intentional breaking of bones as doctors then pull fragments apart to encourage growth. Doty wasn’t seriously suggesting I go that route, but the fact that cosmetic lengthening even exists illuminates the extraordinary lengths people are willing to go to shrug off their natural limits. Bone-breaking struck me as a clear violation of the one promise I had made myself, to do no medical-grade harm. More than that, it felt like a violation of nature. I like my bones just the way they are. Besides, my year was fast coming to an end.

  Not long after I left New York, an encouraging report came out of Chicago, one that should cheer would-be dunkers everywhere: Derrick Rose, the Bulls point guard who had sat out the entire previous season during his recovery from major ligament surgery, and who had set his own return mark to when he could dunk off his injured left leg, announced that he had added an extraordinary five inches to his vertical. “I think I jump higher,” he told reporters. “I think coming into the league I was at thirty-seven [inches vertical jump] and they tested my vertical at [a training facility]. I’m probably at, like, a forty-two [inches], so I’m jumping a little bit higher.” I felt like his year and my year were weirdly aligned. If Derrick Rose, already renowned for his explosiveness, could squeeze out a few more inches of jumping talent following a devastating injury, couldn’t we all? And Josh Scoggins, one of the young men I had met at the Hill Country basketball camp, who had sworn off jumping because of growing pains, wrote me. In pregame warm-ups, he had completed his first-ever dunk. “Everyone screamed, and then I did it a second consecutive time,” he said. “It felt awesome.”