by Asher Price
17
Allez Hop!
In Austin there grows a type of agave called a century plant. For nearly all its life this bluish, smooth-leaved agave appears inert and bloodless. It grows very slowly. And then, seemingly overnight, it sends a bright green flowering stalk dozens of feet in the air. The stalk, straight as Gary Cooper, resembles a gigantic uncooked spear of asparagus, one so thick a grown man can’t get both his hands around it. You can find the century plants, so called because the stalks shoot up after decades of dormancy, across the deserts of the Southwest, lending an otherworldly feel to the dry plains.
I think of the sprouting of the century stalk as the great shout of the otherwise-silent cactus. The plant goes, suddenly, from a period to an exclamation point. But it also marks the end of the book, as it were, for the plant. It is exhausted by the reproductive effort. Beneath the stalk that has waved high for months, the leaves of the cactus wilt and gray. Sickly, they flop to the ground and then, finally, the stalk itself crumples into a leathery decay.
The effort it took to dunk, the months of preparation, the daily pushing open of the doors at the gym to lift weights, the sprawling on the ground yet again to do still more push-ups, the counting up to 15 with near-nauseating repetition—fifteen reps of biceps curls, fifteen reps of triceps presses, fifteen fingertip push-ups—to tease out that potential that I trusted lurked invisibly within me, was coming to a close. I was expecting a spectacular final flourishing before my project’s end. Eventually, my muscles would melt, my belly folds return, my age assert itself. Already my legs were tiring, my knee sounding the alarm that time was against me.
Astonishingly, with only days to go, it remained a mystery to me whether I could dunk a full-sized ball on a full-height rim. That I was now this close, the equivalent of an underdog with a shot to win the game with the clock ticking to zero, was itself amazing to me. Once, a couple of months into my project, I had suffered dreams in which coaches, unhappy with my lack of dunking ability, shipped me out of the country—to France, peculiarly enough. Now I found myself sliding into sleep with visions of slam dunks. Still, in plain daylight I knew that I couldn’t simply run up and dunk the ball on a 10-foot rim, as I had at the ever-so-slightly-short Boys & Girls Club rim. Bearing the ball with me during my run-up, I couldn’t re-create the angle I would need to push the ball down. My hands were just too small, my tensile strength too weak, to both palm the ball and sharply swing my arms in such a way that I could steam ahead.
My solution to this problem: the alley-oop dunk. Etymologists trace the name for one of the most electrifying moves in all of sports to the cry of French acrobats as they were about to leap into a trick. “Allez hop!” they would cry, in their presumably impeccable silent-h French accents. (It means “Off you go!” or “Let’s go!”) The term “alley-oop” then surfaced in the late 1950s, used by the NFL’s 49ers to describe the lob play to their springy 6′3″ receiver R. C. Owens, a former college basketball player. The quarterback would loft the ball high into the air, trusting Owens to soar and snatch it. Within a few years the term took hold in the NBA, popularized by the late Los Angeles Lakers announcer Chick Hearn, to describe the exhilarating play in which one player lobs to another for the midair catch-and-dunk. Executed properly, the alley-oop scans like a poem: beginning as a long-syllabled hang-in-the-moment, floating finesse pass in the proximity of the rim; ending, the ball plucked in midair, with a short, accented phrase, the bursting dunk. Deciding to go with an alley-oop dunk to finish my year required particular audacity on my part. The alley-oop takes coordination, concentration, and timing, after all. It’s a don’t-try-this-at-home sort of dunk. These would be extra, final hurdles in my dunking year. But it also had tactical benefits: Attempting an alley-oop meant that I would not have to carry the ball rimward, thus freeing my arms for their pistonlike work. And if I could pull it off, an alley-oop would be an emphatic way to nail my first—and perhaps last—ever real dunk. All I had to do, easy-sounding enough, was palm the ball in the air and snap it through the hoop.
—
The day of the dunk was a Monday in late August. The following afternoon Rebecca and I would board a plane for Istanbul, for Nathaniel’s wedding. Dunking, Texas, stretching, and dieting would recede from my mind at 550 miles per hour. This was the last chance.
I had taken it easy the previous few days, track-star-style, tapering off my workouts to rest my leg muscles before their big liftoff. As I undertook my standard warm-ups at Charles’s gym—the skips, the high-knees, the bounding, and so on—I felt fresh and loose. My nerves melted away. Charles dribbled the ball by the basket and I readied myself at half-court, running through, in my mind’s eye, the keys to getting up.
A small audience gathered: Rebecca, there for moral support—and to take video of what might be an epic moment; Charles’s assistant, Terrell; a half-dozen or so 12-year-olds, all aspiring dunkers, who took a break from their basketball game to watch; and the few customers who happened to be hanging out at Charles’s gym that morning. It was high noon in Texas, a faceoff between me, at half-court, and my nemesis, the rim. The gym had grown quiet, except for some murmurs, and everyone was staring at me. All the work had come down to this, a final series of dunk attempts. “You ready, man?” Charles asked. And on that first jump, I exploded up, swatting the ball toward the back iron and then hanging, for a second, on the rim. It gave a serious shudder as I dropped to the ground. Yes, I was ready. Everyone was watching, egging me on, now, hollering. The kids took their shoes off, sat near the basket, and beat the floor with their sneakers during my run-ups. I was getting higher up than I ever really thought possible, but I was not quite putting the dunk down.
If you had stepped inside the air-conditioned gym from the big-sky brightness and throbbing Texas heat outside, you would have seen a man in modest, solitary, periodic flight. He’s sporting not a cape but a curious costume: a crimson gym T-shirt (increasingly darkened by sweat) with the slogan “Gold Is Our Standard” stretched across the back (trumpeting Charles Austin’s gold-medal-winning history); a frankly quite ugly pair of Athletic Propulsion Laboratories sneakers, just in case they decided to start matching their promises; and navy-blue super-lightweight short shorts—practically a high-tech loincloth—meant for runners (no extra-long baller’s shorts for him). Nearly beneath the basket, you would have seen a second man, strong and loose-limbed, emanating competence, bouncing the ball with two hands and tossing it underhand into the air, like a basketball ref letting go a jump ball. You would hear Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” playing on the sound system in the background, partly drowned out by the clanking of weights that echoed about the cavernous space, softening the squeaks that squeezed off the parquet floor as the man pawed at the half-court circle with his sneakers like a batter stepping up to the plate. You could have watched his first attempt. His second. His tenth.
Again, again, the ball would leave my hand, only to rattle against the inside back lip of the rim, and out. I could not get my arm high enough for the right angle to slam it true, as if I were a carpenter incapable of swinging his hammer up to bash the nail-head home. Fifteen tries. I glanced down at the palm of my left hand to find the joints of my middle and forefinger bloodied from scraping against the rim. I reached back to that cold winter morning a year and a half earlier when I had met Tyler in Central Park: He had warned me of the bruising and the blisters, tracing a line of callus across his fingers. I had secretly doubted I would ever get high enough on the rim for such a thing to happen to me. And now, on the last day of my great dunking experiment, my fingers were bleeding. I was shocked and pleased. They appeared, these blood blisters, like dunking stigmata, mystical evidence of the real pain I was feeling.
“I’ll put money on it,” said Terrell. “Show me something!”
Twenty minutes of this passed. Some of the kids, inspired by my exertions, were now lined up to dunk on a seven-foot plastic hoop in the corner. Talking trash through giggles, they were playing grownup
. I envied them; they made it look easy.
I collected myself. I sipped some water from a fountain. I shook out my legs. I readied myself again. Again I flew up to the basket, my wrist above the rim, my palm kissing the ball.
—
Deep in the New Mexico desert, in a razor-wired compound guarded by the military, I glimpsed the future of jumping. Buffeted by the wind, hills of red rocks scrabbled around, the federal Robotic Vehicle Range felt like an outpost on Mars. It was home to a few doublewides, a mini-warehouse, and a communications tower—a modest collection of buildings that form the initial testing grounds of some of the world’s most advanced robots. It was in that warehouse, off a high shelf, that Jon Salton, a government engineer, pulled down an orange hard-plated suitcase, one that a Romanian might have traveled with in 1976. Salton laid it on a workbench, snapped it open, and pulled out something that looked like a metal mini-skateboard with puffed-up wheels. This little machine was why I had made the trip to the high desert: This was the Hopper 2.5, a six-pound proof-of-concept vehicle that promised to remake jumping from a high-spirited expression to a serious-minded tool of warfare.
In the late 1990s, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the arm of the Defense Department that funds newfangled technology like algae-based fighter-jet fuel, began supporting efforts to build a robot capable of leaping at least 20 feet while reliably maneuvering across complicated terrain autonomously. Historically, wheel size has determined mobility: the bigger the wheel, the higher the clearance, which is what you have with those ridiculous-sized monster trucks. The hopper robot, all six pounds of it, was meant to break the paradigm. Now you can have a small vehicle that simply hops over an obstacle. “Where there’s a flat spot—and there are many of those in this world—it’s a whole lot easier to use the old-fashioned wheel,” Salton’s boss told me. “Still, there are places this can go that you can’t take a tank.”
Researchers at the Robotic Vehicle Range won the nod from DARPA to solve the challenge. Part of Sandia National Laboratories, the range was carved out of the vast Kirtland Air Force Base, a left-behind, Cold War–era kind of place, still dedicated to designing nuclear weapons. A Sandia researcher named Rush Robinett, an avid trout fisherman, got the idea for the machine’s early navigation style as he was out catching grasshoppers to use as bait. “I noticed they jump around in a random fashion, hit the ground in an arbitrary orientation, right themselves, and jump again,” he said. “I said to myself: ‘I can make a robot do that.’ ” These prototypes were the size and shape of grapefruits and coffee cans, with low centers of gravity. They were durable, but they fell over, or barely made it off the ground, as scientists tinkered with the right fuel mix.
The original plan was to prepare the hoppers for interplanetary exploration, to dispatch them in every direction from a Mars lander. But 9/11 changed all that, with DARPA desperate to find robots that could do reconnaissance in the Afghanistan theater. Over about eight years, a dozen people worked long hours in the New Mexico desert to build a jumping robot, one that could read a map and find its way around inhospitable terrain, deciding on its own whether to move by means of energy-efficient rolling or by energy-demanding hopping. It had to navigate and path-plan, in engineer parlance, making use of complicated algorithms that Salton and his team strung together. The electronics had to be squeezed into a tight space, because the smaller they could make the vehicle, the more fuel-efficient it would be. And it had to be sturdy, partly so the electronics could survive each jarring landing, and partly so it could jump again.
“The real limit is the landing,” said Salton, as he dusted off the hopper. He had a drawn, marathoner face above a pressed shirt, khakis, and a sensible pair of black shoes. He had obvious respect, even affection, for it: The old robot had hopped more than 300 times, and, like a coach rationing the playing time of his star forward, the one with the creaky knees and bad back, Salton wanted to limit further impact.
I asked him if it had a name, assuming it didn’t.
“Lewis,” he said, as he lovingly regarded the robot—the other prototype robot, in another suitcase, was named Clark. “I wanted to name them Lois and Clark—it flies and all that,” he explained, “but that was shot down.”
In 2010, Salton turned to Lewis for a critical “go/no-go” test before a program manager for DARPA. Lewis successfully executed a series of jumping and wayfaring tasks around the robotic vehicle range, wending its way around cacti, over asphalt, and through windows perched dozens of feet in the air. That evening, to celebrate, Salton and the team went bowling on Taco Tuesday at the Air Force base bowling lanes.
“The secret sauce,” he told me—and here I was thinking he was going to say something dark and weapon-y, about how the vehicle had managed to hide a mini–machine gun in its aluminum scales or how vials of plutonium powered the thing—“is how we store and meter the fuel.”
Basically, the machine works its way backward each time it must make a jump: By calculating how high it has to jump, it sets aside the right amount of fuel to achieve the task. Then it shoots out an “actuator” (geek-speak for anything that leads to an action), essentially a foot with a foam pad—sort of like the front wheel on R2D2. When the actuator, in a piston action, presses fast against the ground, the hopper springs into the air, tumbling and twisting before coming to a hardy landing on those puffy wheels. It’s a tough little guy: The acceleration travels over the four inches of the actuator; the deceleration is spread over the four wheels, each of which has a radius of only about half an inch. “It’s an enormous shock; electronics don’t like to be shook up at a thousand Gs,” Salton says. “Our joke is: Hopping once is easy, because it’s mortar.” I stared blankly and told him I didn’t get the joke, feeling the weight of generations of clueless non-military forefathers pressing upon me. Salton took it in stride: “Oh, it’s just that once mortar lands, that’s it”—the ordnance has exploded. “Getting the hopper to hop again is the hard part.”
We were outside now, in a triangle of asphalt by one of the doublewides, the warehouse, and some outbuildings. It looked like the backlot of a movie studio. A random piece of rocket leaned against a golf cart. A high scaffold stood in one corner, with lights and a set of security cameras, bunched together like grapes, hanging off some of the woodwork. At another corner of the lot, some engineers held aloft gizmos to gauge wind speeds, to decide whether they could launch their hexo-copter, a mini-drone that had six helicopter blades. Nailed to the outside of a shed was a basketball hoop, of course, because the damned things were chasing me.
“Need help with anything?” a bearded post-doc hollered over to Salton as he hunched over a laptop that sat atop a garbage can, in the kind of high-tech/low-tech maneuver that suggested a haphazard, ingenious glue-and-Scotch-tape operation. He was programming some parameters into the hopper’s byte-size brain.
Salton un-hunched himself and presented crossed fingers—luck: “Just that kind of help.”
He affixed to Lewis a small canister, like the sort you’d find filled with whipped cream; it carried the fuel to shoot the actuator down.
“I feel guilty,” he said, and he appeared to be talking to the hopper itself.
“What about?” I asked, as I scribbled down notes.
“I have two very old Labrador retrievers at home, and I feel the same way about this machine as I do about them.”
“I see knee problems in its future,” laughed a Sandia staffer who was watching.
“It is a fairly well-utilized prototype,” he admitted.
All told, Lewis cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build. Unless it goes into the toy market as the most awesome remote-control monster truck ever, it will never be profitable. But as a nimble, lifeless scout, it might save the lives of countless American soldiers.
Out there in the New Mexico desert, I asked Salton what distinguished Lewis from human jumpers. “If you programmed Lewis to do it,” I asked, gesturing to the hoop that hung only feet from us, “what
would jump more efficiently, Lewis dunking itself or me dunking a ball?” He seemed to think this was an interesting question—Salton actually stroked his chin—leaving me quietly pleased with myself. Or maybe he was trying to figure out how to answer politely a question that was vaguely absurd.
“The human body is not very efficient,” he finally said. (Tell me about it, I thought.) “We optimize our gait compared to a robot. But we have torn ligaments. We have banged-up knees. We have hips out of alignment. A lot of the work is wasted on just picking yourself up.” The machine humans have engineered to launch itself highest—a space shuttle—has rockets that drop away after they have completed their propulsion work. Human legs, on the other hand, don’t detach and float away after they’ve launched us into the air. “Whether it’s biological or mechanical, jumping is a big deal in terms of energy,” Salton continued. “It’s hard to compete in terms of efficiency with a robot. For us, landing, including the bending of knees to absorb the shock, takes an enormous amount of energy.”
Finally, Salton demonstrated the jumping capability of the hopper. With a small remote-control joystick that looked like a run-of-the-mill Nintendo controller, he steered the machine along the asphalt to a 12-foot-high fence. Beyond, desert. He punched a button on his laptop. The actuator pressed into the ground and the hopper went flying, tumbling over itself as it skyed over the fence. Then it landed, hard, on the dirt outside. It was as if it had escaped from a prison. I and the one or two other onlookers cheered and clapped—it was truly amazing, this little thing projecting itself so high up into the air—and Salton steered it in a little circle to make sure it hadn’t suffered the electronics version of a concussion. He seemed relieved. I asked him if he was going to command it to jump back. He looked at me like I was crazy before taking his leave to scoop it up in his arms, like a helpless pet.