by Asher Price
As I got back in the car that would take me out of the Air Force base, the late afternoon light shining meekly now, I noticed dozens of hopping insects buzzing about us and my thoughts turned back to Malcolm Burrows, in England, with his froghoppers and flying cockroaches. I felt like I had seen both the past and the future of jumping, finely evolved exoskeletons and niftily designed pieces of metal machinery leaping many times higher than their body weight might allow. But they couldn’t dance like Michael Jackson, and they couldn’t execute a 360-degree jam like Spud Webb. They would never jump up and down, pouting like a child in hysterics, to win a parent’s attention. They would not jump with unbounded enthusiasm, like the young Masai warriors, to announce their manhood. They would not jump in lordly leaps, like the dancer Rudolf Nureyev, to seize the affection of another dancer and an entire audience. They had no artistry and they lacked exuberance. They would never jump for joy. They could jump, yes, but they could not express themselves. Perhaps a robot could smoothly leap through a basket. But it could never dunk.
—
Charles is out of time now, and my body is out of energy. I had swatted the ball into the hoop, but these efforts didn’t quite have the feel and control—the snap—that suggested a true dunk. Charles had thrown the ball up perfectly, tossing it so that it hung in the air like a full moon, and I had, more times than not, gotten my palm onto it. But I hadn’t quite gotten all the way on top of the ball—it was just an inch too far—and so I was left slapping the ball toward the basket and hoping it would rattle in. A few did, and a few of these felt right—there had been something of that snappish feeling, and the friction of my sliding hand against the warm, curved metal—but as soon as I landed and twisted toward Charles, I would see him shaking his head. “Asher, Asher, Asher,” he’d say. The ball had dripped through the net. “So I didn’t dunk it?” I’d ask, sincerely unsure and genuinely hopeful. He’d turn to one of the folks watching—a bearded paunchy guy in glasses, another gym-goer caught up in the hullaballoo—and say, “Was that a dunk?” “Almost,” he said, holding his thick thumb and forefinger in the air, a delicate centimeter apart. This stranger, this random witness, casually pinching my potential between his fingers like a bug.
They were turning away, now, the boys, one by one standing up and going back to their kids’ basket in the corner of the gym, blithely dunking and horsing around. The moment of possibility had imperceptibly turned to a moment of desperation.
Charles took me aside, to the half-court circle, and, huddling with me, an arm briefly around my shoulder, brandished his iPhone. He had queued up a YouTube clip of his winning jump in the 1991 world track and field championships. “See that burst?” he asked, as if, just by watching, I could absorb his talent. (The frustration that he must endure, the bewilderment, at my inability to do better. And the confidence in himself, after all that hard work, at how very easily it all came. He’s in a tough business, it suddenly seemed to me—nothing’s as hard to communicate as physical success.) “Look at the explosion of those hips,” he said, nodding approvingly as an enduring image of himself flew across the screen, as if he couldn’t quite contemplate the gulf between my abilities and his. As if dunking were pure obviousness, and the mystery, if there was one in a mind of such confidence, was why everyone couldn’t dunk.
He had a client waiting now. His next appointment. My year was up.
“Just once more,” he said for the fifth time; he wanted so badly for me to succeed. And I myself couldn’t believe how close I was to accomplishing this thing I had worked on for a year—lacking just that little bit of air, a thimbleful, no more, that could fill the distance between thumb and index finger. I relaxed. I told myself I had already completed the dunk, and that this would be, in Charles-parlance, just play. I smiled. I imagined that thousands of fans were stomping their feet, that cheerleaders waved their pom-poms, that Michael Jordan himself was watching, and that Rebecca, filming all this, was NBC television. “Being in an actual game atmosphere adds adrenaline,” Josh Scoggins had once told me, after his first dunk. This was it, the last gasp. I pumped my knees, flew forward, planted hard, drove myself up through the air.
I couldn’t quite get my hand over it. Perhaps if I had tried a thousand more times, like a kid mastering a video game, I would have gotten it. But I hadn’t. I had failed.
The one or two kids who were still left under the basket quickly got up and grabbed basketballs; they sensed that any lingering would drive home the failure, and for them, at their age, failure was something contagious and best avoided. Terrell started ministering to a client on an exercise bike. “Listen, man, I gotta go,” Charles said. “But you keep your head up.” I could tell he was disappointed for me. Everyone had turned away. Rebecca was the only one left. “You doing okay, big guy?” she asked as she squeezed my shoulder. She asked me if she should throw me the ball. But my legs were tired—not just from that day’s jumps, but from a year’s worth of them. Time had run out. I paid my final training receipt, stepped outside, and tugged off my sweaty shirt. I threw my high-tops in the trunk. We drove back to Austin mostly in silence.
Postscript
After my grandmother’s death earlier that year, my father asked my brothers and me for advice. At 75 he had grown worn and a little bent. He shuffled. He was keenly aware he might slip into old age. “I’m falling apart” was long his standard line after touching back down from some far-flung academic conference, and we always understood that as a knowing, heroic joke about his boundless energy, the topsy-turvy way ideas were always spilling off of him; now the phrase threatened to carry real freight. With his mother’s death, he said he was “unmoored,” and I took that to mean he was both directionless and, given the care she required in her last years, liberated. He wanted a new purpose. He wanted to shape up, something that had never been important to him, and, in the way that drives so many of us to exercise, he wanted to recapture a long-ago nimbleness, a physical twinkle. Years before, when I was sick and he was sick in hospital beds half a country apart—he had his prostate surgery in New York on the very day my first week of chemotherapy ended—he wrote me: “Wish we could be having dinner together or going for a walk, you and I. We will.”
He was right, of course. Just a few months later, on a late-spring day with the jasmine blossoming, Rebecca and I busied ourselves as we waited for the results of my post-treatment scans. We were at our house, the fixer-upper we had closed on just a week before I had been diagnosed. It was gutted now, the old shiplap and 1920s wallpaper fragments exposed, the framing stripped down to the joists. A real rebuilding job. When the phone rang, Rebecca and I took the call to the porch. “It’s not often I get to give patients such good news,” said Laurie, the nurse for my oncologist, sounding genuinely happy. We celebrated that night Texas-style, with champagne and barbecue.
My father had also been given the all-clear, and now, these seven years later, I hoped he would find the satisfaction, as I had, of some extra lift in the leg. I used to say if surviving cancer had taught me anything, it was to take pleasure in a full helping of tagliatelli con funghi—the not-so-good-for-you creamy pasta dish at the trattoria down the street from my place in Austin. Now, by trying to dunk, I had learned the gratification of discipline, and, with something of the convert’s zeal, I began suggesting some of the very exercises, albeit in milder forms, that had been bringing me so close to the rim. He took to them with a schoolboy’s diligence. He began walking first one, then three, and finally all ten flights of steps up to his apartment. Maybe not with explosive speed, but he could do it in a steady march. He took brisk strolls in his Manhattan neighborhood. He lost weight, discovering for himself the wonders of yogurt. His posture straightened. He was invigorated.
In a way few of us care to acknowledge, we work out in modest defiance of the inevitable. This was, of course, partly at play in my dad’s remaking of himself. And it was partly at work in my attempt to dunk, made at an age when I was just beginning the slide from peak phy
sical capability to, ultimately, dust. (Why put too fine a point on it?)
At the start of the year, I told myself I was in a race against the imperceptible decline of my physical abilities. This was my last chance to dunk. Yet I discovered that even if we’re not all quite dunkers, we have what might fairly be called a superhero’s confidence in transformation, a capacity for creative self-improvement that winks at the grave. “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor,” Thoreau wrote. I think I know what he meant. Even utterly spent, as I pushed through the gym doors early one evening, the sky dark enough that the cars on the freeway had flipped on their lights and you could see the glow of neon popping up here and there from the Action Pawn and the Blazer Tag, I found myself cozying up to the thought that I was lifting myself higher than I had ever thought possible.
I never did slam home that basketball. I sometimes look back at the year of the dunk and wonder why I failed. I had some of the world’s best coaches giving me advice and was regularly the sweatiest man in the gym. So I’m left grasping after trivial explanations: Maybe if I had found the right pair of sneakers. Or was it something further back in time, a piling-up of small decisions I had made over many years? Maybe I was just born fated to be earthbound? Whatever the reason, it all added up to an inarguable fact: I couldn’t dunk.
My brother-in-law Ben, the basketball player, once wrote about the “climate of assessment” that hovers around competitive athletes: “Childhood, for them, was the game you won at.” I’m no professional or college or even high school athlete, so my failure has had no real repercussions—I wasn’t cut from the team, I didn’t feel lesser than the guy next in line. I was like a lot of people: athletic enough, with a thin desire to win, but never the best and never desperate to be the best. Maybe that explains why, all those years ago, as a carefree boy flailing about the streets of Manhattan, I tried my hand at awning-slapping; unburdened by any expectation of success, I ran along fancy-free. Even now, all these years later, I still occasionally swing away, as if childhood were a game you merely played at. But during the year of the dunk I took those childhood antics suddenly seriously, testing how I might measure up against a sterner yardstick.
Sometimes I wonder what another Asher, whose combination of fortune, effort, and experience had propelled him to dunk on that rim that final day, would be like. Would he have had Charles Austin’s natural confidence and easy smile? Would he so trust in his own abilities that the men and women around him would take them for his simple birthright? Zadie Smith wrote about the similar pangs she felt as she ran across a Talking Heads album in a record shop one day. “As I stopped to admire it, I was gripped by melancholy, similar perhaps to the feeling a certain kind of man gets while sitting with his wife on a train platform as a beautiful girl—different in all aspects from his wife—walks by. There goes my other life. Is it too late to get into Talking Heads? Do I have the time? What kind of person would I be if I knew this album at all, or well?” The dunk project was my chance to cross the street and walk along that other life. But perhaps, despite my dramatic physical transformation, or because of it, if I had managed to complete that dunk in Charles’s gym, it would have signaled no profound change: it wouldn’t have been the act of a natural dunker, after all, but the final and fast-fading result of a tremendous effort.
In any case, in the end, that other life, that do-over, remained, like all fantasies, out of reach. Is that the gloomy subtext to my father’s rejuvenation? We each can lift ourselves off the ground for so long, but in the final analysis, we’re all moving in one direction? I’m not sure which was the more seductive lie spun by Michael Jordan’s remarkable hang time: the lie that we could defeat gravity or the lie that time could stand still. Even Michael Jordan had to touch back down eventually.
Months after my final dunk attempt, my APL shoes lie abandoned, thudding about deep in the trunk of my car. A bag of protein-shake mix slumps untouched in a kitchen cabinet, waiting to be thrown away. My gym membership is long canceled. But I still play pickup basketball. I show guys the video of me dunking on our court, and they hold their hands over their open mouths. I can’t bring myself to tell them it’s less than ten feet, for fear of dashing their own dreams. I’m quicker, partly as a matter of confidence. I take guys off the dribble, or back them up in the post and try a turnaround jumper—my elevation is still better than it was before I began my crazy experiment. I emerged sinewy, tough, and lean. Not wanting to disappoint my mother (“Of course you’re always handsome,” she tells me on the telephone, “but you’re especially handsome now”), my weight remains pretty good. I eat dessert more freely these days and am back to my happy pasta-eating ways. But asceticism clings, like the last streaks of nonfat yogurt sticking to a bowl. I used to be a whole-milk person; now I’m a one-percent kind of guy. I’ve been known, even now, to decline the services of a bun with my burger. It’s a little sad. One evening every couple of weeks, just as the sun starts to set and the grackles muster along the power lines for their evening gabfest, I make my way to the nearby middle school track to do a lonely set of sprints. I put myself through some push-ups and a few sets of sit-ups, lowering myself to the ground with the enthusiasm of a man getting into a cold bath. It’s mostly vanity now. This is what happens once you’ve found yourself with a six-pack, with higher hops, with yet more compliments from your mother. You find it hard to let yourself go. But I’m trying.
Appendix A
The Dunker’s Handbook
Suppose, having read this book, you wanted to add inches to your vertical. My sense is that it’s hard to lose weight for the sake of losing weight, or to lift for the sake of lifting. Both seem joyless. It helps, instead, to have a purpose, even if that purpose is something as rudimentary as getting yourself to jump higher. The weight loss and the exercise will follow.
Here’s a scaled-down version of how to jump higher.
First, measure your current abilities. This’ll be crude, but doable: Put a bit of tape on your finger, doubled over into a loop. From a standstill, jump and slap a wall, making sure to stick the tape to the wall at your highest possible point. OK, this is the mark you want to beat.
Jumping, like comedy, comes in threes:
1. Stretching. First, take a light jog, one just long enough that you begin to sweat. You’re going to want to improve your explosive capabilities as quickly as you can, so feel free to mix in some high knees, some skipping, some jump rope, as you jog. Now that you’re warmed up, you ought to take a solid 10 minutes to stretch. Make sure you get to your quads, your hip flexors, your groin, your calves, your butt, and your Achilles. Bonus points if you stretch your IT band. Think about getting as deep a stretch as you can. Where are you stiffest? Work on more nuanced stretches to ease up these regions of your body. As a reference, I recommend the book Staying Supple by the late John Jerome.
2. Lifting. I actually want you to start with no weight at all. In fact, start working out on the very chair you’re sitting in right this moment. Trying standing up and sitting down. Do that a few times, rather quickly. Did you use your hands to help launch yourself up? Now try standing up and sitting down with no hands. Not even on your knees. Just keep them by your sides. Try springing up as soon as your bum touches the chair seat. Can you do that comfortably, 10 times in a row? OK, once you can do that, I want you to do that on one leg: Lower yourself down and pick yourself back up again on the same leg. The other foot shouldn’t touch the ground. Hard as hell, right? Get back to me when you can do that 10 times in a row, in three sets. (A tip: Don’t use a chair with wheels.)
Another exercise: squats. Stand up. Now drop your bum below the level of your hips. Make sure you keep your heels on the ground. And make sure your knees don’t stray ahead of your toes. Got it? (If that’s too hard for you, put a board or a folded towel beneath your heels to elevate them slightly.) Do this 10 times, up and down. Each time you go up, go up as fast as you can. Now try do
ing the same thing while holding a broom over your head, with your elbows more or less locked in place.
Finally, try doing squat jumps. When you explode upward from a squat, follow through and actually leave the ground. Land softly, with knees slightly bent. Lower yourself immediately back into a squat and explode upward again.
Try following these and other leg exercises Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, try a track workout. Concentrate on short bursts of speed, starting out no longer than 25 meters and moving to greater distances, stopping at 200 meters. Take a 30-second break after each 25-meter sprint and a one-minute break after each 200-meter sprint. So a workout might look like four 25-meter sprints, three 50-meter sprints, two 100-meter sprints, and one 200-meter sprint. And then work your way back down the pyramid. Or you could do a set of six 200-meter sprints. If you don’t have a track available to you—if you live on the nineteenth story of a downtown high-rise—then take the stairs. Try going up two-by-two if you can. Or taking them one at a time as fast as possible, to improve your footwork. Don’t use the rail. For a heftier workout, go up two flights, down one flight, up two flights, down one, etc.
Each of these workouts, as well as the leg workouts, should include some abdominal work—sit-ups or planks or whatever works out your tummy.
There are tons of other leg workouts, including ones, like squatting, that involve weights. But for now, these will suffice.