Year of the Dunk Read online

  He always kept his poise

  To the top branches, climbing carefully

  With the same pains you use to fill a cup

  Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

  Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,

  Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

  I happily smacked the awnings I knew I could smack, and didn’t bother with the ones I knew were just out of reach. Happy-go-lucky, you could say, but luck gets you only so high.

  Now I am all grown up, and, except for the times when no one, save my wife or an easily impressed young nephew, was looking, I haven’t tried to take a whack at an awning in a long time. It’s a little embarrassing for a man to hop about Manhattan trying to touch signs. But I have wondered just how high I could get if I really worked at it. If I made it my single purpose for a year—if I spent hours doing leg work and jumping exercises, consulting with basketball trainers and scientists, and talking to top-notch athletes—could I get high enough to dunk?

  1

  Assembling the Gurus

  On a late winter afternoon in New York at some basketball courts by the Great Lawn in Central Park, my hands jammed into my hoodie pockets, I waited for my pal Nathaniel. It was crisp, still cold enough to see the breath puff in front of your face, especially if you were winded. An old Spalding street ball, circa 1988, dug out from my childhood closet, sat on the ground between my feet. In its way, it was a worn-down globe of high-impact asphalt geography. In some parts, the leather stuff, or whatever it once was, had completely worn away, making what remained look like the splitting of continents. Between them, you could see the crisscrossing rubber filaments left naked, like open ocean.

  I had asked Nathaniel to meet me because I wanted to entertain him with the latest in a recent line of mischievous ideas. I had struck a restless mood, the sort that comes naturally to a reporter used to facing daily deadlines and now facing open time. My home and my newspaper were in Texas, but I was up in New York on a months-long journalism fellowship, with little more to do than take a few classes, and found myself dreaming up, toying with, and then, inevitably, discarding a succession of playful projects. A history of Jews eating pork. A documentary about a day in the life of an American supermarket. An international comparative study of the milk shake.

  I gathered myself up when Nathaniel arrived, all curly hair and glasses. I wanted to see just how far away I was from dunking, I told him. He’s a psychiatrist, and, in his practiced way, he nodded as if my crazy idea sounded entirely sensible. My friend since grade school, he has long been a coconspirator in my fantasies, dating to the massive battles we waged with toy soldiers. As Nathaniel stood aside, a plaid scarf swept around his neck, I tried jumping rimward a couple of times with the ball and had my usual pathetic results. An observer would have justly wondered why I was grunting so hard to undertake what appeared to be mere layups. I felt bloated, and the hair on my head seemed to me especially wispy and thinning. What the hell kind of idea is this? I wondered.

  Just then, a guy wearing a Megadeth T-shirt and a purple bandanna and Lehigh gym shorts joined us on the court. He was stocky, and there was something formidable about his forehead. He was maybe my height, but he didn’t have my long arms. Nathaniel and I were chatting, and this guy asked if he could borrow my ball. As he shot around I asked him if he could dunk. I didn’t expect much, but Megadeth just went ahead and did it: threw it down with one hand after a quick dribble and jump. He looked like a flying caveman, with a basketball instead of a club. Then he watched me try, a few times, and gave me some pointers on my biomechanics. I was leaning too far forward. I ought to bring my butt farther down before springing up. I should try jumping off two feet, he told me. As if my inherent failings could all be corrected.

  His name was Tyler Drake, and it turned out he had started dunking only at age 30, after an old roommate who had become obsessed with driving golf balls as far as possible began swearing by squat lifts to improve his power. “My college basketball team didn’t emphasize weightlifting,” he told me. What sort of college basketball team doesn’t emphasize weightlifting? And had a guy on the roster who couldn’t really dunk? Caltech, it turns out, where Tyler studied physics. When Tyler played on the team, the Beavers (nature’s engineers) had not won an NCAA game since 1996. Only in 2007, several years after he graduated, did the team snap the streak—after a record 207 consecutive losses against other NCAA Division III teams. I told him I wanted to make myself a dunker. “Definitely doable,” he said. Will you help me? I asked. (Why not? I figured. Don’t blink when serendipity stares you in the eye.) He was not a man to dance around words: “Totally.” Perfect. A dude who played on the losingest college basketball team ever would give me advice on how to dunk.

  A few weeks later, over wine and homemade baba ghannoush at his girlfriend’s place in Harlem, Tyler began going over the physics of the dunk. “Right now you’re just standing, exerting two hundred pounds on the ground. Jumping, you want to exert five hundred,” he said. I scribbled notes with one hand while eating with the other. I tried not to stare at his beautiful girlfriend, Paola, a Haitian émigré and model. A photo of her, naked, with a dusting of sand—but artistic, you know?—hung on a wall. The key to upping ups, he said, was in the routine, obsessive exercise of lifting weights through squats. “The bar is a stronger version of gravity. From a state of motionlessness, you want to go directly upward, and directly downward. The bar pushes you toward perfect form. If you’re leaning backward and pushing up, at an angle at all different from exactly up, you’re going to eat shit. It demands pushing exactly up. It’s totally what you want if you want to jump higher.”

  Tyler told me he was able to dunk when he could squat 315 pounds and deadlift 405. “It’s like loading up a spring and then going up,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said, with a hint of false swagger. I had no idea what that truly meant—I had never really lifted weights—but at least I had something to aim for.

  Then he told me that I’d probably develop a line of calluses along my back, from one shoulder blade to another, which, to be honest, kind of grossed me out. But to Tyler I just smiled. I didn’t want him to think I would be anything less than fully committed.

  —

  To transform my average-Joe body into a svelte jumping machine, I had decided to get some professional help. If I was truly going to test my capabilities and scientifically go about monitoring my performance, I needed some top-shelf trainers on board.

  Tucked on the ground floor inside an expensive-looking condo tower called the Bellaire, the Performance Lab of the Hospital for Special Surgery looks a little like an overgrown, high-end preschool playroom: Large, brightly colored inflatable balls sit on the softly matted ground. Stacks of stepping blocks stand in a corner. Dowels lean against a wall. Fluorescent lights buzz overhead. This is where the New York Knicks have been put through their paces. And now, somewhat amazingly, this was where my mission began.

  I hadn’t expected anyone to take me seriously. I wanted to dunk, yes, but the notion of an adult going deliberately about it seemed ridiculous. I wrote emails: “I’m interested in the limits of human potential,” I explained, as I laid out my project. And then: “I want to dunk.” Many of these, unsurprisingly, went unanswered.

  And then a real-life scientist, a very nice older man named Stephen Doty, who had himself played high school basketball in the 1950s, wrote me back. “What a great idea for a story. I, too, only reached the rim, never over it. And when I see what these giants of today are doing, it makes me wish I had tried harder.”

  A couple of weeks later, I found myself hurriedly buying some chocolates at a deli as I hustled to a swank Upper East Side neighborhood to meet Doty, a senior scientist who specialized in the loss of bone density at the Hospital for Special Surgery. He introduced me to a crew of physical trainers who had gamely agreed to help me.

  “So we’re going to get you to dunk, right?” Polly de Mille, a hands
ome, sandy-haired reed of a woman said after greeting me with a warm, Massachusetts-sounding hello. She’s not the chocolate-eating variety, I thought, immediately regretful that I hadn’t bought something like a bag of clementines. From my emails introducing my quixotic project, I had become something of a curiosity, and this was the first time the staff at the Performance Lab had set eyes on me. “That’s the idea,” I said, trying to sound as confident as I could, despite my own doubts—about my abilities, about my willingness, about my free time.

  Over nearly three hours, Polly put me through a battery of exercises to test my capabilities. Or “deficiencies,” as one of her colleagues described them. As it would turn out, I’m quite deficient.

  She began by taking baseline measurements of my body, an accounting of my flesh-and-blood vital statistics. First she performed a skinfold test: I felt a little like a piece of meat on a hook as she measured the body fat around my chest, arms, and legs with a pair of calipers. The pinching of the skin was meant to determine the subcutaneous fat layer—the measurements are then converted to body-fat percentage. (To determine the mathematical formula, doctors turned long ago to cadavers: After submitting the dead to skinfold tests, they dissected them to determine fat content.) Her findings: About a fifth of my overall weight was body fat, just worse than average for men my age. Between my love handles were the modest beginnings of a gut. Polly, who wore a T-shirt that said “Train Like a Knick,” told me that basketball players have body-fat percentages of only 10 percent. To reach that goal, and achieve the physique of a prototypical dunker, at my current level of fat-free mass, I would have to cut my overall weight to 171.6.

  And it became fast apparent I would have to add some serious muscle. My brother-in-law Daniel said he thought I would want to get the largest legs possible, and then trim as much as I could from everything above the hips. “Don’t you want to have the lower body of the Incredible Hulk and the upper body of Kate Moss?” he asked.

  I ran the theory by Polly.

  “We want you to be strong enough so that it feels like you’re jumping off a solid concrete platform,” Polly told me. “All your energy should be going upward efficiently. If you’re not strong in the core as well as the legs, if you’re leaking out energy all over the place”—and here she kind of waggled her body—“it’s like you’re jumping out of a rowboat.”

  We were joined by Jamie, a lightly tanned, sunny, small, and muscular trainer who looked like a shiny young soccer player. “We’re going to get you to dunk in a year, right?” he said with an enthusiastic laugh. “We’re putting together a fifty-two-week regimen for you.” He had gotten up at 5:30 that morning to get to work especially early to finish it up. Holy Jesus. I get up that early only if I have to catch an airplane. As I lay myself down to do some crunches—the first test of my core strength—I suddenly didn’t want to disappoint these two people. They already believed in me and in the project more than I did. Beneath those fluorescent lights, I told myself I would succeed—I would slam the ball home.

  Then came reality: I could pull off only a measly half-dozen sit-ups before my hips started to lift up and my feet came off the floor. I whinnied, not unlike a horse. Polly checked the “Needs Improvement” box on her clipboard.

  She measured my grip strength. The metal vise gave disconcertingly little ground as I squeezed. I felt like one of the guys who had given it a shot before Arthur came along and pulled the sword from the stone.

  Next, Jamie and Polly demanded what amounted to an impossible push-up. Dear reader, you should try it: Lie down, face on the ground, put your palms facedown, with your thumb-tips by your eyebrows, less than an inch from your forehead—now complete a push-up. Ain’t happening, right? There I was, lying on the ground, trying to figure out a way to push myself up. Anything to save face in front of my two trainers. I got, perhaps, the slightest insight into paralysis: intellectually knowing what must be done but not able to even twitch. I let out a little grunt. “Oh, that’s totally OK,” Polly said. “Yeah, most people aren’t able to do even one,” Jamie chimed in. “Just try some regular push-ups.”

  They announced they would next measure my standing vertical—a jump test—to get an early sense of my jumping ability. Jamie positioned me with my left shoulder and side next to a red cinder-block wall and asked me to reach my left hand straight up; he marked the spot with a bit of masking tape. Ninety-eight inches high with my feet planted on the ground. He then wrapped a bit of tape around my left forefinger and middle finger. I jumped, slapping the tape against the wall at the highest possible point. The distance between the two pieces of tape: 18 inches, less than half of Michael Jordan’s vertical at his prime. While the standing two-footed vertical isn’t an exact substitute for a running leap—which nets me another four or five inches (I could just touch the rim, 120 inches off the ground)—it’d be a perfect proxy for the progress of my explosiveness. Given the size of a basketball, I’d have to get my hand at least 126 inches off the ground to slam the ball. In short, if I could increase my standing vertical by five inches, or my running leap by eight inches, about the height of this book you’re reading, I could dunk.

  The two then led me through seven exercises that would assess my mobility and stability. The first was the overhead deep squat: Holding a dowel overhead, elbows locked, I began lowering my butt to the ground. I couldn’t even get my thighs parallel to the floor. “That’s all right,” said Polly, as I pathetically tried to get lower. “We’ll just have to work on your flexibility.” That moment, standing bare-chested and fluffy-haired in my shorts and sneakers, I felt a pang of embarrassment. The In-Line Lunge, the Hurdle Step, the Active Straight Leg Raise. None went beautifully. All afternoon I kept hearing things like: “The support leg is slightly wobbly on both sides.” Or: “Your left knee tends to collapse inward and your hips drop out of alignment.”

  It sounded like I was an old man. Misaligned, in addition to being sub-functional. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. I think of myself as a lumberer. “You walk as if you think the floor is one foot deeper than it is,” Rebecca tells me.

  The best possible score on the Functional Movement Screen, as the set of exercises is known, is 21, though that’s unusual. “Increased risk of injury may be associated with scores < 14,” said the evaluation material Polly later sent me. Then: “Your final score is 11.”

  “It looks like I’m jumping out of a rowboat,” I told her.

  She corrected me, with a laugh: “A leaky rowboat.”

  —

  After we wrapped up tests at the Performance Lab, Polly told me we would head to a place called the Motion Analysis Lab. “Everyone over there looks like they won the science fair,” she said over her shoulder as she spirited me from one building to another. “I always feel like one of the monkeys.” Earlier that very day, she told me, some guy was hooked up with sensors as he practiced, 100 or so times, wristing a dart toward a target. The motion was meant to test recovery from broken wrists, she explained, as if most people snap their wrists like they’re barflies.

  Polly had shuttled me to the lab to do something far more prosaic—and painful: a Wingate Test, which is meant to test peak power in anaerobic conditions. I would pedal atop a stationary bike for five minutes, with little resistance. Then, thirty seconds of biking through three-foot-deep mud—and I’d have to pour myself into slogging ahead as fast as I could. “Pretend you’re dragging an elephant,” peeped a slight, bespectacled graduate student. As if I’d dragged an elephant just the other week. As if dragging an elephant were humanly possible. As I got on the bike, the student discreetly pulled over a small wastebasket. “Just in case,” she said.

  The namesake of the Wingate Test, Orde Wingate, was a slight British soldier who won fame for his derring-do in the 1920s and 1930s. I think of him as a cross between Lawrence of Arabia and Rambo. He had the self-confidence in battle to give himself the radio transmitter call sign “Winner.” He was a renegade, a wisp of a soldier, a Christian zealot, a har
d-ass, and something of a romantic.

  Above all, he was “fanatical about fitness,” according to his biographers. A lifelong friend reported that as a teen Wingate “had no use for girls whatsoever and concentrated on physical fitness and his horses.” Wingate himself once described his excitement about going horseback riding this way:

  “Today,” I said to my soul, you will forget this tawdry life of reality, this vulgar present, this banal undistinguished existence…such trivialities as “the great heart of the people,” “liberty, fraternity and equality,” “humanity,” “evangelicism,” “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” and other dreary coarsenesses! Today, in the only world I will admit to be real, the real world of dreams, of fancies, of departed glories brought nigh, in this world…you are about to move. Black is the past, black may be the future, but the present, oh my courageous soul, is glorious. Today I shall be like a god.”

  Ah, yes, just how I feel each morning when I throw a towel around my waist to grab the morning newspaper. Godlike always, that’s my motto.

  Serving in India, the Middle East, and Burma, Wingate became known for his dashing raids in the colonial spirit, and his feats of endurance. A 1933 journey through Libya in search of Zerzuza, a mythical oasis, “was desperately hard going, made even more so by the extra hardships that Wingate had devised, true to his habit of testing himself and those under him to their limits,” write John Bierman and Colin Smith in Fire in the Night, about Wingate’s exploits. “Spurning the usual routine of desert travel, he made his protesting men and complaining camels plough ahead through the heat of the day, instead of traveling through the night.” I’m sure his men adored him. In another epic test, he led his men through fifty miles of thick Burmese jungle in 48 hours. “The inexperienced soldier,” Wingate wrote, “is apt to think that where he suffered there is something wrong instead of realizing that suffering is a normal and necessary part of operations.”