Year of the Dunk Read online

  At one point, he fished in a sack for something, and then pulled it out: a skeletal model of the lower leg and foot. And this large man, a former college middle linebacker with a deep, baritone Massachusetts voice, began gently manipulating the foot as he held forth on the nuances of muscle and foot coordination.

  —

  A few weeks later, on a Thursday evening, as the thermometer dropped just below 100, I steered my car west, out of Austin, into the rolling scrub-brush landscape known as the Hill Country. I passed ranches with old stone walls and barbed wire, over creeks dry in the summer drought, and past signs that read “Burn Ban in Effect.” The governor had recently asked everyone to beg God for rain. I was looking for the Fitzhugh Baptist Church, one of dozens of churches that have sprung up in this corner of Texas to serve an increasingly suburban population. The churches often have catchy signs to attract passersby, and Fitzhugh, cut out of a stand of live oaks, was no different: “Hot? Church is Prayer-Conditioned.” I was there not to pray for rain but to watch some basketball.

  Inside the gym beside the church, Chris Corbett, a tall, potbellied, salt-and-pepper-goateed 40-something private basketball coach was putting a half-dozen kids through a series of curl drills. Corbett had kindly invited me out here after I contacted him, asking him to put me in touch with kids on the verge of dunking. (I had decided to go through a coach because the alternative—lurking at community courts to talk to young, promising teenagers—could come off as pervy.) He wore knee-high black socks and a knee brace, and even though the gym was thoroughly air-conditioned, his shirt showed the faintest bit of moisture as it clung to him.

  The kids were all young teens trying to get onto their high school squads. Silently, obediently, they executed the drills, or tried to, as Corbett shouted instructions and encouragement. Their parents sat on some folding chairs on one side of the court, making small talk with one another, staring out into space, watching their kids, or reading. One kid, Cabe, about 5′7″ with a thatch of black curls and a sleepy-looking face, was absently palming a ball between drills. I told his mother, Lauri, that I wished I could do that. She said the boy was already wearing size-13 shoes. “I’m just hoping he grows into that body,” she said. Cabe had some talent, but he seemed indifferent to the coach’s orders. Finally, as he made his way around a chair too slowly in a drill that simulated a pick-and-pop cut, Corbett lashed into him: “You taking a break to have a margarita?” The best players were self-assured sisters, aged 15 and 13, Alé and Mariana. In her camouflage shirt, Alé drained a series of jumpers over a tall, thin boy who played a little shyly. (“When she got here two years ago, she could steal but not score a basket for all the gold in China,” Corbett told me.) Mariana, a fierce girl only a shade over five feet, kept feeding the ball to her older sister for open shots, giving small pumps of her fist each time Alé made one. Their mother whispered to me that each night before Mariana gets into bed she prays to God for height.

  I was there to see two kids, each on the brink of dunking. Josh Scoggins, a 5′11″ 15-year-old, was trying to get off the bench of his suburban high school team. As he warmed up he told me that his favorite dunker was Michael Jordan. Hadn’t Jordan retired before Josh was old enough to really watch basketball? He had seen videos on ESPN, he said, grinning. Josh had a thin, sinewy body, one in which he seemed very comfortable, and he began a series of takeoffs in his new Air Jordans. He was trying to dunk a volleyball, and he was successful maybe three times out of a dozen. His mother, a bright-eyed woman, began talking my ear off as I scribbled notes. Had I heard of a particular book on performance management? she asked me. She asked me about my book—what was the value of it? she kept asking. She asked what I wrote about for the local newspaper. Energy and the environment, I told her. “Green everything is a hoax,” she harrumphed. “My motto is as few rules as possible and as many as necessary. That way we stay the freest nation on earth.”

  I fled to the other end of the court, where a smiley-faced boy named Laquan Williams was trying his hardest to be assertive in the paint. Another coach, a former UT player, was walking him through post-up drills. Laquan was 14 and a linebacker at Hendrickson High in Pflugerville, a neighborhood north of central Austin. He told me, through deep heaves, that his coach had told him to pick up basketball to learn some footwork. I could see why: he moved like a baby giraffe, an awkward procession of limbs. Just over six feet tall, he wore a beat-up pair of Nike running shoes. He was strong-looking—big arms that made his T-shirt look tight—and narrow-waisted. I teased him that he was dogging his drills. He hadn’t gotten much sleep last night, he sighed, hooked on one episode after another of a Nickelodeon cartoon. I talked to his mother, a former volleyball and basketball player in her early thirties who now served in the National Guard. “He’s a man physically, but he’s growing mentally,” she laughed as she handled her grandson, nine-month-old, mohawked Carmelo Caesar Anthony. (He’s Laquan’s 17-year-old sister’s kid.) Laquan grew up without a father, and his grandparents recently died. “He thinks he needs to be the man of the house! He tries to seem intense, but he’s really not.”

  When Emerson wrote that “America is the country of young men,” he had in mind the can-do buoyancy of would-be dunkers like Laquan and Josh. (Not that Emerson could have known what a dunk was, of course.) And as I stuffed my notebook in my back pocket, I wondered whether I could lasso their optimism and drag it back to Austin with me.

  —

  I myself was never a born jumper—that’s the idiomatic way of putting it, as if it’s our fate, written in the stars at birth, never to dunk, literally and metaphorically. As if, in the end, some things are simply closed off to us. Or are they? I’ve had reason in my life to ponder this question. When I was at the peak of my fitness and youthful promise, about the age that Spud Webb was as he flew hoopward and dunked himself into my consciousness, fate introduced me rather abruptly to my own physical limits, and science introduced me to the ways we humans sometimes can outwit them.

  One sunny, clear morning in early 2006, six years before that afternoon in Central Park when Nathaniel and I batted around my dunking odds, I found myself on a hospital room gurney, a sonogram technician wincing at the ultrasound image before him as he passed his wand back and forth over my gelled left testicle. Whatever my potential might have been, it was now naturally circumscribed, I would soon learn, by an unforeseen cellular mutation that would, if left to its own devices, insist on multiplying, voraciously, until it killed me.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but the first sign of my testicular cancer had come a month earlier, an inexplicable backache I woke up with the morning I was supposed to play tennis with my buddy Alf. I was 25. I felt sheepish, a young man canceling a tennis game because my back hurt.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” I remember chuckling on the phone, “but my back is killing me.”

  As mysteriously as the backache surfaced, it subsided. I barely had a chance to think about it anyway. Rebecca and I were negotiating to buy our first house—a fixer-upper in Austin. We had made the mistake, while still renting, of curiously popping by open houses: to snoop, in a sanctioned way, around intimate spaces; to be privately snobby about other people’s décor; to envy, finally, what they had. It’s a dangerous game. Soon you find yourself with a Realtor, a home inspector, and a contract.

  Then I noticed the lump. I was soaping myself in the shower and found a hard bit, the size of a half-pea maybe, bulging from my left testicle. I wondered if it had always been there, like some hard-to-see birthmark. I decided to ignore it.

  A couple of weeks later, on that sleepy Saturday morning in January, I woke up again with another strange ache—this time in the left side of my lower abdomen. It was a dull, quiet, thudding pain, as if someone had kicked me in the groin.

  I hadn’t told Rebecca about the lump. My stomach was hurting, was all I said as I shuffled off to the bathroom to see if the lump was still there. It was. It didn’t seem any larger, but now I was worr
ied. Maybe, I called from the bathroom, we should go to the hospital.

  “For a stomachache?” she asked.

  “I don’t feel so well,” was all I managed, suddenly unsure of my own body.

  After the sonogram technician completed his inspection, I was wheeled back into a hospital room, where the on-call doctor told me that I had testicular cancer. “Exactly what Lance Armstrong had,” he said, as if that would make me feel better. He wore a Daffy Duck tie. “So some people get this and live.”

  As Rebecca started crying on my chest, the certainties of the world suddenly uncertain, I giggled and wept. I giggled because the whole situation seemed absurd; I wept because I knew my parents would be breathtakingly sad, and I couldn’t bear the thought of telling them. My dad had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a month earlier; this was something else they didn’t need.

  The chief ingredient in the testicular cancer chemo cocktail, I learned, is cisplatin, essentially liquid platinum. (The story goes that a biophysicist, experimenting with bacteria, unexpectedly found their growth stymied near platinum-plated electrodes he was using to stimulate them with electricity. That discovery would be taken up by a cancer scientist who began developing platinum-based drugs to inject into humans.) Slouched in a La-Z-Boy, diminished and bald, the backs of my hands and my forearms sore from the daily needle jabs, cisplatin coursing through my veins, I used to think of myself as one of those pathetically weak comic book characters secretly gaining superpowers—Platinum Man, impenetrable and unbreakable. A fantasy, of course, but, after all, the drugs were allowing me to sidestep the misfortune of my nature. These were not exactly Spud Webb–like superpowers (leaps to the basket in a single bound!), but they were superpowers nonetheless.

  I survived. After my testicle was maneuvered out through a slit in my abdomen by a urologist named, I kid you not, Dr. Dick Chopp; after three cycles of chemotherapy; and after all my hair fell out, only to grow back in unexpected thick curls so baby-soft as to announce a second life, I was declared cancer-free.

  The Greeks had conceived of the Fates as severe women, crooked with age. Three nights after a child’s birth they decided the course of his or her life, spinning, measuring, and cutting the thread of life. In an earlier time, without the intervention of medical science, my fate would have been an early death—a short thread. Instead, in a surprisingly short period of time, I was fine. How much, I wondered, of our story do we humans weave with our own hands? How much can we manipulate the fabric of our physical lives?

  3

  The Dunking Year Begins

  Aug. 25, Eve of the Year of the Dunk: No. of tortilla chips consumed at Polvo’s, at roughly one every six seconds for nine and a half minutes: 95. Enchiladas de la casa, plump with gooey white queso: Tres. Plus rice and refried beans. Followed up with a root beer float at Amy’s Ice Cream. Weight: 203 lbs. Hasta luego, dessert. 365 days to go.

  Two days into my grand test of human capability, on a muggy midweek evening in late August, it seemed obvious to me that my capabilities wouldn’t budge. I felt like someone had unfairly reorganized my musculature. As if my biceps, my shoulders, my hamstrings had been jumbled up and then clumsily knotted back together. Muscles that I hadn’t known existed ached in rebuke. I wasn’t all that surprised. Those first couple of days I did four hours of weightlifting and squatting. The dumbbells might have been about the size my septuagenarian parents used, but they definitely qualified as weights. So unused was I to pumping iron, the very bones of my hands throbbed after the first set of repetitions.

  Carving out the time was not easy. I had to slip away from work. Get up early. Go in on a Saturday. Getting myself into dunking form wasn’t shaping up as much fun. It was certainly a narcissistic exercise. I caught myself, half-naked, staring into mirrors, squeezing my sides to figure out if they had tightened up any. I examined my belly for any nascent signs of a six-pack. I turned profile to see if I was looking any slimmer.

  I did my daily work at a gym set up within the newspaper where I worked. It was called the Press Room. The brass had installed it a couple of years earlier as part of a wider effort to make employees feel better about themselves. Me, it made feel weak and pathetic. But I had to give the publisher credit—it was an impressive gym, with lots of shiny equipment of the kind that I had studiously avoided the previous 33 years of my life. It also offered a small program of classes that I was determined to attend to increase my flexibility: yoga, Zumba, cardio club.

  That first week I made sure to stop by yoga. Six women with their mats, led by Kandice. I stepped into their dimly lit room a couple of minutes late, just as Kandice was leading them in Horserider’s Pose, a kind of lunge. I grabbed a mat and tried not to distract as I stomped about as lightly as I could manage.

  Kandice’s head spun around: “Your sneakers,” she hissed.

  “What about them?” I whispered.

  “This is yoga,” she scolded. “We don’t wear sneakers.”

  Well, then. I took my sneaks off as quietly as I could and struggled through simple postures like Downward Dog. A small redheaded woman was positively canine in her execution. I comforted myself with the following thought: No way can she dunk.

  “Feel your internal organs,” Kandice told the group.

  The only organ I like to feel is my external one. Otherwise, I prefer to think of my innards as a single blob, if I think of them at all.

  “Move into Child’s Pose,” she announced. In this exercise, you kneel on the ground, drop your butt toward your heels, and stretch your head and hands forward. Except my butt didn’t really drop. It just stayed up like a camel’s hump. Kandice stepped off her pad to push my butt toward the ground. It didn’t want to go. She shoved hard, and under her touch it stiffly moved toward my heels. She moved away, and, like a balloon just let go by a child, my bum began steadily rising skyward on its own.

  —

  I would need help cutting fat, too. I was still hovering over 200 pounds. Not bad for a guy my height, but not good if you want to dunk a basketball. Like domesticated animals, we have grown fattened and slow, far removed from our ancestral, lean hunting selves. Steve Austad, an expert in the biology of aging, tells me there’s a marked difference between the athleticism of wild mice and lab mice. “Lab mice are lucky if they can jump two inches,” he says. “Wild mice can jump out of a garbage can. There’s something in that domestication that leads to the loss of explosive abilities.”

  I want to be able to jump out of the garbage can.

  To cut weight, I turned to my friend Phil, whom Rebecca affectionately calls the Incredible Shrinking Man. We went to high school together, where Phil, in his good-natured way, struck a character both jovial and cutting. He was witty and quick and, famously in our circle of bleeding-heart liberals, an unabashed Reaganite. The man actually had a framed photo of the Gipper in his Westchester bedroom. He was unathletic and a little overweight, but he was a nasty Ping-Pong player. He played like a stick figure, getting the lines of his body just right, if a little rigid, to put away most shots. His parents kept a table in the basement of their home, and I blamed my never-ending losing streak on this fact. (I similarly put my mediocre basketball skills down to my not having a hoop in my driveway. Not that we had a driveway, for that matter.) Once I almost beat him. I had a lead late, and was about to serve, when Phil told me that a girl I’d obsessed about for years was interested in me. My game was shattered. Phil would become a white-collar criminal defense lawyer, using his fine theatrical instincts and formidable will-to-win to represent insider traders, wayward military contractors, and big-ticket fraudsters. If you read about them in the newspaper and shook your head about the nogoodniks of this world, he or his firm may well have represented them. (Alleged nogoodniks, Phil would winkingly say.)

  He also carried around with him that extra weight. He didn’t mind it, as far as I knew, and, of course, no one else did, either. But a few years ago, a few of his officemates decided to put together a betting pool on who co
uld lose the most weight, as a percentage of total body weight, in six months. The competition of it aroused Phil. He would, he quickly decided, obliterate them. “Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife,” Emerson wrote in Self-Reliance. A shrill piercing noise evidently rang in Phil’s ears those six months: He shed sixty pounds—more, really, than he had to lose—with a diet of granola and nonfat yogurt in the mornings; a salad with light oil and balsamic vinegar, tossed with avocados, for lunch; and a dinner of lean chicken sausage with grilled peppers and onions—no oil added, of course. “It was really boring,” he says. “But I wanted to win.”

  His advice to me was straightforward: Cut the carbs, and work out an hour each day—like it’s your job. For me, working out had always been sport; sweating was something I happened to do while playing with a soccer ball, a Frisbee, or a basketball. I would have to endure smaller, healthier portions and a steady diet of zero-fat yogurt and nonfat milk—the devil’s water, I call it. Now, it was becoming clear to me, what had begun with the feel of a lark was growing occupational.

  —

  And so it was, that fall, on the lookout for a spot outfitted with some of the equipment lacking in the Press Room, that I found myself stepping for the first time inside a commercial gym, one wedged, like so many things in Austin, into a strip mall, between a Taco Bell and an X-ray clinic. It was a miserable place. Humans, in all their wonderful messiness—rolls of fat, knock-knees, wonky postures—were groaning to transform themselves into efficient robots. Here was a bank of treadmillers, running like a row of pistons, ker-plunk, ker-plunk, ker-plunk. There, a man was seated on a black, sweaty, faux-leather stool, swiveling unhappily away on an abs machine. Heavy bass throbbed from overhead. Most people were expressionless, drained of their humanity. Maybe they were thinking about the memo they had to write their boss or the groceries they needed to buy on the way home. Or maybe nothing.