Year of the Dunk (12 page)

Many of us are unsettled, too often unattractively so, when someone operates outside the boxes in which we expect them to perform. Back at home, it wasn't hard to find mean-spirited comments about Griner tucked beneath online videos of her highlights. In an odd, unkind way, the very attributes of her game that are cherished among young males—foremost among them, the ability to dunk—appeared to be held against Griner because she is female. It's an ancient taunt leveled at assertive ladies: “Women are
soft, mild, pitiful, and flexible; / Thou stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless,”
Richard, a would-be king, sneers at Margaret, who has taken up arms to defend her husband's throne in Shakespeare's
Henry VI, Part 3
. Griner was a latter-day virago, distinguished because of her heroic, “manly” abilities and demonized for the same qualities.

“This is
someone's child,” Mulkey had said in one press conference in response to a question about the derogatory anonymous comments posted about Griner, ones that accused her of being, in a word, unwomanly. “This is a human being. She didn't wake up and say ‘Make me look like this, make me six-foot-eight and have the ability to dunk.' This child is as precious as they come.” Academics and critics across the nation weighed in on what the sub rosa discussion of Griner's gender meant about women's sports and the American male gaze. Because Griner lacked
an “erotic dimension” that would appeal to straight men, “she has found limited use within the national imagination,” David Leonard, a cultural and gender studies professor, wrote in
Slam
magazine. Griner, for her part, seemed to shrug off the insults. “I'll go and
search my name on Twitter, to see some of the things they say,” she once told reporters. “[School officials] tell me I shouldn't read the blogs: They're mean. But it doesn't bother me.”

For me, trying to dunk was shaping up as an effort to overcome my natural physical shortcomings. But for Brittney Griner, the dunk was an exuberant expression of that innate physical identity that was being picked apart by a horde of anonymous bloggers, sports commentators, and academics. In a man's world, the dunk is a flourish on a basket worth two points like any other—but each time Brittney Griner dunked, the act shouldered all kinds of interpretations. Were her jams feminist statements, each forceful slam another strike against that glass ceiling, each leap a vault into the rarefied air normally occupied by men? Or were they simply outpourings of awesomeness? The dissection of Griner's dunking habits seemed itself unfair: Why does it have to be so complicated for Brittney Griner to
dunk a basketball when it's pretty much just the opposite for a guy who dunks? The probing of her dunking domination was emblematic of the greater burden that Brittney Griner, through no fault of her own, was forced to bear. It's a situation Rebecca, and probably a lot of other non-dunking women, can relate to. Rebecca doesn't like playing football, but one year she came along, out of duty, to an annual ragtag Thanksgiving two-hand-touch game I organize. She turned out to be the only woman to show up, and besides, the numbers were odd. It would have been easy for her to sit and watch. But even before the game actually began she felt it was too late to back out: As the lone woman, she didn't want to allow anyone to think she wasn't game just because she's female. She didn't want to let the side down, as it were, and the thought of sitting in the bleachers cheering on the boys didn't suit her image of the world. On the other hand, she sucks at football—she'd readily admit this—and all she would accomplish by playing would be to look and feel pretty hopeless. It's the kind of no-win calculation that only women need to make.

Late that Saturday afternoon in Waco, in the pressroom after the Lady Bears had clinched the conference championship, Kim Mulkey, pert-nosed, with short, peroxided hair, was asked about how she gets her team prepared as they drive toward another nationalchampionship run. She still wore the enormous heels on which she had squatted during the game; they themselves, absurdly impractical for coaching on the hardwood, seemed to me a concession to the demands that women maintain some trapping of conventional femininity even in the context of a conventionally masculine pursuit.

“I told them to dig deep into their souls and find ways to keep winning,” Mulkey said, in a very Waco answer, one that somehow combined basketball with spirituality. She was pastor as much as coach. “The memories are all they will have in life. The trophies are collecting dust, but nobody will take those memories away. We're blessed to have kids that understand that.”

The Baylor team closed out their regular season with several more sparkling victories. In Griner's final home game, in the second round of the season-ending NCAA tournament, she tweeted from the locker room at halftime that she would dunk twice more; she then delivered. The team was favored to repeat as national champions. But only four days later, in the Sweet Sixteen, a scrappy Louisville team disrupted Baylor's rhythm, ganging up on Griner. She didn't score in the first half, and her teammates failed to drain open shots when she got them the ball. In a major upset, Baylor lost 82–81. Three weeks later, Griner, already out to her friends and family, declared publicly that she's gay. She said Mulkey had told her players not to be open about their sexuality because it might hurt recruiting and the program. “It was more of
an unwritten law [not to discuss your sexuality],” she told ESPN. “It was just kind of, like, one of those things, you know, just don't do it. [The coaches] kind of tried to make it, like, ‘Why put your business out on the street like that?' ” In a prepared statement, Mulkey told reporters that she could not “comment on personal matters surrounding any of our student-athletes, but I can tell you Brittney will always be a celebrated member of the Baylor family.”

Turning professional, Griner was the first overall pick in the late-spring WNBA draft by the Phoenix Mercury. In her first WNBA game, unshackled by the name-calling and sexuality-suppression that lingered in Waco, she dunked twice.

163 days to go:
Foggy, frigid spring morning, Riverside Park in New York City. On the road, so no squat-lifting. Another kind of misery: 90 squat jumps. 120 jumps up and down from a park bench. 600 ankle hops. And I can just get my butt below my knees when I squat flat-footed! My right knee is bothering me a bit. At night, after everyone is asleep: three spoonfuls of Häagen-Dazs dulce de leche ice cream from my parents' freezer. I pledge to eat an entire pint of that stuff when I'm done with my dunking year. Still at 182 pounds. My mom thinks I look so very handsome
.

I
n March, a shade past the halfway mark of my dunking project, I headed to New York to see family, friends, and, of course, Polly and Jamie. At one lunch at an upscale French restaurant off Park Avenue I found myself doing battle with my stomach: A baguette lay across the table, daring me. As the waiter cleared our plates at the end of the meal, he asked if we wanted any tea, coffee, or cookies. “Yes, cookies,” one of my dining companions, familiar with my project, told him. “But”—he gestured with his head toward me—
“he won't have one.” I felt like a 15-year-old whose parents won't let him take even a sip of wine. Or maybe a prizefighter accompanied by his manager.

My friend was right, of course. The next day I was scheduled to meet with Polly and Jamie to see what, if any, progress I had made. I knew I was slimmer, I knew I had done a ton of squats, and I knew I had jumped my brains out, but would I appear to them any different? Especially now, the day before checking in with them, I wanted to behave.

Still, as my lunchmates made some final chitchat, it became clear to me that five of the eight miniature cookies—yes, I was counting—would not be consumed. As we stood up to leave, I asked them: Didn't they want to take them with? No, they each said. And as we walked together out of the restaurant, I looked over my shoulder wistfully.

I was indeed a slenderer version of myself. My weight had dropped to 182 from a little over 200. Polly did some flesh-pinching with her calipers; my body fat, she found, had correspondingly dropped from 20 percent to 11.5 percent. I now had less body fat than 90 percent of 30- to 39-year-olds, she told me.

“You look just great,” she said, and indeed I felt as if I had stepped out of a Weight Watchers television ad.

I told her and Jamie about my workouts. A lot of squatting, I said. And a plyometric workout called the Air Alert system.

“Air Alert! Some of my buddies did that and swear by it,” Jamie said.

“Really?” I was pleased to hear I wasn't completely wasting my time even as I was jumping myself silly.

“One of them gained something like ten inches.”

“No way,” I said. Wow. A man could dream. “So how old was your friend when he gained those ten inches?”

“Eighteen.”

Phooey.

Jamie said he'd quickly put me through the same tests they checked through months earlier, to see if I had made any progress, carefully examining my stability, balance, and flexibility.

“Awesome,” he kept announcing. “Much better.” “Like Cirque du Soleil,” he said at one point, and I could feel my cheeks redden. I was able to do at least one of those push-ups with the thumbs by the hairline, though Jamie had to gently prod me to move my thumbs higher up. “All the way to the hairline,” he said, thus reminding me, unwittingly, that I continue to bald.

My overall test score in the Functional Movement Screen, the examination of my flexibility and power potential, jumped from 11 to 17. But my single-leg squat remained wobbly, Jamie noticed, and my hip and knee tended to fall out alignment. He pledged to put together some exercises that would solve these problems, or at least compensate for them.

Now it came time for the vertical. Was I actually improving? All those hours of exercise, of dieting, of misery: Did they add up to anything?

As I had months earlier, just before the start of my dunking project, I wrapped a bit of masking tape around the fingers of my left hand, stood next to a cinder-block wall, squatted down, and jumped as high as I could, spanking the tape against the wall at the highest possible point.

The result: I had jumped nearly 2 inches higher than last time. Just over a 10 percent increase.

I was thrilled, as if, blindfolded, I had just smashed a piñata. All that work, for so long, in virtual darkness. Two inches ain't much,
but it showed that at least I—and, by extension, just about anyone past his or her prime—had the capability of improvement. Of course people grow fitter if they work at it, but to push yourself higher into the air than you ever have before suggests something majestic about our potential. “If I seem to boast more than is becoming,” Thoreau wrote, “my excuse is that
I brag for humanity rather than for myself.” Yes, he was talking about our overlooked ability to head out and build one's own tight-shingled shelter—not to jump higher. But the point holds.

“How much time do you have?” Jamie asked me.

“I'm aiming to finish it in late August,” I said.

“This August?”

“Well, yes, or the very end of summer,” I said, as if that would buy me any more time.

I returned the following morning for a repeat of the dreaded Wingate test.

“Prepare to go balls-to-the-wall,” Polly told me, as I mounted the stationary bike.

I corrected her: “You mean ball-to-the-wall.”

“Right,” she said with a smile.

We bantered for the first five minutes, as I warmed up my legs. Mostly we kvetched. She told me that she couldn't stand gyms, either, especially women who aimed for a “gym-fit body.” “What's the use in it?” she said. “I mean, show me what you can do with your body.” She was a strong, thin woman who walked leaning slightly forward, as if she were battling a stubborn wind. “I just want to be outside, even in a slashing rain.” She said this all with the broadest Massachusetts accent—she grew up just outside Boston. She had been preparing for a bicycle race, and she told me, with a shake of the head, about the would-be ironmen who abandon their spouses and children to train fanatically. She was interested in the good that fitness could do, which is why she had recently partnered with
researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering to examine how exercise improved chemotherapy recovery for women with cancer. She told me this partly because she knew I was a cancer survivor, and partly because I knew that she was a cancer survivor.

“Ten seconds,” she then said, giving me a heads-up that my life was about to become temporarily miserable.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

The resistance ratcheted up, as if I suddenly had cinder blocks for shoes.

“Go! Go! Go!” she shouted as I surged forward—at least, as forward as one can on a stationary bicycle. I felt as if I were running up a down escalator, one moving increasingly quickly. I was trying frantically to pick up my legs, and the thirtieth second of my thirty seconds appeared ever further away.

“Done!” she cried.

I couldn't talk, only breathe heavily.

My peak power, she told me as I ceased gasping, was 885 watts—or more than 10 percent better than my previous peak power output. Judging by a series of reports on Wingate test results from around the world, I now most closely resembled the peak power output of
a Saudi elite soccer player. Random, yes, but I liked the word “elite.” Her eyeglasses now on—she usually hung them around her neck—Polly silently scrutinized a graph she'd printed out that mapped my performance during the test.

“What is it?” I asked.

There wasn't a spike and drop-off in my performance, just a steady decline over the final 20 or so seconds.

“That tells me you've got a slow-twitch muscle makeup,” she said,
with a drift of sympathy in her voice. I would need every fast-twitch fiber I could summon to dunk; slow-twitch muscles wouldn't help me much.

I felt like a pruned tree, deeply rooted, no matter the shape or reach of its branches.

That night, I went to my 102-year-old grandmother's for Passover. She lives in Forest Hills, Queens, the land of grandmothers, in a semi-detached house on Clyde Street. The house had disintegrated like its occupant: the bricks long unpointed, a shifting foundation stiffening the door until it barely opened, and the front garden barren, given over to the sort of rocks one lays atop a gravestone.

When I had seen her last, in October, she still walked with a walker, and we had long conversations about the old days, about Vienna, about the old family farm in Nitra, in Slovakia, about the cruises along the Danube and the Black Sea that she would still like to take. She had long avoided any regular medication, and only a few years ago, after her last serious fall, a doctor told us she had the “blood of a twenty-nine-year-old.” But her condition had slipped. As my aunt and I prepared the matzo balls and laid out the gefilte fish, my grandmother, now unable to use her legs, remained seated on a cushy chair, often appearing to be asleep, an oxygen tube snaking its way into her nose.

I roused her, to tell her about a lunch that week with my agent and editor. “They even paid the bill!” I told her.

“A big shot,” she laughed. I asked her if she had done any jumping in gym class in Vienna. We're talking 1916 here. (She had always been good with specific memories, and her stories went beyond the
borders of old photographs. When I grumbled about some math homework once, she confided to me that she had cheated on a school exam by sewing sine and cosine equations into her stockings.)

“No, I don't jump now. I'm no spring chicken.”

“No, no, Mamama.” I leaned in. “WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD—DID YOU JUMP AT ALL?”

“Sure, we did it. We did running and jumping. For recreation. But it wasn't all that popular. It wasn't like it was something the Rockefellers did, or someone famous.”

She meant Rockefeller the robber baron, not Rockefeller the governor; it was the sort of throwback reference that dated her, as if it wasn't already obvious that she was really, really old. Did my project sound absurd to her ears? My grandmother had always been a largely unsentimental person. In her cupboards, glass Yahrtzeit candles, lit on the anniversary of her husband's death, won a second life as everyday drinking glasses. To spend a year jumping must have sounded quite frivolous, and maybe a little too American, to a frugal refugee. But if she had misgivings, she never let on.

We had the seder in the shadow of her old vitrine, with its glass doors and mirrored backing chockablock with European knickknacks. It housed a crush of objects, the remnants of a Viennese life long lost—hand-painted teacups and heavy crystal bowls and art nouveau silver platters. They were pressing reminders, too, of all the people who didn't get out; for every Kiddush cup, so many relatives. Here and there, stuck in, were 1960s and '70s travel souvenirs, chintzy Mexican tchotchkes and patterned Japanese chopsticks, relics of failed efforts to move beyond the chasm of the war. As the meal wound down, my grandmother announced that she wanted to retire. Her helpers removed her to her room, into her La-Z-Boy, and we crowded around her, taking the dining chairs with us.

It was a crummy room. Plaster was half-falling from the ceiling.
The bank of windows was sealed with a plastic tarp and duct tape to keep the bitter winds at bay. Her bed, the same one her husband had died in of a heart attack 30 years earlier, was parked against a wall. Hanging above it, a faded photograph of my grandmother's parents and grandparents, one she was now too blind to see. A commode sat in the middle of the room.

She lay assembled in the La-Z-Boy small and fragile as an ancient doll, a ridiculous green fleece blanket, decorated with frogs, tugged about her. Her right eye was milky, a cloud permanently stationed in its blue sky, and her face was cracked and chipped. Her silver bob, lovingly washed by a nurse, was soft and almond-smelling. The EverFlo oxygen tank kept a regular rhythm as we began “Dayenu,” a Passover song passed through generations. If He had delivered us from Egypt, it would have been enough. But he also gave us the Torah. If He had given us the Torah, it would have been enough, but He also gave us Moses. And so on. My grandmother, half-there, half-mumbled along. This is when she customarily roused herself, for so long the old lady impressing our Pesach guests with her relentlessness. Even now she stirred, driving through the lyrics with her parched lips. My father held her hand in his own, caressing it with his long thumb. My throat caught as I sang the familiar words. Whatever potential she might have wrung from life, whatever deep possibilities lay within her, were now exhausted. Perhaps her talent had been resilience. If that was the case, she had made full use of it, passing through a life of mothering, of war, of flight, of resettlement, of remaking herself as an American. Seeing her there, shrunk down, the comparison was obvious—her body was reaching its limits, just as I was pressing mine. The self-centeredness of the thought upset me.

“Mokele! Mokele!” she cried suddenly, as if she were beseeching the Messiah. It was the name she called my father when he was an infant. “Where's my Mokele?”

“I'm right here, Mom,” said my father, and he reached over to gently stroke her forearm, the skin as thin as tissue wrap.

“Mokele,” she whispered to him, “I want Mama.” Still desperate, in her last days, for her parents, dispatched to Auschwitz seven decades ago.

That was the last time I saw my grandmother. Rebecca and I flew back from Texas a week later for the funeral. At the service, my father read a letter my grandmother had sent her aunt in March 1941 from Macon, Georgia, where she and my grandfather (and my father, a toddler) had been resettled after escaping the Third Reich. My grandmother's parents were trapped in Europe, and she was desperate to get them out. “It would have been better for me to die there, than always to exist with such trembling here,” she wrote. By August of 1942 she had grown frantic: “I have constant and terrifying worries about my mother and there is no rest or pleasure for me,” she wrote in another letter to her aunt, in New York. “I think of Mama always and the circumstances that bind her. I think of her when I eat, when I sleep, whatever I am doing. I cannot get any reliable information at all.”