Year of the Dunk (13 page)

My grandmother was an indomitable woman, always looking for solutions to problems, and in my pew, hearing her helpless desperation, I buckled and wept. “I know my mother,” my father wrote in his memoir. “She must have considered every possibility, everything that was remotely available to her in a world in which distance, borders, histories, time, mindless, hateful strategies, were
conspiring against her lone efforts.” It wouldn't be till years later, after the war, that she learned of her parents' fate, and those of at least 15 of her uncles, aunts, and cousins. She mourned for them the rest of her life, decades after they themselves might have had the blessing of dying a natural death. “One thing was certain,” my father continued. “Because my grandparents did not escape from Vienna, my mother did not either.”

As I stepped off the plane and onto the Austin jetway, a blanket of warm early-April air tossed itself about me. I felt like I had alighted on another planet, one far from the sorrows of New York City. With nearly five months left, I resolved to approach my project with a renewed earnestness: My grandmother, after all, would have liked me to make the most of what I had inherited. A few inches, by my reckoning, were all that separated me from the dunk.

99 days to go.
Double digits! 178 pounds. I start the day with a set of sit-ups at home, and then three sets of 30 push-ups. Rebecca, cross-legged in her pajamas, a bowl of cereal in hand, watches me from the couch, our scruffy, monkey-faced dog curled up beside her. “I'm impressed, baby,” she says, sounding oddly genuine. “You used to do those all floppy, if you could even do them.” I lie on my chest, panting, pulling together the energy to get up and go to the gym
.

A
muggy evening in late July, 1996. Atlanta. As track-and-field events wrap up for the day, eyes at Centennial Olympic Stadium, including those of President Bill Clinton, fall on the narrow-bodied leapers. Charles Austin squares off against his rival, a rangy, pale, goateed Pole named Artur Partyka. At stake, high-jump gold. The height is now set at 7′9″. Partyka clears, even as his shorts lazily graze the bar. Twice Charles has failed, his heels clipping the obstacle. He was trying too hard to blow the entire jump up, to jump as high as eight feet. Charles turns his mind to his kids in Hawaii, and to what he is going to eat after the competition. It's
his final chance to clear 7′9″, and, in a move that speaks of his boldness and his calm, he orders the bar to be set at 7′10″. He smiles and shakes out his shoulders. He approaches the bar with religious conviction. Confident, aggressive—and yet under control—he bounds forward in the familiar J-shaped pattern. He plants his left foot and springs, quickly twisting his body in midair as he sails over the bar. He lets out a roar, puffing out his chest, thrusting his fists down to his knees as he stands atop the slouchy high-jump mat—the moment of Olympic gold. Now it is Partyka's turn, now his final run-up, his final chance to match Charles. He looks as if he's about to cry, like a thin, sad, very skinny,
very tall Jesus. He fails.

Charles told me this story in his gym, after I'd failed for the third time in a row to dunk a mere tennis ball. If I couldn't manage that, how was I ever going to dunk a basketball? Charles looked at me and said: “You're too much like this”—and he tensed up his entire face and looked serious, just about the only time I didn't see him smiling. I knew what he meant. I could feel my brows knitted as I readied myself for yet another run to the basket. “You run faster and you jump higher when you're in the flow,” Charles continued. “I had already jumped that height in my mind. Making it was nothing. It was play.

“Stop thinking,” Charles commanded. “Just get up there and put that ball in the hoop.”

And then, not long after I had returned from New York, and closing in on four months to go, I managed to dunk a tennis ball on a full-throated rim.

After I threw it down, Charles lit up.

“Hey, Asher, you have any kids?” he bellowed, even though I was only a few yards from him.

“No,” I said.

“You going to go home and tell your wife you dunked a tennis ball and you're going to have a baby in nine months.”

He let out a belly laugh.

“How's that feel? You can't stop showing your teeth, you're smiling so hard.”

It's true: I was pleased with myself. Not yet a basketball—far from it—but I was showing some tangible progress. And I had only had a few sessions with Charles at this point. The man was getting me to believe in myself.

He was also making me stronger in just the right ways. Twice a week I was driving the 45 minutes each way to his gym—down through the suburbs south of Austin and finally off the highway just across from the outlet malls. Outside the gym, which looked like an oversized Quonset hut, stood Charles's black Camaro, surprisingly lacking a vanity plate, and the heavy-duty Chevy pickup of his assistant, a beefy guy named Terrell.

I usually showed up at 9 a.m.—I was on book leave from the newspaper now—and the gym was largely empty, save for me and Charles and Terrell and maybe one or two other people, a high schooler getting ready for the coming football season, or a retiree with time on her hands. Charles might have me strap on a vest with a pair of nylon ropes dangling from behind. These he'd grasp, standing about 10 feet behind me. “Pull me,” he'd say, and like a yoked giraffe I'd start sprinting down a track, huffing and puffing, the weight of Charles's muscled body making it that much harder. “Get off your toes!” he'd shout, like a mantra. Lord knows I tried, as I felt my hamstrings on fire. I worried that some of that sweat flying off my frantic arms and legs would splash Charles. But he seemed unfazed. “Get off them toes, Asher!” He wanted me to drive off my
entire foot, pushing my knee up each time as high as it would go, which wasn't much higher than my belly button. We made a funny couple, tethered together by nylon: I, pale, balding, hairy, effortful, inefficient, grunting; Charles, smooth-headed, toned, economical, powerful, easygoing, a chatterer.

Charles was an entrepreneur, often holding forth about the long-term plans he envisioned for the gym—how he hoped, for instance, to pass it down to his kids. He was only 46, but he had come from a large household of scarce opportunity and didn't want to see the success and reputation he had won just fade away. (The only time he'd leave the gym was for a business appointment or to have lunch with his wife. “What did you eat?” I'd ask, at an early-afternoon training session. “Nothing. I just stared into the eyes of the most beautiful woman in the world,” he'd say.) His latest idea was a simple, ingenious piece of exercise machinery that he hoped would make its way into the home of every middle-class American, like a NordicTrack of its day. (My parents had a NordicTrack. I'm honestly not sure they used it even once; for a half-dozen years it served as a pricey towel rack before they finally got rid of it.) In a nutshell, the invention, a rectangular piece of fiberglass, allows for a version of stationary speed-skating. Exercising on the machine was hard, as a matter of coordination, and, of course, tired out my hips. I asked him if he would be doing infomercials: “Everything, man, everything,” he said, and as he got on board the device to show me how it ought to work, smoothly, effortlessly gliding back and forth, I thought: “Even though I am fully aware this would end up an expensive towel rack in my household, I'm prepared to buy this exercise device from this incredibly charismatic, confident, and handsome man.”

I may have had a little crush.

A stopwatch hanging about his neck, Charles ordered me to undertake slalom shuffles, squat jumps, resistance-banded walks. These were intended, as Jamie had once explained, to recruit my
glute muscles. “Recruit” was one way of putting it; “make miserable” would be another.

And, worst—or best—of all, he ordered me to jump on his four-foot-thick high-jump mat. Have you ever tried standing atop a high-jump mat? I hadn't, either: It's like a foamy water bed. Even getting on top of it is hard. It's like an adult version of one of those ball castles that delight children. Charles would slouch atop a plyometric box, stopwatch now in hand, and order me to jump in place, two-footed, for a minute. Sweat would go everywhere. Legs would burn like roasted chicken. I'd break for a minute, walking about the big mat like a drunken sailor; jump some more; break for a minute; jump some more. Then he'd have me jump backward, or hop, or side-shuffle on the mat. By the end, my shirt would be fully drenched. I'd stagger off the mat and stab at a towel I had brought along, drying myself for the fifteenth time that hour.

Charles knew I was a journalist, knew about my project, and had jealously guarded his regimen. He worried that I would reveal too much.

“I'm invited to conferences and they say they'll pay me thousands of dollars,” he jabbered in a monologue as I slogged away on an exercise bike—fast rhythm, heavy resistance, short ride—too exhausted to do much more than nod. “But I don't want them to have my secrets.

“Terrell, how long you been working here?” he called over his shoulder to his second-in-command, a jolly 6′5″ dude who grinned and lumbered his way around the gym.

“Eight years.”

He turned back toward me. “I tell him only what he needs to know.”

The weird part was that nothing Charles was instructing me to do was novel: box jumps, high knees, clapping push-ups, hurdle jumping. Pushing myself to please him made the time so valuable.
“I'm like a doctor healing a bad patient,” he had told me, in one of his frequent koan-like pronouncements. (But really, did he have to liken me to a sick person?) “I want to see you make the most of your potential. It makes me feel good.” And I, in turn, wanted to be a model patient. It says something about me—an unhealthy deference to authority? a precocious obsessiveness?—that as a boy, I had always aimed to be the perfect customer at the Belnord Unisex Barber Shop; my goal, neurotic as it sounds now, was to move my head this way and that before the barber ever had to give me direction. I never quite anticipated every command, of course, and I remember my small deflation when the barber, standing behind me, inevitably ceased the
clip-clip-clip
of his scissors, and said: “Straighten up, please.”

A couple of weeks after the tennis ball throw-down, my initial warm-up sprints completed, Charles handed me a squeezy yellow ball, the sort we used in dodge ball as kids. It was a little bigger than a softball, a little smaller than a volleyball. About three times the size of a tennis ball.

“Dunk this,” he ordered.

I wasn't alone in the gym. Charles' eight-year-old son, Cameron, was shooting at a rim on the other end of the gym, and his 19-year-old son, Allex, the state high school high-jump champion, was working out on an exercise bike.

I tried a half-dozen times to jam the yellow ball, but I couldn't do it: The ball hit the front end of the rim or I threw it off the back iron. And now two generations of the Austin clan were staring at me. Partly, I just didn't want to disappoint Charles. But partly I didn't want to disappoint myself. I was angry at the rim. Or maybe, if I'm honest, I wanted to be angry. I can do this, I told myself. I thought about those weightlifters at the gym who scream during their final repetition. I'm not even screaming, I thought. Perhaps I'd feel self-conscious, a poseur, summoning a show of passion for a purely physical act. My brother-in-law Ben had played professional
basketball until, he had told me, he decided he'd rather write than train. Of his playing days, he once wrote, “I never learned the trick of falling into a passion
like you fall into step.”

Charles could tell I was frustrated: “Close your eyes,” he commanded, as I prepared to start my run-up. “See yourself dunking.”

My eyes opened.

“Now do it,” he said, as if he had performed a Jedi mind trick.

On my eighth try, to my great relief, I dunked the ball. With nearly a third of my dunk year left, I was definitely moving in the right direction.

Charles said: “You going to get home to your wife as fast as you can.”

Allex hunched over his exercise bicycle and mimed swerving a steering wheel with his hands: “He's going to be driving like he's got a race car!”

“What'd she say the last time you told her you dunked?” Charles asked.

“She smiled a big smile,” I said.

“Yeah? How big?”

“There was lots of smiling going on,” I said.

What Rebecca had actually said was: “Maybe I don't want your non-dunking genes polluting my dunkers' gene pool.”

“The limits to human performance that we now perceive do not represent physical realities so much as they signify failure of the imagination,” John Jerome argued in
The Sweet Spot in Time
. “Those limits don't really exist; they are
ghost images, lying there waiting for us to surpass and dissolve them.”

These “ghost images,” I was learning, are what top athletes and coaches try to banish. “I don't like the word ‘limits,' ” Todd Wright, the burly University of Texas basketball strength coach, told me when I first interviewed him. He had called me back only reluctantly, he said, because he was uncomfortable participating in a book that even considered limits. “The first thing we teach our players is the only thing they should doubt is their doubts.”

I'm sure great athletes, and performers of all stripes, have greater confidence than the rest of us, at least when it comes to their field of expertise, but I could perceive a cult of limitlessness appearing before me. “A couple of words we never use are ‘can't' or ‘won't,' ” Will Lenzner, a trained sports psychologist who has served as the director of mental conditioning at the Chris Evert Tennis Academy, tells me. He has trained martial artists, golfers, and military snipers. (“When they come to me they've either hit rock bottom or they're just below the top and want that extra edge.”) “I don't believe in the word ‘try.' That gives them an out. I don't care if you dunk a tennis ball. I want the attempt to be successful. I don't want you thinking about dunking it. Think about the process: three steps, one power dribble, and boom! We focus on dunking, and dunking becomes an insurmountable goal. But we focus on those three power steps and we're much more likely to find ourselves dunking.”

For a time, Lilo, a petite, white-haired, 50-year-old Austin attorney, kept a small pile of her broken wood at her office, a neat form of intimidation, until she needed to reclaim space on her desk. Michael, a brown-belted, tubby 14-year-old with a premature moustache, keeps his neatly in his closet.

The cracked timbers were the leftover evidence of cocksure flying fists and heels, souvenirs of training at Kim Geary's karate studio.

“I want y'all relaxed but serious, confident but not cocky. Everyone here is more than ready,” Master Kim, as she is known, told the half-dozen barefoot students assembled before her. They wore white robes, each cinched with a colored belt; she, black on black, with hair short and curly like steel wool. She had a rugged face, with deep lines setting off her cheeks. “If you feel nervous, just take a deep breath.”