Year of the Dunk (14 page)

The task before them: breaking through stacks of white pine, with a combination of kicks and chops: spear-hand; rock-knuckle fist; ridge-hand; palm-heel; knife-hand. I had wondered about the mental effort it takes to do the seemingly impossible, which is how I ended up at Master Kim's studio, all blond pine and mirrors and windows, sheltered on a small street from a cold, rainy Texas morning. Who in her right mind would strike a piece of wood? Or a fired brick? It seemed to me a pure execution of mind over matter. If these people could convince themselves to break objects with their bare hands, if they could conjure up the necessary mental willpower, shouldn't I be able to persuade myself to dunk a basketball?

Before the collision of bone and timber, Master Kim, 53 years old, an eighth-degree black belt, led her students in a series of chants: “Respect others. Refrain from violent behavior.” I thought for a moment that maybe this would be the milquetoast of martial arts, that I would see little of the mental and physical stretching of potential that I was hoping for. Then came the martial-arts-style calisthenics. “Four-knuckle fist to the throat,” Master Kim barked, and the class of six, in synch, would punch through the air with a shout, as if engaged in a
West Side Story
street fight. “Kick the belt, punch the face,” she ordered. “Kick the belt, chop the neck.” I imagined an unhappy adversary, wobbly now, bloodied, who picked the wrong bathrobed sextet to mess with. “Two punches to the face, roundhouse kick to
the temple.” They sparred with martial arts styles called “Destroy the Fortress” and “Escape the Mess,” which made me think of those old Bruce Lee movies where he had to overcome dozens of no-name bad guys on the chief villain's unmarked island retreat.

Then, with everyone rapt, Geary laid a red brick across two cinder blocks. “A black belt demonstration,” she announced. She knelt on one knee to the side of the brick and pulled her right hand high above her, slowly, steadily bringing it toward the brick a couple of times, as if measuring out a golf putt. For most of us, breaking a piece of pine with our bare hand would seem a fool's errand; breaking a brick seems positively counterproductive. And when I had introduced myself two weeks earlier and explained why I had contacted her, Master Kim told me that she would not be cajoled into breaking anything. She had not broken a brick in a half-dozen years—when you're a badass eighth-degree black belt, what do you really have left to prove? But I wasn't so surprised that rainy day when she knelt by the brick and prepared to strike it. Geary's career had been built on proving herself: She had begun her karate studies in earnest in Houston in the mid-1970s, under a sadistic master who forbade the drinking of water during workouts and encouraged his students to run barefoot on a scorching-hot track nearby. All the other students were male. “I had to be better than the guys,” she explained.

Now she pulled her hand back once more. And then—Haaiiieee!—she swiftly brought it through and cut the brick in half.

“It's been a long time,” she said, to no one in particular, standing up and smiling with some relief as her students hustled to remove the cinder blocks. Later, after the class ended and the students had all changed and gone home, she confided in me. “I dreaded it all week,” she said.
What is it about Master Kim or Charles Austin that allows them to dream up a task and then make their bodies follow? As with a kid spotting up for yet one more shot on his driveway rim, their motions become more a knack than an effort. They grow fluent in the language of their limbs.

Most of us lack that kind of intimacy with our physical selves. It's a luxury of middle age: Old people and athletes are much more attuned to their bodies than the rest of us. Our bodies seem only loosely attached to us until something—a tumor, perhaps, or a clogged artery—reminds us with a jolt that we're bound up with them. Josh, my eldest brother, a marathoner and vegetarian, thinner and taller than I, woke up a few months ago to an unexpected, alarming shortness of breath. After a trip to the emergency room and a battery of tests, the doctors diagnosed a congenital calcification of his arteries. “I feel like my body betrayed me,” he told me. (I got the news on the road, during a newspaper assignment, and it shook me. He's my dependable big brother and, in a way, I felt like his body had betrayed me, too. He asked me to tell our parents; as I dutifully did, sitting on an old, high curb in the empty Texas town of Gonzales, I suddenly was launched back to my revelations about my own cancer: I found myself desperately trying not to fall apart.) Our bodies are foreign to us—hair, teeth, fingernails, both alive and dead at once, involuntarily growing out of us. (It's a feeling that stalks us during puberty, as if we were strangers to our own bodies, meeting them for the first time. Some people are even convinced they were born the wrong gender.) In the throes of the flu, or the fogginess of a bad cold, we wish we could trade our bodies in for an upgrade. This flesh and blood happens to house our brains, and the most we can hope for is that the foundation holds up, that the plumbing doesn't clog, that the halls remain tidy, that the windowpanes don't break. We see ourselves in photos and wonder how true the likeness is—because it doesn't look the way
we imagine ourselves, just as our voice, played back on a message machine, doesn't match the way it sounds in our own head. Part of the reason somebody might be described as “comfortable in his own skin” is precisely because so few of us are actually comfortable in our own skin.

Yet our alienation is a mild one. If on one end of the spectrum athletes, karate masters, and ballerinas, mind and body in harmony, coax their bodies to clear high bars, break bricks, or dance
en pointe
, at the other end of the spectrum a motley crew negotiates chasms far greater than our own, between their psychological sense of themselves and their actual physical ability.

In 1874, a young French psychiatrist was summoned to consult about a 43-year-old woman admitted to an asylum just southwest of Paris. The problem: the woman was convinced she essentially did not exist. Mademoiselle X told the doctor, Jules Cotard, that she “
did not have a brain, nerves, chest, stomach or guts,” he recounted in an 1880 lecture, in which he identified the illness as
délire des négations
—an attitude in which the patient denies the existence of the self. Of course, Mademoiselle X did have a brain, a chest, and a stomach, even as she insisted “all she had left was the skin and bones of her disorganized body.” Though rare, cases of the delusion, now known as Cotard's syndrome, or more colorfully as walking corpse syndrome, still crop up. In 2005, Greek doctors reported on a case in which a 46-year-old woman, twice jilted and swindled by fiancés, was escorted to a hospital by two of her brothers. She informed doctors that “all the organs within me have rotted…. I am tired, I haven't slept for years, I have no blood, I have no heart, it doesn't beat anymore,” she continued, in words as poetic as they are troubling. “You are deceiving me when you take my blood pressure, because I'm not alive anymore,
I'm a dead plant.”

You can think of Cotard's as the reverse of phantom limb syndrome, in which amputees report feeling tingling or other sensations
where a limb no longer exists. Doctors believe Cotard's, a cousin of other paranoid delusions involving identity, results from a combination of deep melancholia (which is partly why it's so rare nowadays, since depression can often be treated) and, oddly enough, profound, hard-to-treat facial recognition problems. A glance in a mirror reveals a total stranger.

Often, as with Josh, who is now fine, the source of that anxiety, a betrayal of the heart, is all too real. But the profound mental disassociation of the Cotard's patients reveals how important it is that we convince ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, of the capabilities of our bodies. Few of us overestimate our physical potential; most of us underestimate it. For world-class athletes, on the other hand, there is little daylight between their sense of their athletic capabilities and their actual capabilities. To put it geometrically, for them the two are congruent. For the rest of us, bridging that gap has great consequences for how we perform, whether the aim is to sing or to dunk.

June 10: 76 days left.
A shaved-head, box-eared guy stopped me in the Greek yogurt section of the supermarket today. “You work out at gym?” he asked me. “Yeah, I do,” stunned that whatever I did at the gym had caught anyone's notice. “I'm Vasily, Russian boxer. Live here now with wife. I watch you work out. You work out hard. You make legs strong.” Russian-boxer-dude just complimented me on my workouts. I'm squatting 190 pounds, plus squat jumps with 65 pounds across the back. (I know, I know–most of you can do that in your sleep. But for me, inflexible as I am, this is a big deal.) But my right knee is hurting more and more, for longer and longer, after each workout. I ice it down regularly. Weight: 175 pounds
.

Progress report:
As my jumping was coming along, I wondered about the two kids I had met months earlier, Laquan and Josh, who appeared to be on their way to dunking.

Last I had seen Josh Scoggins, at a Hill Country gym, he could dunk a volleyball. When I wrote him a few months later to ask after his progress, he told me his dunk project had stalled because he had been suffering severe pain in his knees. Doctors had diagnosed him with Osgood-Schlatter disease, a sort of temporary arthritis not uncommon among adolescents growing into themselves. He had to lay off the jumping, he told me.

Laquan was not faring much better. His mother, Demetria, had invited me to come out and watch him play in an after-school league. So on a Tuesday night I headed back across acres of farmland to Pflugerville, the suburb with the funny spelling that had become home to a lot of middle-class African-Americans, the consequence of black flight as Austin neighborhoods that had been African-American since the Civil War grew brown.

Laquan was the biggest player on his team, but he started on the bench, in one of the plastic folding chairs by the coach, a comb-over in a white polo shirt and glasses who was earnestly spewing instructions to his team at a rate I'm pretty sure most of them couldn't process. Laquan looked unhappy. I also noticed he had a bandage wrapped on his left hand. He was still wearing those beat-up kicks; the other kids had gleaming white sneakers.

I was standing with parents on the other side of the court—Demetria was off looking after her grandson. One couple was actively heckling players on Laquan's team as they tried shooting free throws. It seemed unfriendly to me, a weirdly hostile thing to do in a meaningless after-school league with middle schoolers. A guy beside me, presumably a parent, was paying no attention at all, squatting over a copy of
Front Sight: Your Leader in Firearms Training
.

The comb-over didn't put Laquan into the game till just after halftime. By now I had found Demetria, who told me that Laquan was in no mood to talk. He had been in a car accident the day before and had been shaken. He had also sliced his hand, which explained the bandage. Now he was sullen. Maybe that explained why he was on the bench the first half. Things hadn't been working out so well for him, she said. The Pflugerville school district had been paying for Laquan to visit Chris Corbett's basketball camp, where I had originally met him, as a sort of scholarship to give him some structure and mentorship. But the district had cut the scholarship money since I had last seen them, she said, ending the trips to the basketball camp.

When Laquan got in the game, his team was trailing 31 to 29. Maybe now, I thought, given an opportunity to play, he'd go to work. But he seemed disengaged, trailing his teammates when running back for defense, unwilling to grind into a good position down low on offense. He was loafing, really, a word that I remembered Estes Banks, my elementary school soccer coach and a former Oakland Raiders running back, using to describe players who didn't fully commit themselves to the punishing drills he had prepared (among them, running in place, in the mud, until Estes screamed “Hit it!” and all of us, many of us lawyers' and doctors' sons, dived to the ground and picked ourselves up and ran in place more, as if we were in Raiders training camp): “Loafers,” he called us. (I was known by my teammates as “The Professor” because of my tortoiseshell glasses.)

“We need you, Laquan!” a teammate's father called from the sideline.

Laquan got fouled on a move to the hoop. Then, suddenly, he thrust his chest out at the defender and then shoved him with two hands. He was losing control. And the refs whistled a technical foul.

Front Sight
guy snapped his head up, for a second, from his glossy firearms mag.

“Get him pissed off!” screamed the heckling woman, in a jeer at Laquan.

“Clear your head, Laquan!” called the father of the teammate.

The coach pulled Laquan aside and, I could tell from his body language across the court, was trying to calm him down. He kept pushing his two hands downward through the air. Laquan chilled out, but then, again, he seemed disengaged, beaten downcourt by shorter players. When the game ended, Laquan's team had lost 43 to 31.

As he walked to his mother, I asked if he was up for talking some. He just shook his head. And he looked like he might cry.

I had assumed these kids might jump farther and higher than me easily enough, but their potential, it seemed, had its own limits. Someone once wrote that a young man is a theory, an old man is a fact. These kids were learning that we were not all quite created equal—something dunking distilled quite neatly. Figuring out their capabilities was a puzzle Josh and Laquan had not quite solved, a test of confidence, of maturity, of physical durability.

Little more than a half-dozen years earlier, when I was subjected to another round of cancer toxins, a nurse told me that mine was a chemo cocktail concocted to be so potent that only young men could withstand it. Even so, I had felt bad for the patients around me, women chiefly in their 50s and 60s, whose cancer treatment was open-ended and uncertain. The most many of them could hope
for was a long-term temporary reprieve. I knew I had a different trajectory. Two weeks after my initial diagnosis, I prepared to travel to Indianapolis, to begin my treatment with Dr. Larry Einhorn, the researcher who had turned the tables on testicular cancer. (Still, some people, including the son of a family friend, another Einhorn patient, die of the disease.) He had told me to bring everything to Indiana, including a sheaf of CAT scan films and my forensic report. “Don't check anything in,” he told me. “Carry it all on.” Rebecca and I drove by the Austin hospital to pick up the report: inside a small bubble-wrap-lined manila envelope labeled “fragile” was a test tube with what looked like a half-consumed sucking candy—a cross-section of my testicle. My left nut, so recently hanging inside my scrotum, now flew snugly in the seat-back pocket ahead of me to Indiana.