Year of the Dunk (16 page)

“He was off-the-charts amazing,” he said, as if the cloud that had cast a shadow on Lance's Tour triumphs had spared his research lab.

I could understand the unwavering loyalty to Lance. He had boosted my own spirits and offered some practical help in my darkest moment. The weekend I was diagnosed, in 2006, I telephoned my editor at the newspaper: I wouldn't make it in that week—cancer and all. Not a bad excuse. He said he'd tell Fred, the managing editor. By Tuesday, I was down to one testicle, swaddled, and anxiously undergoing follow-up tests to find if my cancer had spread. That day, I got an unexpected email:

Asher,

Hi, it's Lance Armstrong here. I heard yesterday from Fred about your situation and wanted to drop you a line. Of course I'm well familiar with what you're going through and am hoping for the best. I'm confident you'll be fine! I would recommend (after the pathology report) a trip to see either Dr. Larry Einhorn (Indiana) or Dr. Craig Nichols (Portland) to get a truly world-class second opinion. I can help with this if need be. I'm in Johannesburg, SA right now but home on the weekend so just let me know if I can help. Otherwise,
hang tough and keep livin' strong!

Best,

LA

It felt like an unexpected reprieve, a get-out-of-school note in the middle of the week. This was early 2006, remember, when Lance, an Austin resident, was at the height of his popularity—when he was still engaged to Sheryl Crow and the official winner of seven Tours
de France. I was like the cliché of the sick kid visited by the famous baseball player who promises to hit a home run. I soon learned my cancer—a particularly aggressive strain—had spread to my lymph system.

I called Einhorn's office to see if he'd be free. Not for about six weeks, unfortunately, his nurse told me. That seemed an eternity: I didn't want to sit on my hands while a nasty disease was rapidly working its way through my body. So I wrote Lance back, asking for his advice. Within an hour, this answer:

Asher,

No worries at all. I have already emailed Dr. Einhorn and told him you'd be calling. If there are any problems then let me know.

Take care,

L

Einhorn's office could fit me in the following week, the nurse said this time.

As with so many things in my life, I was lucky to know someone who happened to know someone. But my sense is that in thousands of ways large and small, Lance had given some hope or help to a person unexpectedly facing their mortality. The following October, already rid of cancer, I participated in my first Livestrong Challenge, an easygoing race that raises money to fight the disease. Besides the siblings, parents, friends, and children of cancer victims, there were the survivors and the patients: bald kids hanging out in the backs of pedicabs; wigged women jogging with their families; and people like me, just happy to be on my feet. As I crossed the finish line with Rebecca, I was given a survivor's yellow rose. The race gave us a sense of traction, of fight and engagement, against an often
random-seeming disease. We felt relief, yes, but we were moved also by the realization that many of those around us were at less fortunate points in their story than I was, and that this meant that what we, as a group, were celebrating was not so much a lucky escape—a happy ending—as something more essential to the character of each one of us, and less dependent on providence.

In the lead-up to Lance's confession to Oprah,
I wrote a personal essay, a defense, in the newspaper. Some commenters had appeared gleeful about this latest turn of events involving Lance and doping allegations. “From Hero to Zero,” read one online headline. Not surprisingly, I had a different take. The sanctimonious epithet that followed Lance around was “arrogant,” as if that's not a trait commonly found in the best athletes. Arrogance is part of what makes great athletes great: They play, they jump, they cycle with the expectation of greatness. Early in Michael Jordan's career, his coach supposedly scolded him that “There's no
I
in ‘team.' ” Michael's response: “But there is in ‘win.' ” (Charles Austin, too, was a sort of peacock. Once, as I huffed-and-puffed through some sit-ups, he began yammering on his Bluetooth. “All y'all were on all that stuff and I still beat y'all. It don't matter what you were on—I still won. I still won.” “Who's he talking to?” I asked Terrell as I rolled over. “There's no telling,” said Terrell with a smile. “He's like this every day.”) It takes arrogance, surely, to take on an opponent as blindly formidable as cancer. It takes arrogance to parlay inborn physical prowess into the idea that one man can make a difference against such an overwhelming Goliath.

That arrogance had a dark side, of course. In January 2006, Armstrong said in sworn, now cringe-worthy, testimony: “
I would never beat my wife, and I never took performance-enhancing drugs.” None of the testimony at the time turned up eyewitnesses to Armstrong's doping, and SCA paid Armstrong $7.5 million (which the company is now trying to get back from Armstrong). But in 2008,
with scientists who had testified for SCA trying to throw doubt on his journal article, Coyle was forced to acknowledge
an error in his calculations. His most famous academic article was now caught up in the controversy. Still, even with Armstrong's 2012 confession, Coyle felt a loyalty to Lance, despite the admissions of cheating and worse. You are left with these two very different men: Lance, with a reckless, ruthless drug-taking regime, designed to boost his natural talent, and Coyle, dutifully jabbing himself only to record, for the sake of science, his solid but far more modest capabilities. Coyle was Daedalus, the master craftsman, seeking to improve performance through science; Lance, a phenomenal talent, one who justifiably became a hero because of the work and money he devoted to fighting cancer, was an Icarus-like protégé who, in a fit of hubris, had soared, with man-made aids, too close to the sun. In his grief, Daedalus busied himself with his work, determined to unravel, with human know-how, the sorts of mysteries that bedeviled the ancients. The same could have been said for Coyle.

Now here I was, in the exercise machine myself. “Go, go, go!” shouted Coyle—echoing Polly in New York City—as I struggled to rotate the wheel from a standstill. Finally, after a solid second of muscle recruitment, I pushed through. My result: 5.3 watts per pound, which put me just below the average power of a female college rower—and significantly lower than a men's college basketball player. With just a couple of months to go, I was grounded enough, I had learned, that there was no chance I would melt near the sun.

46 days left:
I catch myself lingering in the mirror a couple of beats longer than necessary—the vanity that comes with a newly shaped body. I can squat 265 pounds. “Bring the heavy” is the expression some of the other weightlifters use—and that's as much as I can muster. But to coax explosiveness out of my muscles, I concentrate now on the weighted squat jumps—three sets of 20, at 75 pounds—and the usual sets of lunges, leg presses, calf raises, and upper-body work. This saves my right knee some aching: It prefers quick action with lighter weight, like a lottery winner choosing yearly payments over a lump sum
.

W
hen, some years ago, my brother-in-law Ben dunked in a game on West Fourth Street, in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, a passing businessman pressed his face to the chain-link fence to cheer: “Nice to see one of us doing that!” When people say white men can't jump, they aren't being completely literal, of course. Dunking is a stand-in for style, and the stereotype is that white guys, shuffling about in their Asics and khakis and polo
shirts, are incapable of coolness. When the businessman cheered Ben on, he was appealing to something beyond tribal identification and loyalty—though there was, ridiculously, plenty of that, too. The comment was pregnant with envy. The sociologist Gena Caponi-Tabery has argued that the slam dunk, like a piece of jazz, is a
form of expression that embodies characteristics of the African-American aesthetic: improvisation, virtuosity, and defiance. Whether it's a riff by Miles Davis or hang time by Michael Jordan, the moments that linger in our minds involve some exceptional, stylish individual skill that combines these traits. If you can dunk, in other words, you can at least lay a tenuous claim to coolness.

But the businessman's comment also tapped into the conventional wisdom that some things, genetically speaking, are closed off to most of us. “Look, man,
you can listen to Jimi but you can't hear him,” Sidney Deane, played by the smooth-as-silk Wesley Snipes, tells the countrified Billy Hoyle, an especially honky-looking Woody Harrelson, in
White Men Can't Jump
. Rebecca, who can quote the movie backward and forward, reminds me that Billy does eventually dunk (“But it looked fake,” she says with a light shake of the head)—and we can all hear Jimi, even if we don't get the lyrics quite right. But when word got around that I was trying to dunk, smiles spread across faces: “White men can't jump,” friends would say, as if it was my first time hearing that. “You look like a desk guy,” one acquaintance told me doubtfully, and I couldn't help wondering if it was my hue to which he was alluding.

At the 1996 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Sport, the distinguished Roger Bannister, the first breaker of the four-minute mile, decided to weigh in on differences between blacks and whites—a subject outside his expertise.
Blacks had a “natural advantage,” in running, Sir Roger claimed, as if an entire race of people were born with sneakers on. He wasn't alone in idiotically, and reprehensibly, holding forth on the topic: “The black
is a better athlete to begin with because he's been bred to be that way,” sports commentator Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder observed in a notorious 1988 television interview. “This goes back all the way to the Civil War when during the slave trade…the slave owner would
breed his big black to his big woman so that he could have a big black kid.” Jack Nicklaus was once asked why there were so few blacks among the elite ranks of golfers. “
They have different muscles that react in different ways,” he said.

Sports commentators have long played on the specious differences: White athletes are hardworking, black athletes are amazing physical specimens; whites are smart, blacks are talented; whites are team players, blacks are showboaters. In his 2000 book
Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It
, a kind of sports entry in the race and culture wars of the period, Jon Entine—a journalist, not a scientist—delivered what he called a “biocultural” explanation that “
biological factors specific to populations can exaggerate the impact of small but critical anatomical differences.” He observed that athletes of African ancestry hold every major running record, from the 100-meter dash to the marathon. “Genes may not determine who are the world's best runners, but they do
circumscribe possibility,” he wrote.

While he had his supporters, including his sometime collaborator Tom Brokaw, Entine quickly drew a varied and expert set of critics. “If professional excellence or over-representation could be regarded as evidence for genetic superiority,” Jonathan Marks, an anthropologist at Berkeley, wrote in the
New York Times
, “there would be
strong implications for Jewish comedy genes and Irish policeman genes.” The science about the relationship between genetics and performance was still too vague, he claimed. “We could document consistent differences in physical features, acts and accomplishments until the Second Coming and be entirely wrong in thinking they're genetically based.” Essayist Jim Holt wickedly
opened a review of Entine's book with the conclusions about sporting and genetic makeup from an earlier period:

It is pretty obvious that certain racial and ethnic groups are naturally gifted at playing certain sports. Take basketball.
That's a Jewish sport. So, at any rate, people thought in the 1930s. After all, the star captain of the original New York Celtics, Nat Holman, was Jewish, as were four of the starters among St. John's famed “wonder five,” who ruled college basketball in the late '20s. Jews were believed to have a genetic edge, being endowed by nature with superior balance, greater speed and sharper eyes—not to mention, in the words of one sportswriter, a “scheming mind” and “flashy trickiness.”

(If only my own flashy trickiness, along with my usurious ways and abiding appetite for virgin Christian blood, translated into dunk-ability. Scheming gets you only so high.)

Still, the issue whether African-Americans were naturally superior in some sports has flummoxed many, including Arthur Ashe. “Damn it,” Ashe once said. “My heart says ‘no,' but my head says ‘yes.' Sociology can't explain it. I want to hear from the scientists. Until I see some numbers [to the contrary], I have to believe that we
blacks have something that gives us an edge.”

So what does scientific research tell us about genetics, race, and athletic ability? Or, put less delicately, can a white guy like me dunk?

On the face of it, the answer is obviously yes. White guys do it in high school gyms every day across the country. But the very question—asking whether a white guy can dunk—fundamentally misunderstands why some of us appear naturally better at things than others. “ ‘Race' is the wrong term,” for thinking about these
issues, Harvard evolutionary biologist Dan Lieberman tells me. Muscle development has nothing to do with the color of one's skin. But scientists have noted common characteristics among “biological populations,” or people from different parts of the world, says Lieberman. In other words, we ought to separate race from our ancestral geography, just as we might distinguish a man's clothes from his politics. Just because someone appears to be black (or white or brown or whatever) doesn't mean we can draw any conclusions about her physical abilities. Knowing where her ancestors came from can sometimes offer hints. The genealogy of some top-notch long-distance runners, for instance, has been traced to a particular Kenyan valley; some sprinters' family trees find their roots in specific parts of West Africa. “You have more individuals in those populations better built for power than endurance,” says Lieberman.

Just because you or your forebears hail from Côte d'Ivoire obviously does not mean you are going to be a particularly good sprinter. But, says Lieberman, certain pockets of the West African population are more likely than others to have what's known as the speed gene, alpha-actinin-3, or ACTN3, a protein found exclusively in fast-twitch muscles. Fast-twitch muscles produce more force more quickly than slow-twitch muscles; squid use theirs to
shoot out tentacles to catch prey, we use ours to sprint after a bus. The downside is that they're quicker to tire than their slow-twitch counterparts, which can withstand repeated contractions over a long period of time without lactic acid buildup; these are the muscles that mussels use to cling long and hard to slippery, briny rock as they're relentlessly beaten about by waves. For similar reasons, the turtle beats the hare.

Michael Bárány
weighed only 92 pounds when the Americans liberated Buchenwald in April 1945. “I was just of bone,” he would tell an interviewer from the Shoah Foundation a half-century later. Raised the son of a
well-to-do farmer outside Budapest, he was
denied admission to university for his Jewishness and as young man had found work as a mechanic in a Hungarian army factory. In late 1944 he and other Jewish mechanics were
directed to a train depot and told that they were being dispatched for a military operation. They were in fact being sent to a death camp. They were given a
two-day supply of food to endure a 21-day journey in a boxcar—some of the ninety men, including Bárány, resorted to drinking their own urine. “Hunger, smell, and disease
transformed the cattle wagon into hell,” he later wrote. By the time they were dragged out of the boxcar, one of the men had died and two of them could not walk. The others were made to march through the Buchenwald gates, above them the taunting slogan
“Jedem das Seine
,” or, roughly, “Everyone gets what he deserves.”
It was Christmas Day, 1944.

After the liberation, Bárány, 23 years old, weakened by tuberculosis, remained nearly a month at the camp to recuperate. He then made his way back to Hungary, where he learned his parents had been gassed in Auschwitz. He had grown up an Orthodox Jew, but God had been wrung out by the Holocaust. “I tell you when I
lost God,” he told the Shoah interviewer. “I lost God first when I heard my parents saying God would help. And when I became a scientist, a life scientist, then I couldn't find God anymore.” By September 1945, determined to establish a new life for himself, he enrolled in university.

Bárány specialized in medicine. He met Kate Fóti, a fellow student, when she came into his dormitory to get first aid after she cut her finger
slicing some bread. Within months they were married. She would become his lifelong scientific collaborator. After winning
his medical degree, Bárány turned to biochemistry, drawn to the lab of a Hungarian Nobel Prize winner. He
began to study the lives of muscles, and how and why they contract. I like to think of this man, whose formative years were spent suffering at the hands of the most inhumane ideologues, concentrating his meticulous study on what seems to me to be our inner humanity: the source of both our grace and our power, the tools that control everything from the gesture with which we soothe a child to the vigor with which we dunk a basketball.

But he faced a second kind of prejudice after getting his doctorate in 1956. He found himself unable to teach under Communist rule because of his father's prewar landholder status—no matter that his family land had been wrested away by the Fascists. He was
deemed a capitalist. Lacking opportunity, the Báránys plotted to flee the country. The border was mined, watched, and wired. “So
escape was not absolutely simple,” Bárány later observed.

At one point the couple paid a former secret police officer to
help them escape, but he was arrested. In another scheme, they were to be smuggled aboard a coal barge departing Budapest for Vienna, but the Danube froze and the ship was jammed. They finally engaged a guide to help them cross the woodsy border into Yugoslavia. He steered them to a spot where a
cow had stepped on a land mine and been blown up, thus creating a zone for safe passage. The family—Michael, a scientist on the verge of a breakthrough; Kate,
seven months' pregnant now; and George, their 22-month-old toddler—trudged
through ten miles of snow, zigzagging through the night to dodge the border guards. Bárány
carried two suitcases, one filled with food, the other with diplomas and lab notebooks. Family lore had it that at the end of this harrowing trek, the boy, who had been sedated with a sleeping pill and carried for the first few miles before being made to walk, told
his parents upon their arrival in Yugoslavia
“Jól sétáltunk”
—“
That was a nice walk.”
*

In 1960, after stints in Israel and Germany, the family finally settled in the United States. Living in the fringes of Queens, the Báránys
left their house so early for work that by the time their boys awoke they had only a governess to greet them. They were dutiful sons: their mother made them a poster of
17 good reasons to do push-ups, and the boys did push-ups routinely upon getting out of bed each morning. (Not far away lived my grandparents, themselves refugees from Vienna.) The Báránys' destination each morning was Manhattan's Institute for Muscle Disease, where they worked on teams trying to cure muscular dystrophy, a disease of progressive weakness, often first seen in children, that hampers locomotion. The Báránys were “
inadvertent comparative biochemists,” they would later say, examining the muscle contractions in rabbits, chickens, and frogs. It was in New York, doing these experiments, that Michael
Bárány made his most acclaimed discovery, of a relationship between the speed of muscle contraction and the breaking down of energy-bearing molecules inside the muscle. The finding, one that characterized the difference between “fast-twitch” and “slow-twitch” muscles, was laid out in a 1967
Journal of General Physiology
article that has now been
cited more than 1,700 times. Nearly a half-century later, this was the difference I was hoping to navigate in my own training as I steered my body to be fast-twitch heavy.