Year of the Dunk (21 page)

We were outside now, in a triangle of asphalt by one of the doublewides,
the warehouse, and some outbuildings. It looked like the backlot of a movie studio. A random piece of rocket leaned against a golf cart. A high scaffold stood in one corner, with lights and a set of security cameras, bunched together like grapes, hanging off some of the woodwork. At another corner of the lot, some engineers held aloft gizmos to gauge wind speeds, to decide whether they could launch their hexo-copter, a mini-drone that had six helicopter blades. Nailed to the outside of a shed was a basketball hoop, of course, because the damned things were chasing me.

“Need help with anything?” a bearded post-doc hollered over to Salton as he hunched over a laptop that sat atop a garbage can, in the kind of high-tech/low-tech maneuver that suggested a haphazard, ingenious glue-and-Scotch-tape operation. He was programming some parameters into the hopper's byte-size brain.

Salton un-hunched himself and presented crossed fingers—luck: “Just that kind of help.”

He affixed to Lewis a small canister, like the sort you'd find filled with whipped cream; it carried the fuel to shoot the actuator down.

“I feel guilty,” he said, and he appeared to be talking to the hopper itself.

“What about?” I asked, as I scribbled down notes.

“I have two very old Labrador retrievers at home, and I feel the same way about this machine as I do about them.”

“I see knee problems in its future,” laughed a Sandia staffer who was watching.

“It
is
a fairly well-utilized prototype,” he admitted.

All told, Lewis cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build. Unless it goes into the toy market as the most awesome remote-control monster truck ever, it will never be profitable. But as a nimble, lifeless scout, it might save the lives of countless American soldiers.

Out there in the New Mexico desert, I asked Salton what distinguished
Lewis from human jumpers. “If you programmed Lewis to do it,” I asked, gesturing to the hoop that hung only feet from us, “what would jump more efficiently, Lewis dunking itself or me dunking a ball?” He seemed to think this was an interesting question—Salton actually stroked his chin—leaving me quietly pleased with myself. Or maybe he was trying to figure out how to answer politely a question that was vaguely absurd.

“The human body is not very efficient,” he finally said. (Tell me about it, I thought.) “We optimize our gait compared to a robot. But we have torn ligaments. We have banged-up knees. We have hips out of alignment. A lot of the work is wasted on just picking yourself up.” The machine humans have engineered to launch itself highest—a space shuttle—has rockets that drop away after they have completed their propulsion work. Human legs, on the other hand, don't detach and float away after they've launched us into the air. “Whether it's biological or mechanical, jumping is a big deal in terms of energy,” Salton continued. “It's hard to compete in terms of efficiency with a robot. For us, landing, including the bending of knees to absorb the shock, takes an enormous amount of energy.”

Finally, Salton demonstrated the jumping capability of the hopper. With a small remote-control joystick that looked like a run-of-the-mill Nintendo controller, he steered the machine along the asphalt to a 12-foot-high fence. Beyond, desert. He punched a button on his laptop. The actuator pressed into the ground and the hopper went flying, tumbling over itself as it skyed over the fence. Then it landed, hard, on the dirt outside. It was as if it had escaped from a prison. I and the one or two other onlookers cheered and clapped—it was truly amazing, this little thing projecting itself so high up into the air—and Salton steered it in a little circle to make sure it hadn't suffered the electronics version of a concussion. He seemed relieved. I asked him if he was going to command it to jump
back. He looked at me like I was crazy before taking his leave to scoop it up in his arms, like a helpless pet.

As I got back in the car that would take me out of the Air Force base, the late afternoon light shining meekly now, I noticed dozens of hopping insects buzzing about us and my thoughts turned back to Malcolm Burrows, in England, with his froghoppers and flying cockroaches. I felt like I had seen both the past and the future of jumping, finely evolved exoskeletons and niftily designed pieces of metal machinery leaping many times higher than their body weight might allow. But they couldn't dance like Michael Jackson, and they couldn't execute a 360-degree jam like Spud Webb. They would never jump up and down, pouting like a child in hysterics, to win a parent's attention. They would not jump with unbounded enthusiasm, like the young Masai warriors, to announce their manhood. They would not jump in lordly leaps, like the dancer Rudolf Nureyev, to seize the affection of another dancer and an entire audience. They had no artistry and they lacked exuberance. They would never jump for joy. They could jump, yes, but they could not express themselves. Perhaps a robot could smoothly leap through a basket. But it could never dunk.

Charles is out of time now, and my body is out of energy. I had swatted the ball into the hoop, but these efforts didn't quite have the feel and control—the
snap
—that suggested a true dunk. Charles had thrown the ball up perfectly, tossing it so that it hung in the air like a full moon, and I had, more times than not, gotten my palm onto it. But I hadn't quite gotten all the way on top of the ball—it was just
an inch too far—and so I was left slapping the ball toward the basket and hoping it would rattle in. A few did, and a few of these felt right—there had been something of that snappish feeling, and the friction of my sliding hand against the warm, curved metal—but as soon as I landed and twisted toward Charles, I would see him shaking his head. “Asher, Asher, Asher,” he'd say. The ball had dripped through the net. “So I didn't dunk it?” I'd ask, sincerely unsure and genuinely hopeful. He'd turn to one of the folks watching—a bearded paunchy guy in glasses, another gym-goer caught up in the hullaballoo—and say, “Was that a dunk?” “Almost,” he said, holding his thick thumb and forefinger in the air, a delicate centimeter apart. This stranger, this random witness, casually pinching my potential between his fingers like a bug.

They were turning away, now, the boys, one by one standing up and going back to their kids' basket in the corner of the gym, blithely dunking and horsing around. The moment of possibility had imperceptibly turned to a moment of desperation.

Charles took me aside, to the half-court circle, and, huddling with me, an arm briefly around my shoulder, brandished his iPhone. He had queued up a YouTube clip of his winning jump in the 1991 world track and field championships. “See that burst?” he asked, as if, just by watching, I could absorb his talent. (The frustration that he must endure, the bewilderment, at my inability to do better. And the confidence in himself, after all that hard work, at how very easily it all came. He's in a tough business, it suddenly seemed to me—nothing's as hard to communicate as physical success.) “Look at the explosion of those hips,” he said, nodding approvingly as an enduring image of himself flew across the screen, as if he couldn't quite contemplate the gulf between my abilities and his. As if dunking were pure obviousness, and the mystery, if there was one in a mind of such confidence, was why everyone couldn't dunk.

He had a client waiting now. His next appointment. My year was up.

“Just once more,” he said for the fifth time; he wanted so badly for me to succeed. And I myself couldn't believe how close I was to accomplishing this thing I had worked on for a year—lacking just that little bit of air, a thimbleful, no more, that could fill the distance between thumb and index finger. I relaxed. I told myself I had already completed the dunk, and that this would be, in Charles-parlance, just play. I smiled. I imagined that thousands of fans were stomping their feet, that cheerleaders waved their pom-poms, that Michael Jordan himself was watching, and that Rebecca, filming all this, was NBC television. “Being in an actual game atmosphere adds adrenaline,” Josh Scoggins had once told me, after his first dunk. This was it, the last gasp. I pumped my knees, flew forward, planted hard, drove myself up through the air.

I couldn't quite get my hand over it. Perhaps if I had tried a thousand more times, like a kid mastering a video game, I would have gotten it. But I hadn't. I had failed.

The one or two kids who were still left under the basket quickly got up and grabbed basketballs; they sensed that any lingering would drive home the failure, and for them, at their age, failure was something contagious and best avoided. Terrell started ministering to a client on an exercise bike. “Listen, man, I gotta go,” Charles said. “But you keep your head up.” I could tell he was disappointed for me. Everyone had turned away. Rebecca was the only one left. “You doing okay, big guy?” she asked as she squeezed my shoulder. She asked me if she should throw me the ball. But my legs were tired—not just from that day's jumps, but from a year's worth of them. Time had run out. I paid my final training receipt, stepped outside, and tugged off my sweaty shirt. I threw my high-tops in the trunk. We drove back to Austin mostly in silence.

A
fter my grandmother's death earlier that year, my father asked my brothers and me for advice. At 75 he had grown worn and a little bent. He shuffled. He was keenly aware he might slip into old age. “I'm falling apart” was long his standard line after touching back down from some far-flung academic conference, and we always understood that as a knowing, heroic joke about his boundless energy, the topsy-turvy way ideas were always spilling off of him; now the phrase threatened to carry real freight. With his mother's death, he said he was “unmoored,” and I took that to mean he was both directionless and, given the care she required in her last years, liberated. He wanted a new purpose. He wanted to shape up, something that had never been important to him, and, in the way that drives so many of us to exercise, he wanted to recapture a long-ago nimbleness, a physical twinkle. Years before, when I was sick and he was sick in hospital beds half a country apart—he had his prostate surgery in New York on the very day my first week of chemotherapy ended—he wrote me: “Wish we could be having dinner together or going for a walk, you and I. We will.”

He was right, of course. Just a few months later, on a late-spring day with the jasmine blossoming, Rebecca and I busied ourselves
as we waited for the results of my post-treatment scans. We were at our house, the fixer-upper we had closed on just a week before I had been diagnosed. It was gutted now, the old shiplap and 1920s wallpaper fragments exposed, the framing stripped down to the joists. A real rebuilding job. When the phone rang, Rebecca and I took the call to the porch. “It's not often I get to give patients such good news,” said Laurie, the nurse for my oncologist, sounding genuinely happy. We celebrated that night Texas-style, with champagne and barbecue.

My father had also been given the all-clear, and now, these seven years later, I hoped he would find the satisfaction, as I had, of some extra lift in the leg. I used to say if surviving cancer had taught me anything, it was to take pleasure in a full helping of
tagliatelli con funghi
—the not-so-good-for-you creamy pasta dish at the trattoria down the street from my place in Austin. Now, by trying to dunk, I had learned the gratification of discipline, and, with something of the convert's zeal, I began suggesting some of the very exercises, albeit in milder forms, that had been bringing me so close to the rim. He took to them with a schoolboy's diligence. He began walking first one, then three, and finally all ten flights of steps up to his apartment. Maybe not with explosive speed, but he could do it in a steady march. He took brisk strolls in his Manhattan neighborhood. He lost weight, discovering for himself the wonders of yogurt. His posture straightened. He was invigorated.

In a way few of us care to acknowledge, we work out in modest defiance of the inevitable. This was, of course, partly at play in my dad's remaking of himself. And it was partly at work in my attempt to dunk, made at an age when I was just beginning the slide from peak physical capability to, ultimately, dust. (Why put too fine a point on it?)

At the start of the year, I told myself I was in a race against the imperceptible decline of my physical abilities. This was my last
chance to dunk. Yet I discovered that even if we're not all quite dunkers, we have what might fairly be called a superhero's confidence in transformation, a capacity for creative self-improvement that winks at the grave. “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to
elevate his life by a conscious endeavor,” Thoreau wrote. I think I know what he meant. Even utterly spent, as I pushed through the gym doors early one evening, the sky dark enough that the cars on the freeway had flipped on their lights and you could see the glow of neon popping up here and there from the Action Pawn and the Blazer Tag, I found myself cozying up to the thought that I was lifting myself higher than I had ever thought possible.

I never did slam home that basketball. I sometimes look back at the year of the dunk and wonder why I failed. I had some of the world's best coaches giving me advice and was regularly the sweatiest man in the gym. So I'm left grasping after trivial explanations: Maybe if I had found the right pair of sneakers. Or was it something further back in time, a piling-up of small decisions I had made over many years? Maybe I was just born fated to be earthbound? Whatever the reason, it all added up to an inarguable fact: I couldn't dunk.

My brother-in-law Ben, the basketball player, once wrote about the “climate of assessment” that hovers around competitive athletes: “Childhood, for them, was
the game you won at.” I'm no professional or college or even high school athlete, so my failure has had no real repercussions—I wasn't cut from the team, I didn't feel lesser than the guy next in line. I was like a lot of people: athletic enough, with a thin desire to win, but never the best and never desperate to be the best. Maybe that explains why, all those years ago, as a carefree boy flailing about the streets of Manhattan, I tried my hand at awning-slapping; unburdened by any expectation of success, I ran along fancy-free. Even now, all these years later, I still occasionally swing away, as if childhood were a game you merely played at. But
during the year of the dunk I took those childhood antics suddenly seriously, testing how I might measure up against a sterner yardstick.

Sometimes I wonder what another Asher, whose combination of fortune, effort, and experience had propelled him to dunk on that rim that final day, would be like. Would he have had Charles Austin's natural confidence and easy smile? Would he so trust in his own abilities that the men and women around him would take them for his simple birthright? Zadie Smith wrote about the similar pangs she felt as she ran across a Talking Heads album in a record shop one day. “As I stopped to admire it, I was gripped by melancholy, similar perhaps to the feeling a certain kind of man gets while sitting with his wife on a train platform as a beautiful girl—different in all aspects from his wife—walks by.
There goes
my other life
. Is it too late to get into Talking Heads? Do I have the time? What kind of person would I be if I knew this album at all, or well?” The dunk project was my chance to cross the street and walk along that other life. But perhaps, despite my dramatic physical transformation, or because of it, if I had managed to complete that dunk in Charles's gym, it would have signaled no profound change: it wouldn't have been the act of a natural dunker, after all, but the final and fast-fading result of a tremendous effort.

In any case, in the end, that other life, that do-over, remained, like all fantasies, out of reach. Is that the gloomy subtext to my father's rejuvenation? We each can lift ourselves off the ground for so long, but in the final analysis, we're all moving in one direction? I'm not sure which was the more seductive lie spun by Michael Jordan's remarkable hang time: the lie that we could defeat gravity or the lie that time could stand still. Even Michael Jordan had to touch back down eventually.

Months after my final dunk attempt, my APL shoes lie abandoned, thudding about deep in the trunk of my car. A bag of
protein-shake mix slumps untouched in a kitchen cabinet, waiting to be thrown away. My gym membership is long canceled. But I still play pickup basketball. I show guys the video of me dunking on our court, and they hold their hands over their open mouths. I can't bring myself to tell them it's less than ten feet, for fear of dashing their own dreams. I'm quicker, partly as a matter of confidence. I take guys off the dribble, or back them up in the post and try a turnaround jumper—my elevation is still better than it was before I began my crazy experiment. I emerged sinewy, tough, and lean. Not wanting to disappoint my mother (“Of course you're always handsome,” she tells me on the telephone, “but you're especially handsome now”), my weight remains pretty good. I eat dessert more freely these days and am back to my happy pasta-eating ways. But asceticism clings, like the last streaks of nonfat yogurt sticking to a bowl. I used to be a whole-milk person; now I'm a one-percent kind of guy. I've been known, even now, to decline the services of a bun with my burger. It's a little sad. One evening every couple of weeks, just as the sun starts to set and the grackles muster along the power lines for their evening gabfest, I make my way to the nearby middle school track to do a lonely set of sprints. I put myself through some push-ups and a few sets of sit-ups, lowering myself to the ground with the enthusiasm of a man getting into a cold bath. It's mostly vanity now. This is what happens once you've found yourself with a six-pack, with higher hops, with yet more compliments from your mother. You find it hard to let yourself go. But I'm trying.