Year of the Dunk (22 page)

Suppose, having read this book, you wanted to add inches to your vertical. My sense is that it's hard to lose weight for the sake of losing weight, or to lift for the sake of lifting. Both seem joyless. It helps, instead, to have a purpose, even if that purpose is something as rudimentary as getting yourself to jump higher. The weight loss and the exercise will follow.

Here's a scaled-down version of how to jump higher.

First, measure your current abilities. This'll be crude, but doable: Put a bit of tape on your finger, doubled over into a loop. From a standstill, jump and slap a wall, making sure to stick the tape to the wall at your highest possible point. OK, this is the mark you want to beat.

Jumping, like comedy, comes in threes:

1. Stretching. First, take a light jog, one just long enough that you begin to sweat. You're going to want to improve your explosive capabilities as quickly as you can, so feel free to mix in some high knees, some skipping, some jump rope, as you jog. Now that you're warmed up, you ought to take a solid 10 minutes to stretch. Make sure you get to your quads, your hip flexors, your groin, your calves, your butt, and your Achilles. Bonus points if you stretch your IT band. Think about getting as deep a stretch as you can. Where are you stiffest? Work on more nuanced stretches to ease up these regions of your body. As a reference, I recommend the book
Staying Supple
by the late John Jerome.

2. Lifting. I actually want you to start with no weight at all. In fact, start working out on the very chair you're sitting in right this moment.
Trying standing up and sitting down. Do that a few times, rather quickly. Did you use your hands to help launch yourself up? Now try standing up and sitting down with no hands. Not even on your knees. Just keep them by your sides. Try springing up as soon as your bum touches the chair seat. Can you do that comfortably, 10 times in a row? OK, once you can do that, I want you to do that on one leg: Lower yourself down and pick yourself back up again on the same leg. The other foot shouldn't touch the ground. Hard as hell, right? Get back to me when you can do that 10 times in a row, in three sets. (A tip: Don't use a chair with wheels.)

Another exercise: squats. Stand up. Now drop your bum below the level of your hips. Make sure you keep your heels on the ground. And make sure your knees don't stray ahead of your toes. Got it? (If that's too hard for you, put a board or a folded towel beneath your heels to elevate them slightly.) Do this 10 times, up and down. Each time you go up, go up as fast as you can. Now try doing the same thing while holding a broom over your head, with your elbows more or less locked in place.

Finally, try doing squat jumps. When you explode upward from a squat, follow through and actually leave the ground. Land softly, with knees slightly bent. Lower yourself immediately back into a squat and explode upward again.

Try following these and other leg exercises Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, try a track workout. Concentrate on short bursts of speed, starting out no longer than 25 meters and moving to greater distances, stopping at 200 meters. Take a 30-second break after each 25-meter sprint and a one-minute break after each 200-meter sprint. So a workout might look like four 25-meter sprints, three 50-meter sprints, two 100-meter sprints, and one 200-meter sprint. And then work your way back down the pyramid. Or you could do a set of six 200-meter sprints. If you don't have a track available to you—if you live on the nineteenth story of a downtown high-rise—then take the stairs. Try going up two-by-two if you can. Or taking them one at a time as fast as possible, to improve your footwork. Don't use the rail. For a heftier workout, go up two flights, down one flight, up two flights, down one, etc.

Each of these workouts, as well as the leg workouts, should include some abdominal work—sit-ups or planks or whatever works out your tummy.

There are tons of other leg workouts, including ones, like squatting, that involve weights. But for now, these will suffice.

3. Dieting: Eat oatmeal for breakfast. Okay, that's basically your carbs for the day. Find something you like that's low-carb and low-fat and happily snack away at it for the day. For me, this was nonfat yogurt. And I chewed gum like a man desperately trying to quit smoking. I also ate lots of fruit and raw vegetables. Sure, fruit has sugars, but we all learned in elementary school that fruit and vegetables are good for you. No alcohol, I'm afraid. No cookies. No dessert—unless it's fruit. No fruit juices, though. And try to cut down on the dried fruit. Apart from the oatmeal, the yogurt, and the fruit, you ought to stick to protein and vegetables, preferably steamed. Have small helpings of turkey and white-meat chicken; the occasional burger, sans bun; tofu; fish. Try for lean cuts, prepared with little oil. And don't underestimate the incredible edible egg.

On Spud Webb fan appreciation night in November 1985, the Atlanta Hawks gave away souvenir stickers instead of the usual posters. “
Spud's just too small for a poster,” a team official explained. To get to the bottom of Spud's heroic hops—to get a sense of how impressive it is that a man too small to warrant his own fan-night poster exerted enough force to dunk—we can look to
two famous laws of physics.
*
¹

The first is Newton's second law of motion, known commonly as F = ma, and which also can be expressed as F = m* dv/dt, where dv is Spud's change in velocity during the jump and dt is the time over which the jumping force is exerted, i.e., the amount of time Spud spends pushing off the ground before being completely airborne. F is the sum of forces acting on Spud: the force he exerts against the ground when he pushes off to jump, minus the force of gravity, since gravity is a force pulling him in the opposite direction. If we use F
_j
and F
_g
to describe the jumping and gravitational forces, respectively, Newton's second law of motion can be rewritten as F
_j
= F
_g
+ m* dv/dt.

A quick aside: We're constantly balancing the pull of gravity with a force of our own, whether we're sitting down, walking about, or lying down. Gravity pulls us downward with a force of 1G—our weight. To
stand, we must constantly exert an upward force of 1G to counteract it. The net upward and downward force = 0, and so we stay upright. We can express force as a multiple of the force of gravity, and when we do we call them G-Forces, or Gs. (You might notice when you're in an elevator that just as it begins its acceleration upward, you feel momentarily heavier. That's because you're experiencing a balancing force against that acceleration. That is probably between 1G and 2Gs.)

The second famous law at play here is the law of conservation of energy, mgh = (½)mv
²
, which says all of the energy of motion accumulated during the jump will be used to fight gravity and lift Spud to the top of his jump. Spud's mass, initial airborne velocity, and height gain are m, v, and h, respectively.

We can fill in numbers for all but one of these variables: g is the acceleration due to gravity, which, you may distantly recollect from high school physics class, is 9.8 meters per second squared; Spud's mass during his playing days was 60 kg. Spud could jump at least 42 inches, or 1.1 meters.

Using the law of conservation of energy, we can solve for v, or the velocity Spud needed for a height gain of 42″. v = the square root of (2* 9.8 m/s
²
* 1.1 m). That comes out to 4.6 m/s. We can also call 4.6 m/s the change in velocity during the jump, dv, since Spud started with zero upward velocity when he planted his feet.

Back to the second law of motion: Doing the math, based on what we just worked out, we learn that the force (in excess of the force of gravity) exerted by Spud Webb when he jumps is (276 kg m/s)/dt.
*
²
To express force as a multiple of the force of gravity, i.e., in Gs, we calculate F/(60 kg* 9.8 m/s
²
) = F/(588 kg m/s
²
).
*
³

The number of Gs exerted by Spud, then, is actually ~0.5s/dt + 1, or roughly between 3 Gs and 6 Gs, depending on whether that foot-plant lasts a quarter of a second or a tenth of a second. In other words, Webb's acceleration falls somewhere between a fighter jet lifting off an aircraft carrier and a low-to-the-ground F1 automobile cornering a curve at high speed.

Special thanks to Jeff Moses, our family physicist, for walking me through all this.

This book began as a fantasy and grew, in ways I still find hard to fathom, into something remarkably real. Among this project's pleasures, for someone who makes his home in the Texas hinterlands, was catching a peek into that faraway literary world of New York City; I can report that immensely talented and kind people are at work there.

I'm very lucky to have David Halpern as my agent. He showed shrewdness in the early, critical shaping of this book and was a patient, smart advocate as it matured. Thanks, too, to Kathy Robbins, David's partner in crime, and the rest of the Robbins Office for their support.

The irrepressible Vanessa Mobley, bubbly with ideas, felt like a wise sister as much as a sharp editor, setting me straight, in the funniest ways, about not only writing but also the ways of the world. One of her corrective notes: “My friend—no oil on earth is nonfat.” Thanks to Claire Potter, who diligently pulled together this book's odds and ends, to Kevin Doughten for his home-stretch work, and to the entire team at Crown—including the art department and Rodrigo Corral for the vivid cover.

It felt like the more I talked about this project, the more real it would be—so thanks to my friends for their indulgence. For their enthusiasms and suggestions, I'm grateful to Nathaniel Mendelsohn, Sebastian Solomon, Marc Bush, Phil Bezanson, Alex Chung, and Julia Markovits; Bob Gee and Carolyn Kimball; and Bill Bishop and Julie Ardery. Gabe and Josh Price and Daniel and Ben Markovits each lent his own brand of valuable brotherly advice.

In important ways, certain people took my idea seriously—arguably
more seriously than it deserved!—as it teetered between fantasy and reality. Jeff Moses warmed wholeheartedly to the question of the physics of Spud Webb's dunks. Tom Hooven picked out, in his typically incisive way, medical specialists for me to approach—without his help, this project might not have gotten off the ground. Along those lines, I'm especially grateful to Steve Doty and Polly de Mille at HSS for their willingness to work with a random dude from Texas who wanted to know how to dunk. Thanks, more broadly, to all the people who cooperated in the reporting involved with the book, in particular Charles Austin, Tyler Drake, Malcolm Burrows, Chris Corbett, Kim Geary, Jamie Osmak, Ed Coyle, Jon Salton, Laquan Williams, Josh Scoggins, Mark Goldston, and Todd Wright—and to George Barany, who shared with me the loving family archive dedicated to his parents.

Back in Austin, Debbie Hiott, John Bridges, and Andy Alford at the
American-Statesman
generously granted me the leave necessary to complete this project. Thanks to them and the rest of my colleagues for making the
Statesman
not only a superb newspaper but also such a wonderful place to work—one I have the good fortune to call home.

This book crystallized during my time as a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University. The fellowship led me to Jonathan Weiner's illuminating science journalism class; Jonathan taught us, poetically, to write about scientific research as quanta, or packets of light, a lesson that made a big impression on me. My deep appreciation to the staff of the University of Texas's Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports, particularly to the avuncular Terry Todd for his help and storytelling on the subject of strength. For their fact-checking help, I'm indebted to Robert Dennison and Holly Duncan.

The much-beloved Jim Phillips served as a crucial reader and confidant. One of my joys was meeting Jim at out-of-the-way Austin strip malls for Vietnamese lunch while he held forth on the pleasures of Haskell Wexler or Archer as we went over his squiggles and scrawls. Jim was my first editor at the
Statesman
and remains a mentor, one for whom my fondness is undiluted by the fact that he's a caring ear for so many others. He's that kind of guy.

To my parents, Aimée Brown Price and Monroe Price: It's hard to give thanks for specific things because the truest thing to say would be thank you for absolutely everything.

Finally, my deepest gratitude to Rebecca Markovits. Her influence
is on every page of this book. She and I have put together a great life in Austin—a pretty old house with a crazy-faced dog, easygoing friends, dear family nearby. But what's nicest for me is seeing so much of her. She is a partner in the work I do and the life I lead, and, invaluably, she has enough confidence in my abilities to nudge me, in the most thoughtful ways, to do better. This book is dedicated to her. If she were in a dunk contest and I were a judge, I'd tape a crude “1” over the zero and give her an 11. She's that awesome.

These notes are meant to clarify sourcing when it may not be apparent in the text. I also include links to YouTube videos and some elaboration on points made in the main text.