Year of the Dunk (6 page)

At home, I developed a special clothes-destinking system: I draped my freshly sweated-through shirts, socks, and shorts over our front-porch railing; hours later, when they were dry and starchy, I would move them to the hamper in our bathroom; finally, when I had a critical mass of dirty clothes, I would heave them into the washing machine. Despite my precautions, for months our bathroom held the gentlest whiff of boys' locker room. Rebecca, God bless her, said not a word. She was in my corner: However quixotic she thought my mission, she deemed it worthy. A brother of hers, Ben, really could dunk, had even played pro basketball in Germany, and as athletic as I might hope to be, she had seen up close how much stronger and faster and taller he was, and the dedication required to improve. (As a teenager, Ben used to practice into the night on the hoop in their backyard, relentlessly
thump-thump-thump
ing the ball on their little court and rattling the rim; one evening, having had enough, the next-door neighbor took out a shotgun and blasted out the lights. Even dyed-blue Austin is, after all, deep in the heart of Texas.) Her family was pretty much basketball-obsessed, and while Rebecca was always too stumpy-legged to really play, as a teen she briefly kept a diary, one with a Botticelli painting on the cover, documenting Michael Jordan's heroics. In it, she kept track of Jordan's box score, wrote about his dunks, and made rough drawings of the previous night's key moments. She was fanatical about the man—during freshman year of college, a moment in time in which it was mysteriously acceptable and even common to find perfectly intelligent people taping up mawkish posters of, say, a shirtless stud cradling a baby, or of dogs playing poker, Rebecca, true to herself, hung a black-and-white poster of Jordan, arms outstretched, a ball palmed in one hand—a cherished object in a room so small you could touch
all four walls while lying on her bed (which I was known to do). Occasionally she wore a pair of old socks emblazoned with Jordan's number, 23. The family had, among its VHS collection, two videos of Michael Jordan highlights. So when the United Center, Jordan's home arena, was dismantled, she and her twin sister had a small bit of the gym floor shipped to Austin, as a gift for Ben. On it was a scuff mark, one Rebecca likes to think was left by Jordan on his way to the hoop.

She wasn't sold that I could dunk. But in some ways I was strapping her to my back: Even as she endured my kvetching about having to work out, my stench upon my return, my groans about my cramping, massing muscles—this was the closest she would ever come to dunking, too.

328 days to go:
Morning sprints–6 × 25 meters; 4 × 50 meters; 2 × 100 meters, repeated twice–and evening lifting: Hamstrings nearly parallel when I squat now, even if I feel a bit like the Tin Woodsman. Squatting only the weight of the bar, 45 pounds. Three sets of 12 lunges, bearing 15 pound dumbbells. Two sets of 15 squat jumps. Weight: 192 pounds. Why does the carrot juice carton say “Not a reduced-calorie food”? Can I not even eat carrots? Jesus
.

Progress report:
One night after work I decided to shoot around at a court down the street. A bit of relaxation after a muscle-bound week. Some guy dribbling around at the other end of the court challenged me to a game of one-on-one. He was my height, roughly, a bearded white guy in his mid-20s with some roundness at the middle. Cody was his name. He might have been me a couple of months earlier, a few pounds heavier and a few pounds less muscular. With much sweating, I had dropped more than 10 pounds and
cut my body-fat percentage from 21 to roughly 17. Less to carry to the rim.

After he checked me the ball, I danced around the top of the key for a minute, trying to figure out whether just to shoot, lazily, or do my usual back-myself-in-and-awkwardly-post-up maneuver, like a Mack truck reversing slowly into a loading dock. Or, I suddenly thought, I could drive. This was an unusual thought for me, given my normal on-court deference and overall slow foot-speed. What the hell, I thought, and crossed the ball over to my left, lowered my right shoulder, and, in a couple of quick, bounding steps, beat him, surprisingly easily, to the backboard. Basket. I caught the ball as it came through the net and handed it to him so that, again, we could engage in the ball-check ritual. I wandered back to the top of the key, rubbing the sweat from my fogged-up glasses, and he bounced it back to me. I drove again: another bucket. Again and again, to the left or right. I was getting higher up, faster, even if I was nowhere close to the rim. I began wondering: Was he that weak, or was I suddenly that strong? Had these leg exercises, these glute crunches, these squats, improved my jumping already? I beat him 15–2. He wanted to run it back, so I ran all over him, again, winning 15–6. A masochist, he asked me if I wanted to play again. No thanks, I said. And stepped to the side of the court to do three sets of 12 squat jumps.

282 days left:
No pasta or beer or much else in the carbohydrate department now for two months. Can't say I mind it much: Down to 186 pounds. Today's regimen: Three sets of 20 squat jumps; 300 ankle hops; 150 split jumps, changing which foot lands on a box and which on the floor; 140 jump-for-joys, as I call them, the sort of jumps where you go as high as you might; three sets of 15 lunges, with a 15-pound dumbbell in each hand; three sets of two pull-ups—six more than I could muster in late August; three sets of 15 push-ups; three sets of 10 hamstring curls at 65 pounds a set; three 30-second planks. Just beginning to muscle up
.

A
visitor in the summer of 1867 to the Maine town of Belfast, tucked into the upper end of Penobscot Bay, might have found a group of young men gathered around a single muscular gymnast near an old farmhouse barn. There, at the center, in the body of 17-year-old Dudley Allen Sargent, the visitor would
have seen a well-sculpted youth who had perfected himself to fight in a war he was too young to wage.

A couple of years earlier, in the closing months of the Civil War,
Sargent had read
Anatomy, Physiology and Hygiene
, an 1852 book by a now-long-forgotten Dr. Cutter that included this exchange: “Agesilaus, King of Sparta, when asked what things boys should learn, replied, ‘Those which they will practice when they become men.' ” The practice, of course, whether in Sparta or in 1864 Maine, was for battle. “
To develop my body became an obsession with me,” Sargent later wrote.

He took up dumbbells, Indian clubs, and boxing, and systemized his gymnastics, all the while undertaking heavy-lifting farm work, rising at 6 a.m. in the winter and 4 a.m. in the summer to complete his hay-baling, lumbering, and wood-chopping chores. He began hosting gymnastics and tumbling demonstrations at his family barn, and soon he was drawing followers. As a pastime, Sargent would lie on the barnyard floor and wrestle against two or three boys at the same time who were charged with keeping him down. The local newspaper, the
Republican Journal
, described him as
a “young Hercules.” Despite the press, the boys largely trained in secret, to insulate themselves from a frosty Maine sensibility that predictably turned against the gym work.

I came across
a public prejudice which I was later to know well and battle hard. Some parents forbade their boys to take part in any kind of gymnastics which they regarded as “monkey shines” and “gymkinks.” The gymnasium was regarded in the same light as were billiard saloons and bowling alleys. Whether this ill feeling was a survival of a Puritanical spirit that tended to stamp out all manifestations of life and joyousness, or whether its cause lay in
the custom of the German turners of performing in cheap recreation halls and saloons, I cannot say.

Eventually,
Sargent fled to the circus, literally, to become a trapeze artist and tumbler. The Goldie Brothers circus was wearying, of course—among other things, a
tiresome senior clown always stole Sargent's buckwheat pancakes—and in less than a year he made his way back to Belfast, weighing whether he might go into law, the ministry, or medicine. A friend, returned from Bowdoin in the summer of 1869, told him about a possible vacancy in the directorship of the school's gymnasium.

Sargent was 20 years old, a former circus runaway with little money and no college degree. But he had shown himself to be a keen, serious student of the body in a period without any such discipline. Bowdoin took him on, and that fall, in his inaugural address, the president of the college, a Mr. Harris, told his charges:

Other things being equal,
the healthy man is the happiest and makes others the happier. He is the more pleasant husband and father, the more generous friend, the cheerer and helper of the sad, in every position and relation, the wholesome man. He radiates joy. Health, as the perpetual spring of animation and energy, is the first requisite of success. It must never be out of sight in the administration of a college.

The speech evidently made an impression on Sargent. As the gym janitor, instructor, and director, he gained the respect of the students—at one point challenging a series of them to
boxing matches, which he invariably won—and remade the modest gym, importing the latest weightlifting mechanisms from Germany.
After a half-dozen years at Bowdoin, however, he went to Yale for a medical degree before moving on to New York, to open his own gym, at 24th and Broadway.

But even as he began training New Yorkers, he longed to return to the academy, to press upon young men his particular form of physical education, which conflated physical health and hygiene with moral rectitude. The teacher of physical education, a term promoted by Sargent, aims “to
make the weak strong, the crooked straight, the timid courageous,” he would write in one academic journal. “His aim is not only to keep them well and prevent disease, but to lift them to a higher plane of living, morally and intellectually, as well as physically.” Such a teacher should combine technical ability and scientific know-how with “a great deal of the moral earnestness and devotion of the Christian minister.”
*
¹
He wrote to a host of universities advertising his services and urging them to consider the addition of physical education to their curricula. The letters back were discouraging. “For the most part, of course,
these letters were polite and courteous,” he later wrote, “but not one of them left a shadow of a doubt as to the absolute impossibility of establishing such a department in any of the colleges concerned.”

Eventually, one school called upon him—Harvard. In 1879, he was named director of the university gym, a job he would hold for the rest of his life. The university became a platform for his search, through physical education, to discover the true potential of his
students. He dedicated himself to a field known as anthropometry, which sought to calculate, through a mass of tables, human capability.
*
²
In time, he gained a reputation, along with a beard and a serious mien, for his curriculum and his innovations, including a primitive rowing tank, “so geared that a four-mile boat race might be rowed in a hundred-foot gymnasium,” as one of his protégés described it.

Prolific and dedicated, fixated on capturing the statistical measure of the man, Sargent late in his career grew “
overtired and fagged out by trying to do too much,” a friend wrote. But in 1921, at the age of 72, with death still several years off, Dudley Sargent, then a man with a long white beard that looked as if it belonged in the nineteenth century, made one final innovation: the jump test. That year, in the
American Physical Education Review
, he published a paper, titled “The Physical Test of a Man,” that codified the vertical jump and gave it a sheen of scientific seriousness. “In popular estimation,” he wrote, “it takes so many inches and so many pounds and a certain size chest girth to make a man.” But there remained
a mysterious “unknown equation” of athletic capability, one that ought to account for power and efficiency and that could be practically tested and numerically expressed. (After all, no one glancing at Spud Webb's chest girth would think he had the capabilities he did.) The jump test he conceived would reveal that previously unknowable relationship. It was a discovery “so self-evident that any fool ought to have thought” of it. “It is so simple and yet so effective for testing the strongest man or weakest woman or child that
one feels almost like apologizing to the general public for mentioning it,” he wrote. It was in that paper, in a sense, sprung from the cold-eyed, empirical confidence of the twentieth century, that the modern sports industry—the NFL combine, the poking and prodding of athletes, the statistical obsessions of baseball—was born. In it lies the notion that if you peer closely enough at a person, you can discern his true, mathematical composition.

The jump, wrote Sargent, required strength, speed, and something more ineffable, which he gropingly called energy.

First, no one would deny that the ability to project one's weight 20 or 30 inches into the air, against the force of gravity, requires
strength
on the part of the muscles engaged in the effort. No one would deny that the effort would have to be made with a certain degree of velocity or
speed
in order to create impetus enough to carry the body twenty inches above its own level in the standing position. Further, no one would deny that back of the requisite strength of muscle fibers and rapidity with which they are made to contract there must be
energy
, “pep,” “vim,” vitality, or whatever it may be termed which drives our internal machinery. Overlapping all, of course, is the skill or dexterity with which the jump is executed. [Italics in original.]

After years of inspecting young men; of training them to make the most of themselves, very much as athletes as well as moral beings; of amassing reams of statistics on human potential, he settled on the measurement of the jump as the single telling factor of a person's physical makeup.

“Damn, I hate jumping,” whined Jamal Carter, a 315-pound, dreadlocked, baby-faced 23-year-old. No one was listening. Carter was seated on a corner of artificial turf, his squat legs sprawled out ahead of him, stretching with a bunch of other elephant-sized men, as he prepared for the vertical jump test at the Houston Texans' Methodist Training Facility. These were, or hoped to be, NFL prospects.

Each year, the nation's top college football players are invited to Indianapolis to work out for scouts from each of the NFL's 32 teams. Then there are the regional combines like this one, for the second- or third-tier players. Ones like Carter, who had recorded a decent 21 tackles in nine games as a senior at Jackson State. Or guys who dropped out of college or were thrown off their teams or were five years out of school but thought themselves great sandlot players. Teammates from Wichita, Kansas, had piled into a Hyundai Sonata to drive the 600 miles—one way. All of them had ponied up the $250 in admission and found their way to Houston with the hope of being discovered. All to be shouted at over a long morning as they participated in the same tests and drills as the players who had a more realistic shot in Indianapolis. The tryouts included the vertical jump test, the one that Dudley Sargent had landed on to get the measure of the man. The stakes could not be greater for the players, who wanted to display their potential, and the teams hoping to divine it. On the line, in the players' minds, at least, were millions of dollars in contracts, and millions more, for the teams, wrapped up in jersey sales, television deals, and, ultimately, victories. Mike Hagen, a handsome, polo-shirt-and-khaki-shorts-wearing 50-something scout with the tired gait of an ex-athlete, called these tests “measurables.” The underlying notion was that beneath all that raw flesh, scouts could latch on to the true potential of the athlete. “This isn't about playing football, this is about being an athlete,” Hagen told me.

In what I took to be nervousness, the players were mostly quiet,
almost solemn, as they stretched and prepared for a series of drills. The odds of success, measured in an NFL contract, for Carter and the 528 other athletes showing up in Houston—one of 10 regional combine sites—were slim. In 2012, 1,999 kids worked out at the regional combines; only four were ultimately drafted by NFL teams. “There is no unheard-of player under a rock,” Sean McKee, a bright-eyed and leprechaun-like NFL official, told me. “The analysis nowadays is so deep and thorough. But everybody here thinks he's the one that's been under a rock—that his talent is undiscovered.

“We offer closure,” he continued. “No one has ever looked these guys in the eye and said, ‘It's not happening. Go get a job, support your family.' ”

Sargent's vertical jump test—along with the 40-yard dash (also known as the “dash for cash”), the shuttle run, the broad jump, the bench-press test—would determine whether actual talent lurked among this crew of massive bodies. “It all correlates,” Eric Lougas, a wide-shouldered, wide-faced football coach from Atlanta, brought in to help run the combine, told me. “Show me a guy with a good vertical, I'll show you that guy running a good forty-yard dash.”

The only real scout on hand was the junior man from the hometown team. Chris Blanco, a Pumas-wearing Californian, a recently minted law school grad wearing a loose-fitting Houston Texans hoodie, stood with a clipboard, barely bothering to make notes as one would-be player after another tried the 40-yard dash. I asked him if I would be able to tell the difference if Andre Johnson, the All-Pro wide receiver for the Texans, were doing these drills. “No doubt,” he said. “He just moves different from these guys. Totally smooth, totally efficient. Almost all these guys look like they're trying.”

The players, wearing black uniforms—some sized as large as XXXL—rotated, over the course of a couple of hours, between the different workout stations. The place was oddly quiet, muffled
like a mitten, despite the huge men stomping around. In the vast, hollowed-out belly of the practice facility bubble, they appeared to me as a thousand Jonahs, each mumbling a prayer for his salvation. So much—contracts, money, esteem—rode on the outcome of just a few tests.

Gathered in a corner of the practice bubble by the facility's concrete loading dock, one group, including Jamal Carter, prepared to jump. One at a time they stood next to a tall vertical staff hinged up high with a host of perpendicular rods that were ready to swing with the slightest nudge. This device is called a Vertec. The aim is to touch the highest possible rod. Eric Lougas, the friendly football official from Atlanta, stood above them on a stepladder, going through the instructions.

“First I'm going to measure your reach with your arm straight above your head,” he said, striking the role of a benevolent teacher. “Then you're going to get two jumps. Don't swing the hell out of your hand, because if you do, what does that mean? It means you're using all your energy to bring your hand all the way back. Just tap it.”