Year of the Dunk (18 page)

I had embarked on this dunking project to see how far my flesh and bones could take me, to know about the frontiers of my capability; Rebecca, a self-described homebody—an eater of plain bagels, a vanilla-ice-cream girl—shunned frontiers. She didn't want to know what the Fates had planned for me. But by dint of scientific
breakthroughs in the mapping out of the genome, we now can have a pretty good sense of our natural potential for everything from dunking a basketball to going blind. Here, suddenly, in a way that overturned all that was sacred in Western literature, from Adam onward, free will would be reduced to a website that presented me with the cold data of my essence. “Know thyself,” Socrates commanded. But surely the ancient Greeks had something very different in mind;
Oedipus Rex
is warning enough of the risks of prophecy. The mysteries of my future, including the sort of natural death I might endure, would be distilled to a game of percentages, as if I were a deck of cards. Is that sort of certainty really a desirable thing? Rebecca had wondered, as I breezily plonked down the hundred bucks to be dealt my hand.

“You don't mind, right?” I asked as a kind of afterthought. I had grown so accustomed to her anxieties that I could be cavalier about them, and even, at times, dismissive.

“Let's not talk about it,” Rebecca said.

“Because of the cancer stuff?” I managed to warble as I spat, for the fourth time, into the test tube.

“Because it's gross,” she said.

It was hard to disagree: My DNA was now slithering down a bit of plastic I gently held between my thumb and forefinger.

It was time, I had decided, to figure out whether my genetic makeup had put me at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to dunking. It's easy to discover whether you (or your child) has the so-called sports gene: In 2008,
Atlas Sports Genetics began selling, for $149, a screening test for variants of the gene ACTN3. Since then at least a half-dozen other companies have gotten in on the act. Federal regulators are dubious. Not long after I took this test, the Food and Drug Administration sent a letter excoriating 23andMe for
failing to prove up its testing and notification procedures.

“The commercial tests are very reliable in the sense of telling you
which genetic variants you have,” Vishy Iyer, a molecular geneticist and microbiologist at the University of Texas, told me. “But in terms of actually predicting something about your success in one sport versus another, they're currently unproven at best, or worthless at worst, in my opinion.” He estimated I had an 80 percent chance of having at least one copy of the speed gene. “Many people have this fatalistic sense that our lives are determined by our genetic code,” Iyer continued. “But with sports that's really unknowable. It's hard to get at.” Iyer, a tall, thin man—a marathoner, with elbows slightly akimbo, as if he were ready at any second to start racing—took me seriously enough to get out of his office chair and chart, on his whiteboard, the relationship between genes and muscle mass. But as he filled the board with jottings and arrows, the air busy with the moist squeaks and faintly chemical scent emanating from his clutch of red, green, and black markers, he turned to tell me that in the final analysis the ACTN3 gene is only a small component of physical activity. The question of athletic excellence is far more complex than one simple gene or its variant. We started having the sort of conversation that straddles philosophy and science, about magical twins who were identical in every respect except one: One possessed two copies of the gene, the other no copies. The first twin might have a marginally better ability to dunk than the second. I was sorry Rebecca wasn't with me; she gets excited about twins, mostly because she and her twin are extremely close. “Twinpathy,” they call their mind-meldedness. If Rebecca spots twins, infant or adult, when we're out for a stroll, she pokes me surreptitiously. Sometimes I think she wants to give a little wave of acknowledgment, the way bus drivers do as they pass each other in opposite directions.

Eight weeks after putting the test tube in a biomedical bag and popping it in the mail, I got the results—via email, of course.

Rebecca, for her part, didn't want to know any of it, especially the parts predicting my medical future. “Haven't you submitted yourself to enough tests? Haven't you had to wait for enough results? Haven't you been poked and prodded enough?” she asked plaintively.

“There was no poking; I only drooled into a tube.”

I argued that the results were probably predictable. My father had endured prostate cancer, for example, and my maternal grandmother had suffered through Alzheimer's—that must leave me at greater risk for both. Oddly enough, she didn't find my way of looking at it all that comforting. As a concession, I decided to forbear from clicking open most of the health results, confining myself to information relevant to my jumping genealogy. It would be the virtual equivalent of covering your eyes at a scary movie, peeking only now and then through a web of fingers to catch fascinating bits of backstory.

Between you and me, a tiny part of me had hoped to find out that I was partly black. But no, I learned from the backlit laptop in my living room, I am fully Ashkenazic, as plainly white as one of those long fluorescent office bulbs. On my mother's side, my genes suggested I belong to a branch of humans who trace their lineage to a quartet of women who lived around 700 AD, according to the genetics company. Those women, who settled in what is now Germany's Rhine Valley, were Jews, and their descendants now number in the millions. On my father's side, my genetic makeup is similarly Western European. (I'm in the 87th percentile of Neanderthalishness, I'm proud to say; the genetics company tells me that 3 percent of my genetic makeup can be traced to our distant hairy relatives, as if I didn't know that by just taking off my shirt.)

What I really wanted to know was whether, genetically speaking, I was swimming with or against the current. Was Vishy Iyer correct that I was almost surely in the genetic middle, in the muddle of humans with one, but not two, copies of the speed gene?

No, as it turned out. The genetic test turned up neither of the copies of the speed gene. I am apparently in the narrow minority of only about
18 percent of humans who lack even a single copy. My Neanderthal qualities notwithstanding, one way of looking at this result is that, physically speaking, I'm highly evolved; through a long chain of natural selection, some humans have cast off their sprinting abilities, which are far less needed than they were hundreds of thousands of years ago, when our arboreal selves still sprung about for their dinner.
I'm better suited, I was learning, to the long game, the persistent stalking of prey over great distances that became our M.O. as we descended to the plains. Another, less happy thought: Despite my height and long arms, the genetics were always stacked against my dunking endeavor. Thanks a lot, Mom and Dad.

July 15, 41 days left:
Michael Jordan's outstretched hand measured 11.375 inches from tip of thumb to tip of pinkie. Mine's about half that. One way of thinking about this: I'm adorable. But if your hand is too small, you have to hold the ball gingerly, painstakingly, like a child handling a spoon in an Easter-egg race. There's nothing I can do about hand size, obviously, but I can improve tensile strength. So now I'm undertaking a few fingertip push-ups. And while watching television my left hand dangles down, my fingertips clamping a basketball like a spider perched atop a pumpkin. I try to keep it squeezed for 30 seconds, or until my fingers ache
.

Progress report:
With a month or so left, on an unusually cool summer night, cool enough that I thought I could palm the basketball, even after warm-ups left my skin moist, I decided to try to dunk. The outdoor court at the nearby Boys & Girls Club was deserted. I was grateful. A live oak, a fairy-tale tree with low, sprawling limbs, easy for climbing, gave me some cover from any passersby. No one would catch my embarrassing efforts. I started a run-up at the rim and felt the ball slip out of my hand. I tried again. Same thing. Again with the run-up, and again the ball slipped out. Okay, take it easy. I pulled back and shot the ball a few times, blew on my hand, as if it had just handled an unexpectedly hot pot, wiped it off on my shirt. And grabbed the ball, solidly. I walked to the three-point line, squinted at the basket like it was an outlaw in an old Western, squeezed the ball at my hip, and drove forward. I took off and brought my left hand high into the air, as if I were an airborne Statue of Liberty—and pushed the ball down into the hoop, the fingers of my left hand sliding against the cold orange metal as the ball rattled down. “Holy shit!” I shouted, to no one in particular. I had dunked a full-size basketball on a rim that adults used to play basketball. Except it wasn't quite a 10-foot rim. Still, I was thrilled. Like a little boy, I ran home the block and a half to tell Rebecca the news.

A few days later, on a Sunday afternoon, I went back out with Rebecca to get the dunk on video. I wanted to prove it to her as much as to anyone else. A little blond boy broke off a walk with his father to press his face to the fence as I tried—and failed. “Honey, keep up,” the father said to the boy as he continued walking. “But Dad, he's going to dunk.” You're right, wee one, I thought. And here I go…and I missed again, the ball slipping out of my hand like I was playing water polo. The boy padded away. I wondered, for a brief minute, whether I had imagined my triumph of the other night. But I banished
the thoughts and convinced myself, Charles Austin–style, that I had already dunked on these baskets. (After all, I had.)

And so it happened, in this year of our Lord 2013, that I dunked a basketball, before my lovely wife and on video. And I let out a roar. Be it noted, once more, sotto voce, that it was on a rim a couple of inches short of regulation. But I was pumped for the full-on dunk with just a month to go.

July 23, 33 days to go:
I saw Hugh Jackman on Letterman tonight, plugging his new Wolverine movie. Man looks ripped. He reported—and this made me very sad—that he didn't eat any fruit during his months of working out. Feeling guilty, I solemnly pledge, from here on out, no fruit for me. Not just fresh fruit; no dried fruit, either. No raisins in my oatmeal, no grapes as a snack. No apples. No banana-frozen cherry–nonfat milk licuados, whipped together in my blender. Nothing. I had grown up in a family that regularly grazed on things fruity, as if scurvy was right around the corner. Fruit was so cherished that gnawed-at apple cores were not deposited in the garbage but stuffed in the refrigerator between the Sunday-brunch lox and years-old marmalade, there to wait patiently for some mysterious future use
.

I
n autumn 1988 a newly minted Reebok executive named Mark Goldston flew from Boston to Michigan on a top-secret sneaker mission, code-named Dr. Detroit. Goldston wanted to see for
himself what he hoped would be the “holy grail” of athletic footwear—a pair of shoes that, in defiance of the sorts of natural limits we all face, would actually make its wearer jump higher or run faster. He had been chief marketing officer at Reebok only a few months, a 33-year-old advertising maven plucked from the toiletry and fragrance firm Fabergé, where he
pitched antiperspirants and hairspray for men, to revitalize the stagnant sneaker company. Before Fabergé, he had run the marketing shop at Revlon for four years, and now, in a way, he was being asked to do a makeover job at Reebok. The company, named for the graceful South African gazelle, had a proud, if musty, history. Descended from a late nineteenth-century English footwear purveyor, the company still insisted that a Union Jack grace every shoe. Reebok had made its mark in the States during the 1970s aerobics craze, and, again, in 1982, with the introduction of a woman's running shoe, a novelty at the time. But as the decade heated up, aerobics and running were taking a backseat to basketball, a sport with new celebrities eager to expand their reach and income through endorsements. In 1988, Reebok saw
its first drop in earnings, about 20 percent. The company, lacking a high-profile high-top, was being lapped by its competitors. Nike had its Air Jordan; Adidas had its Attitude, favored by Patrick Ewing and other big men; and Converse, the old, classy standby, had its Weapon, worn still by Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. Reebook's only basketball shoe was the BB4600, which was affectionately known inside the company as a
shoe you'd wash your car in.

Chicago-raised, Goldston had always been a
brash overachiever, willing his 5′11″ frame to dunk at least a volleyball in high school. “I was always two inches away,” he says ruefully. (I felt his pain.) The narrowness of that difference, between ordinariness and marvelousness (or, as they say in the makeup industry, between looking good and looking great), fascinated him. The slogan of his childhood shoe brand, PF Flyers, rang in his head: “Run your fastest,
jump your highest.” Was there a shoe that could get you to run even faster, jump even higher, than your natural capability?

That was the hope with Dr. Detroit. Reebok had hired a “podiatrist type of guy” at the University of Michigan to design a sneaker with springs inside—“a tiny trampoline” is how Goldston describes it—that promised to instantly improve the hops of its custodian. This was the prototype that Goldston dragged himself to Michigan to try. He still played ball now and then, and he wondered whether these shoes would be what he needed to overcome those two inches.

They were duds. After running and jumping in the clunky shoes for a half hour, Mark Goldston's feet fell asleep. The size of the springs made them too bulky. Plus, he wasn't sure he was jumping any higher—partly because they were so big. Still, he took the shoes back to Massachusetts to conduct future tests. At home he entrusted the sneakers to his dependable quality control experts, his identical twin sons, Adam and Ryan. Little more than toddlers, they were old enough, already, to compete at basketball—they competed at everything, really, a pair of talented left-handers who hated to lose. They were convinced they would one day dunk, and as they slipped their tiny feet into the massive Dr. Detroiters, their eyes grew wide, enchanted by the idea of a shoe with special powers.

About the time Adam and Ryan Goldston were toying with the Dr. Detroit moonboots in their Massachusetts manse, I was a gawky prepubescent trying not to show up late for my Amsterdam Avenue school bus. As an 11-year-old in New York City, my favorite shirt was a baggy gray tee that hung past my butt emblazoned with a photo of Patrick Ewing, the great Knicks center, rising up to slap
away an opponent's shot. “Return to Sender” was stamped across it. This was as much as we could hope for, advertising-wise, from Patrick, marginalized by corporate America for his Jamaican accent and workmanlike ways. We New Yorkers were haunted by a more charismatic dunker, a contemporary of Ewing's: Michael Jordan.

Not only did his Bulls repeatedly shoo our Knicks from the playoffs, but Jordan's image was omnipresent—on sneakers, cologne, T-shirts and, of course, television. Jordan put his popularity down to the “ability to do things that other people can't do but want to do and they can do only through you.” “
They watch you do it, then they think that they can do it,” he told
Esquire
magazine in 1990 for an article titled “Michael Jordan Leaps the Great Divide.” Advertisers glommed on to this logic, too. In their genius, they held out the possibility that we mere humans, even Knicks fans, could approach Jordan's abilities, if only we bought the right merch. “It's gotta be the shoes,” Mars Blackmon, the alter ego of Spike Lee, famously declared in a series of Nike advertisements in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as Michael dunked in the background. (In the pre-
Seinfeld
era, the Nike ads were arguably the best thing on television. They were clever and stylish and they respected the intelligence of both the viewer and the mostly African-American stars who made the commercials what they were.) Good fun, of course. No one really thought Michael Jordan's talent had all that much to do with his sneaks. Even Michael said, “No, Mars.” But the message got through: If you wanted to “be like Mike”—as the jingle went in the Gatorade commercial—you ought to wear his shoes and drink his drinks. Rebecca, being the Michael Jordan fan she is, can still sing the lyrics: “Sometimes I dream / That he is me / You've got to see that's how I dream to be / I dream I move, I dream I groove / Like Mike / If I could be like Mike.” The song is no more about dunking than the Mars Blackmon commercials are. They're about upward mobility, yes, but about a particularly American version of gaining
fortune and fame. That's what it means to be like Mike, who—along with, perhaps, Bill Cosby's Dr. Cliff Huxtable—was one of the first African-Americans to truly be a star for black America and white America equally. It's what Mark Goldston was promising to consumers with his sneakers, in what was the heyday of sports footwear. For white kids, “movin' and groovin' like Mike” meant borrowing some black cool—in that way, just wearing the sneaks were a stand-in for the dunk. At $100 a pair, they were also an early version, for both blacks and whites, of bling—a sign of flushness. And it's why, in a way, the sneakers themselves, especially the white-and-red Air Jordans, kept squeaky clean, became a status symbol of the streets, of wealth and power, something that teenagers famously killed each other over. (In a coda matching our times, the Air Jordan and its sneaker contemporaries are now offered their own shelves and accent lighting in SoHo's museum-like, hipster-curated boutiques.)

With my dunking deadline nearing, and desperate to grab any spare half inch I could find, I began wondering, just as Mark Goldston once did: Could something as simple as a change in sneakers make me more like Mike? I had just learned that I was genetically deficient in the fast-twitch-muscle department. How easy would it be to buy my way out of my natural physical inheritance?

Advertisers have long peddled potential. Whether they're selling weight-loss programs or penis enlargement, companies aim to convince consumers they can remake their bodies. The only thing many baby boomers remember of their otherwise forgettable 1950s comic books were the Charles Atlas advertisements on the back covers that depicted a scene at the beach: “Hey, Skinny…Yer ribs are showing!” a beefy bully shouts at an adolescent standing next to a bikini-clad girl. Two panels later, after the boy has subscribed to the Atlas regimen, he returns to the beach to kick the bully's ass. “Oh, Joe! You
are
a real he-man after all,” the girl tells him. In the bottom half of the ad appeared a picture of Charles Atlas, flexing a biceps.

People used to laugh at my skinny 97-pound body. I was ashamed to strip for sports or for a swim. Girls made fun of me behind my back. Then I discovered my bodybuilding system, “Dynamic Tension.” It made me such a complete specimen of manhood that I hold the title “The World's Most Perfectly Developed Man.”

It was no coincidence that the insides of these comics were dedicated to wondrous tales of transformations, from weaklings to superheroes. There was Robert Grayson, the diminutive son of a Jewish scientist who flees Earth with his family during the rise of the Nazis, only to return as Marvel Boy, with Uranian powers to fight baddies. And there was Steve Rogers, the scrawny offspring of Irish immigrants, who, injected with a serum by the U.S. military, becomes the unstoppable physical specimen known as Captain America. These transformations often involved little hard work—a radioactive spider here, a super-serum there. With the Atlas ads pictured on the backs of comics for nearly 50 years, the implicit lesson for generations of lightweight introverts was that they, too, could undergo a transformation.

On a
sunny, unseasonably warm February day in 1989 in Atlanta, Mark Goldston, accompanied by thumping music,
bounded onto a stage at the Sporting Goods Manufacturing Association meeting, the world's big sneaker trade show, to tell convention-goers about the invention that would secure his name in the annals of sneaker history. Even with the Dr. Detroit project scrapped, Goldston was convinced he could apply the principles of marketing to sneakers by
marrying the technology craze to the high-top. That year,
Back to the Future, Part II
ruled the cineplex and Apple had recently released its first portable computer. Keen to the zeitgeist, footwear companies started using “visible technology” in their sneakers—little plastic portals that purported to give a window onto the performance-changing Asics gel and the Nike air. Goldston had already patented the Energy Return System, a design of cheap plastic tubes that promised to release energy with each footstrike; he had overseen the development of a sneaker whose color could be changed with the insertion of a cartridge; and he had devised a campaign around honeycomb padding found in the seats of the space shuttle.

“I wanted to make something the Jetsons would wear,” he says. The sneaker Goldston would present that day in Atlanta took its inspiration from a pair of his wife's Scandinavian buckleless ski boots that had a built-in device that sucked in air to keep the boot snug. Goldston sketched out the shoe with Reebok designers, ordering that a self-contained pump in the shape of a mini basketball be placed on the outside of the tongue. The prototype used rubber bladders made by a Massachusetts blood-pressure-cuff company.

“The chairman wanted to call it ActivAir,” Goldston says with a snort. “I was like, ‘They have a whole company based on ‘air' ”—Nike—“ ‘and it'd just sound like we're copying them.'

“I suggested ‘The Pump,' and someone says, ‘That's what women call their high-heeled shoes,' and I said, ‘Do you really think fifteen-year-old boys will know or care what women call their heels?' ”

The shoe industry began buzzing about the Reebok Pump and this young sneaker wizard. Advertisements with Dominique Wilkins followed, leaving the vague impression that the shoe would increase powers of levitation. Dee Brown, of the Boston Celtics, would famously stoop down during the 1991 NBA Slam Dunk Contest to pump up his Reeboks before attempting one of his winning jams.

The price was set at $170, making it the most expensive mass-produced
shoe on the market. “If we're going to do something, we've got to shock the system,” Goldston remembers telling his colleagues. “For Chrissakes, we've got a Union Jack for a logo. What is that?” The high price for The Pump was also a sales gimmick to get consumers to settle happily for at least a $75 shoe. “This was going to be like the Mercedes SL in the showroom, the one that sells all the E-Classes,” says Goldston, using an analogy that suggests how well he's done for himself. But the Pump was a phenomenon in its own right. “Guess what? We sold the SLs at E-Class volumes.”

The Pump became a status symbol, a suburban kid's attempt at seeming urban and black and rich at the same time. “Pump it up!” was the unwittingly masturbatory cri de coeur shouted on blacktops across the country. But no one took the scientific claims with anything other than guffaws; the Pump carried all the seriousness of a walking elementary school science fair experiment.

Goldston, who had become known, somewhat derisively, as the
High Priest of High Tech, soon left Reebok, in a squabble over sneaker performance. He moved the family to California and took over L.A. Gear, where his major accomplishment, in another techno-twist, was installing lights in the heels of sneakers. Eventually he would abandon shoes altogether to do Internet startup work. But the thing that haunted him—as much as anything haunted a guy who seemed to float from one corner office to another—was the Dr. Detroit project, and his inability to find his holy grail.