Year of the Dunk (19 page)

The Dr. Detroit misadventure had stuck with his kids, too. Adam and Ryan, the twins already shooting balls at age four, had become bona fide athletes. They had worked ceaselessly at improving their hops through school while leading their Van Nuys prep school team to an end-of-season title. Sharp, handsome, self-confident—they look like they stepped out of a
GQ
photo shoot—they even made it as walk-ons on the USC basketball team. But they knew playing basketball wasn't in their long-term future, and by 2009, still enthralled
with the idea of a technological route to the rim that would appeal to the average player, they convinced their father to join them in a new version of the Dr. Detroit project. They were all of 22 years old. After sketching out more than a hundred designs—the sneaker exec versions of Leonardo da Vincis—the family settled on one with eight springs in the forefoot of the shoe, in a nest of material similar to an egg carton,
housed, like an Oreo cookie, between two plates.

The kids knew—they had learned from the best—that at the end of the day the shoe business was really a marketing game. And so they went about selling these cheap-to-produce, made-in-China high-tops with their kitchen-table technology as some kind of space-age scientific breakthrough. As if to confirm the value of the springs, they set a high price point—$300, just as their father had done a generation earlier for The Pump.

They decided to sell only online, to avoid the distribution costs that come with brick-and-mortars. They came up with a name, cleared with lawyers, inspired by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories: Athletic Propulsion Laboratories, meant to evoke both jerseys and lab coats. And in a bit of marketing moxie, they patented their “Load 'N Launch technology,” basically a fancy term for the spring near the front of the sneaker. The sneakers, they would explain on their website, are “uniquely designed to capture the maximum amount of energy through the compression caused by exerting pressure on the forefoot and then releasing the energy through the propulsion and liftoff stage to increase vertical leap.” The shoes would “provide an instant advantage to virtually everyone who wears the product and engages in jumping on a basketball court.” They commissioned studies that purportedly showed the sneakers added as many as three inches to a person's vertical—just by dint of lacing them on. It was the jumping equivalent of liposuction, or Botox—an instant upgrade.

The strategy paid off big-time when the NBA, in October 2010,
announced it would ban the shoes because “under league rules,
players may not wear any shoe during a game that creates an undue competitive advantage.” The Associated Press, ESPN, Yahoo! and Sports Illustrated picked up the news. The APL website crashed. The Goldston clan was ecstatic: The NBA ban appeared to offer authentication of their claims. The Goldstons trumpeted the decision in news releases of their own. Visitors to the Athletic Propulsion Labs website—the ones who could log on—found a picture of the shoe stamped with the words “Banned by the NBA.” “
It's the ultimate validation,” one of the twins told a Los Angeles television news reporter.

What's bad enough for the NBA is good enough for me: Giddy at the prospect of an easy couple of inches, I ordered a pair of the Concept 2 APL sneakers. This was my best chance, I thought, to fix my genetic foibles. I would essentially buy myself some talent. When the plain cardboard box arrived several weeks later, I greedily opened it and gazed at my chariots of fire—black, with bolts of electric blue and neon green and yellow. But I couldn't bring myself to put them on. I was terrified that they wouldn't work, that, in the end, they would be ordinary, earthbound high-tops. We never want to dash our own fantasies. Rebecca has declared that she wouldn't want to go to Hawaii because it cannot possibly be as awesome as she's built it up in her mind. Or maybe it's like being in high school and never mustering the courage to ask out your crush. It's the terror of what would happen if you confess your feelings. You can't be turned down if you never ask. You keep the fantasy alive. And so I put the sneakers back in their box, in a corner of the living room; if they didn't contain magical powers, they could keep that secret to themselves awhile longer.

It ended up taking me a few weeks to pull together the nerve to test my thunder-bolted new jumping shoes. I decided, finally, that the shoes wouldn't be of any help if they weren't tied to my
feet. So early one summer evening, I laced them up courtside and warmed up, getting comfortable in my sneakers and loosening up my body. By now I knew these rims intimately, like a ship captain knows the feel of her tiller. I knew just how much rim I could grab, and with what authority. And, finally, after thousands of jumps, I knew myself. I was hoping for the dunker's equivalent of Dorothy's ruby slippers. I'd only have to stomp on the ground three times, and then—wham!—the shoes would take me home. I expected some of the “dramatic sensation of lift” APL promised in its promotional material as I flew up to the rim. I gave it a whirl, first with no ball, then with one.

Nothing. Not. A. Thing. They didn't help at all. I found myself reaching no higher on the rim than I had before. I didn't feel any spring. I tried them again each night that week. The company says that “certain athletes have found that the more they wear Athletic Propulsion Labs shoes and understand what it [
sic
] can instantly do for them, the more benefit they seem to derive.” Forget for a moment that that makes no sense—what kind of instant benefit takes time?—I was finding that compared to leaping in my plain old Nike high-tops I was getting no higher. Unlike Dorothy's, my new slippers were not taking me where I wished to go. I felt like a fool, having put store in a fantasy. I had asked the girl out, and she had indeed turned me down, like a bedspread.

I wondered about the NBA ban that started the Athletic Propulsion Labs craze in the first place. The company's website has a section titled “Science of Jumpology” that pulses with phrases like “the resultant effect” and “integrated response curve,” but had the league actually tested the APL shoes? Tim Frank, the league's head of basketball communications, told me that no player or team ever actually came to the league with a request to use the shoes. League officials had met with Athletic Propulsion Labs at the company's request; company officials made claims about how their shoes could
improve jumping ability; the league went ahead and banned the sneaker.

Athletic Propulsion Labs asserts that “independent testing” at an unnamed U.S. university verified the company's data: According to the company's website, the university researchers found that eleven of the dozen participants “
jumped higher instantly” in the APL shoes than in conventional sneakers. Could it be that the shoes were magical, and it was I who was defective? I asked John Porcari, a professor of exercise physiology at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse who tests advertising claims by exercise equipment manufacturers, for advice. He told me to ask APL for a copy of its scientific study. Examine how it was designed, he said: Did the researchers randomize the sequence in which jumpers tested the sneakers? Did the wearers jump first in conventional sneakers, giving them time to warm up before trying the APL ones? “You can design a test that gives you certain results,” Porcari said.

He added: “The company should have nothing to hide. They should want to give it to you.”

“I'm in world-class shape,” Mark Goldston told me, when I reached him, mid-workout, at his Beverly Hills home. He himself had once argued that Americans work out as part of a “
narcissistic” urge to look good—not exactly profound, but at least a bit of candor from a sneaker executive. Now 58, Goldston works out nearly three hours a day. “I've got eight percent body fat!” he said, with some giddiness.

He was charmed by my dunking ambition, and immediately nostalgic for the great dunkers of his youth. He was a big Dr. J fan. And he told me about the search for his holy grail. I asked him what
made him so sure the Athletic Propulsion Labs sneakers could help their wearers jump higher. He recited the information on the website about the stunning test results.

“Could I could see the raw data for myself?” I asked.

“Sorry, that's not possible,” he said. “The university made us sign a nondisclosure agreement.” The university—a “leading West Coast university” was as specific as he was willing to be—“told us they can't take part in ‘commercialization' of a product—they can't be seen to endorse a product,” he continued.

“Well, how about you at least send me a copy of the report with the names of the university and researchers redacted?”

“Can't do that, either. It'd violate the terms of the nondisclosure agreement.”

As a newspaper reporter, I've run across instances of companies forcing university researchers to sign nondisclosure agreements—everyone from tobacco companies to solar energy corporations that want to suppress data or present it in a favorable way—but never the other way around. Mark Goldston at least conceded that the NBA probably didn't undertake its own tests, instead relying on claims the company itself made based on research it had commissioned—except, of course, the company wasn't willing to release the actual research results.

Before we got off the phone, I shot him one last question: So, if these shoes had been around when you were 20 or so, could you have graduated from a volleyball to a basketball? Could you have closed that two-inch gap?

Either because he's a true believer or a very savvy marketing man, he didn't skip a beat: “There's zero question in my mind that I would have been able to dunk.”

July 25, 31 days left:
My fruit fast lasted exactly 35 hours. Who doesn't have an appetite for apples? I refuse to apologize for eating a banana. Besides: a piece in the
Journal of the American Medical Association,
brought to me by my trusty nutritionist, Rebecca, showed that increased fruit consumption lowers body weight, because all that fiber makes us feel full and improves our metabolism. Shred that, Wolverine!

I
n the months following my cancer diagnosis, several friends privately revealed to me problems with their testicles, partly to express empathy, which I didn't really need, partly to get advice, which I couldn't really give. These revelations were usually in the form of phone calls, sometimes from people I hadn't heard from in years. The conversations started with some pleasantries and then, invariably, the tone would turn more confidential. “Listen, I want to ask you about something,” a friend began. “What did the swelling feel like?” He was sure one of his testicles was bigger than the other. Another thought he detected a bulge after the family dog had leapt onto his lap. Following my treatment, I wrote an account of my
cancer experience in the newspaper. One reader emailed about his testicular pain after sex. “Cancer?” he asked.

I was reminded of this as word got around about my dunk project. Friends of friends approached me, as if I were a therapist, to tell me about how badly they had once wanted to dunk and how, even now, they wondered whether they ever could. One, a guy like me in his early thirties, told me animatedly that he had long dreamt of slamming the ball home, and videotaping it to prove his manhood. As a comeback to just about anything, he could whip out the imaginary tape: “I could just say, ‘Oh, yeah? Well, take a look at this!' ” Now, stuck with a table-waiting job, he told me that the couple of hours he spends working out are the best of his week. “I live for that time,” he said. He's a married man, and I found this admission a little sad. Another friend of a friend, a Mexican-American who grew up poor, to parents who were cotton pickers, in one of the
colonias
of rural South Texas, told me about his own brief dunking past. As a senior in high school he was thin as a cornstalk—6′1″ and 130 pounds (“when wet,” he says)—but athletic as hell. He played on the school tennis team and had to do so many jumping drills to improve his agility that he was eventually able to dunk. He told me dunking was a better feeling than winning at tennis. A single moment of absolute thrill, and I wondered whether I would ever feel it.

Given how much of my life was now given over to it, jumping became an obvious thing to talk about at parties. “Tell them about your dunking!” an Austin hostess would say. Then, somewhat timidly at first—I know, I know, this sounds silly, I would mumble—and then, with more confidence, I would hold forth. “The science of jumping?” someone would inevitably say, while giving a little hop. “You must, you just must, study Baryshnikov,” said another, delicate in her movements. “I insist.”

At one such shindig, a woman in her 40s was just explaining to me that her husband, a young, handsome doctor, had spent that
very morning at the Mormon temple, baptizing the dead, when the host popped over and asked how the dunking was coming.

I said it was coming along, but I was uncertain about my chances.

“Have you tried jumping over hemp?” the Mormon woman chimed in.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“I mean, a hemp plant,” she said, as if that would make things much clearer.

She saw that I was totally confused.

“Suzuki says that to jump higher, the ninjas used to jump over a hemp plant each day.”

“Who is Suzuki?”

“He's the famous violinist,” she said.

Why would a violinist care about jumping?

Suzuki, she explained, had written a book about nurturing talent, and in it he recalled the habit of the ninjas of jumping, daily, over a slow-growing hemp plant. As it grew, imperceptibly, their leaps steadily, quietly, grew higher with it.

The story put me in mind of my 12-year-old, book-obsessed nephew, Dovid, and his advice about jumping higher: Jump over a stack of books; each day add a book to your stack. This was the Jewish version of the ninja tactic, apparently.

“Can I legally even get a hemp plant?” I wondered aloud.

And then the Mormon doctor, clean-cut, with beautifully trimmed black hair, wearing a white polo shirt and khaki shorts, leaned in: “I hear that if you ask where you can pick up some basil at a head shop, they can help you out.”