Year of the Dunk (7 page)

Soon it was Jamal's turn. He rolled his neck back and forth and peered up at the Vertec. Then he went into a half squat and rolled his way up: 18 inches. About my vertical, except he had at least 120 pounds on me.

Lougas used the stick like a croupier to reset the rods.

Next up was Tommy White, a handsome six-foot-tall, 210-pound cornerback who had graduated from Grambling two years earlier. He had told me he'd spent the last two years as a vegetarian while dedicating his life to working out and practicing yoga. He stepped beneath the Vertec and rocked down and up, down and up, down and up, and each time I was sure he would jump. Finally, he exploded into the air with a wail and snapped the rods.

“Thirty-eight inches!” Lougas boomed. “Now let's get forty! Get forty!”

The other athletes, none of whom had been paying attention, were now suddenly into it.

“C'mon, bro!” shouted one.

“Get on up!” shouted another.

Forty inches would turn heads among scouts. Calvin Johnson, the star wide receiver for the Detroit Lions known as Megatron, had notched a 46-inch vertical at the NFL combine.

Again, White went into his up-and-down, springlike gyrations, as if he were trying to fake us all out. Again, he yelped as he heaved upward. Once more: 38 inches.

I thought White would be pleased, but he looked deflated.

“I could do better,” he told me.

That seemed to be a theme, to a man. Each of the athletes I interviewed claimed to have performed better in his own workouts, at his own gym. Disappointment lingered in the air, pressed out through the cold mechanism of assessment.

Presiding over this mass of men was Coach Stephen Austin, a small, trim tyrant. “We are guests at this facility,” he told the players, assembled on bended knee before him. “If when I get to the restroom I see as much as a piece of tissue on the ground, there's going to be trouble. Demeanor, focus—we evaluate everything; it's as important as your athletic ability.” Privately, I very much doubted that anything much mattered other than those “measurables” of athleticism. “This is serious business,” Austin continued. “This is a day you're going to remember for a long, long time.”

That part I believed. Besides participating in the jumping and sprinting tests and some football drills, before men in clipboards
and polo shirts who unfeelingly jotted down notes that could shape their lives, the players had to strip down, one by one, and stand in front of a video camera, whose operator slowly panned up and down their bodies, front and back. There was a peculiar cast to the whole thing, of young men, almost all black, being examined by a group of largely white men, of being poked and prodded, and of being told to strip to their underwear so that a young white man could videotape their physiques. On the auction block, slaves had to, among other things, jump for their would-be buyers. A Sargent test before Sargent was even born, and another act of humiliation, surely, in a life of humiliation and worse. Beyond the degradation, it was meant, along with looking at teeth and musculature, as a crude way to test their potential. The film clips, I was told, would eventually be uploaded to the Internet, sortable by player, and I imagined team executives sitting before the glow of their computers, in a dark room, gazing at the physique of one man and then another.

At a lunch buffet reserved for the scouts and NFL staff, I started chatting with Austin. I asked him where he had been a coach. No, he told me, he was merely acting the role. “I'm a businessman,” he said. “I play many parts.” He had started his company in the late 1980s, one of many to scout out college kids as football became big business. “My big innovation,” he said—and here I waited for something profound, some insight into the mix of qualitative and quantitative examination—“was pre-registration.” I glanced from side to side as I tried to figure out if I was missing something. Evidently, little had been tabulated about the prior experience of the players—what college football conferences they had played in, for instance. So he kept and built up data so that players could be compared as apples to apples. I didn't quite understand, since a vertical is a vertical is a vertical, but I think his point was that the consequence of all this pre-registration was that he could distribute tables to general managers and football teams.

“You ever really read what I send you?” he told me he once asked Ozzie Newsome, a big man, a former football player, who had become one of the few black general managers in the league. They were in Newsome's office, and like a cloud passing on a sunny day, Newsome pushed himself, sitting in a swivel chair, to the side, and gestured toward a shelf of binders that were behind him.

“All the time.”

Austin told this story with obvious relish: Newsome's Baltimore Ravens had become Super Bowl champions only a couple of weeks earlier, and Newsome had been credited with building the franchise through savvy scouting.

Evidently the key was pre-registration.

At the end of the day, the players assembled again on bended knees before Austin. They had carefully aligned themselves at midfield, between the hash marks, as they had been instructed by Lougas, one of Austin's underlings. “If you don't want to make Coach Austin mad, do as I tell you,” he whispered to the athletes. These would-be players, it was clear to me, would do anything, small as it might be, to move to the super-regional. I knew Jamal Carter wasn't going to make it—I saw him icing his hamstring, which he had popped during the 40-yard dash. And Tommy White had rubbed Coach Austin the wrong way by taking a little longer than the others to get into a three-point stance before starting his dash: “What is this guy, a prima donna?” Austin shouted to no one in particular. Tommy compounded matters by complaining that the officials had not recorded his correct time—he insisted that he was consistently faster. (Of the dozen or so players I interviewed, only one, I would later
learn, made it past the Houston event. He was invited to a Washington Redskins minicamp before getting cut.)

“You need to have a second dream,” Austin told them. Then they heard a couple of spiels. An NFL officer told them about officiating opportunities. “Whether you make the NFL or not, there are other job opportunities so you can be involved in the game,” she told them, touching on the necessity of clock operators to a group still unready to recognize the shortcomings of their own potential. “Officials maintain the integrity of the game. And you can be officiating the rest of your lives.” The players remained politely quiet, even if many of them appeared to be staring into space. And then a chief with the Navy SEALs, a sponsor of the regional combines, spoke warmly about military camaraderie. He was tall, broad-shouldered, curly-haired, and wearing camouflage. “You guys have what the SEALs are looking for,” he said. As the group finally disbanded—“We'll call you if we want you to come to Dallas,” the site of the next round of tryouts, Austin told them—several of the players came up to the SEAL chief. “How much does it pay?” they wanted to know.

There was something admirable, touchingly sincere, and maybe a little desperate about these men. Most of us surrender our rockstar dreams at an early age. They still wanted to see what they could make of themselves even as the realities of the world bore down on them. Just as I was packing up to leave, a player came up to me, a slender, muscular kid. He wanted me to take a look at a DVD he had prepared of his football highlights; he hoped, I realized, that I was an agent or maybe a scout—another white dude with a notepad who might offer a bit of help. No second dream—not yet, at least.

Dec. 26, 242 days left:
Back to 188 on the scale. Oy gevalt. No big surprise: Christmas Eve dinner of cuminy pork loin in cognac cream sauce with pears; Brussels sprouts broiled with
onion and bacon; Linzer torte, baked by yours truly, with fat dollops of whipped cream. Why should I run from my Austro-Hungarian destiny? Squatting 120 pounds, more than twice my starting weight
.

Progress report:
Setbacks. A New Year's Eve scooter accident—braking suddenly on a rain-slick road—left me tumbling along the concrete like a stuntman; I was largely uninjured, save a bloody elbow and a bruised left hip. And then, three days ago, I tweaked my back while squatting. I wasn't lifting much—roughly the weight of a small woman lying across my shoulders—but I'm laying off the weights for a couple of weeks.

I
n 2003, Malcolm Burrows, a professor at Cambridge who specializes in the nervous system of locusts, was leading some of his students in field research in the lovely English coastal town of Wells-next-the-Sea when he decided to ask them to capture some froghoppers, also known as the spittlebug for the frothy liquid in which their babies immerse themselves. They are wet, incontinent creatures. “There are constantly little drops of water coming off them,” Burrows told me. “So when you're in the forests of northern Canada and it feels wet, that's because they're peeing on you all the time.” Burrows had read recently about the jumping exploits of fleas, and he wondered how the common froghopper, which he had noticed quickly flitting about, stacked up. Students being students, they obliged. Armed with narrow-holed butterfly nets, they managed to capture some of the bugs. At the lab, Burrows put one of the froghoppers in front of a high-speed camera that captured 500 frames per second. The first frame spotted the insect; the rest were blank. After he upgraded to a 5,000-frames-per-second camera, only five frames caught the creature.

It turned out that with a combination of an ingenious catapulting mechanism and an advanced energy-storage-and-release system,
the froghopper had jumped incredibly far incredibly quickly. “Froghoppers have relatively short and light hind legs that are powered by huge jumping muscles and
a novel locking mechanism that allows force generated before the jump to be released rapidly,” Burrows later wrote in the journal
Nature
. When it prepares to jump, the froghopper pulls its legs in and they lock in place by means of Velcro-like pads between them. As the massive muscles slowly contract, the insect stores the potential energy in its very skeleton, in a pair of curved structures shaped liked archery bows. That skeleton is composed, in part, of a rubberlike material called
resilin
, known for being the world's most efficient elastic material. Before each jump, the skeleton bends and bends and then—
thwap!
—it releases, the legs extend, and the froghopper goes flying.

The froghopper, Burrows explained, combined and exploited the best biomechanics of other creatures, making it a world-champion jumper. “There are two basic body designs for jumping that enable many animals to escape from predators, to increase their speed of locomotion or to launch into flight,” Burrows wrote in his
Nature
article. “Animals with long legs (bush babies, kangaroos and frogs, for example) have a levering power that enables them to use less force to jump the same distance as short-legged animals of comparable mass, whereas those with short legs must rely on the release of stored energy in a rapid catapult action.” (Put us warm-blooded humans in the bush babies' category: That's why champion high jumpers tend to have long legs, to use as giant levers as they flip themselves skyward.)

The froghopper has “developed the most amazing mechanisms for jumping,” Burrows tells me. The froghoppers exert a force roughly 400 times their body weight on the ground, about three times as much as your average flea, and 150 to 200 times as much as a human. Another way of thinking about it: If an adult human could exert that kind of force when jumping,
she could clear the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

To visit Burrows, I boarded a 9:45 train one bright weekday morning at London's King's Cross Station. It was a clear day, recalling the London “spread out in the sun / Its
postal districts packed like squares of wheat” that Philip Larkin described in his train-ride poem “The Whitsun Weddings.” Rebecca and I were visiting England chiefly to see her brother Ben and his family. Besides novel-writing and teaching, Ben has carved out an essayist's life as the go-to guy among English periodicals for something literary-minded about the sporting scene. Forty years old, and the man can still throw it down. But what with the responsibilities about the house and his teaching obligations and the shortage of basketball rims around London, he seldom finds himself on a court nowadays. Even so, when he and I play—I in the best shape of my life, he in average shape for him—he can still cruise by me as if I've stopped to lace my sneakers.

Eleven minutes after pulling out of King's Cross, I saw my first horse in pasture. Happy horse, happy pasture, very England. “All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense / of being in a hurry, gone,” wrote Larkin, looking out on a similar landscape, and sitting there I felt a momentary reprieve—a sun-basking exhalation—from the constant haste of my upward rush. As we sped by the backs of houses, the tableaux had the distant ring of familiarity for me. As a 13-year-old trailing my academic parents, and then, later, as a graduate student myself, I had done my time in England. An hour later, after the train pulled into Cambridge station, I stepped out to the meaty, buttery smell of a platform vendor's Cornish pasties, and long-suppressed memories of execrable English public-school food wafted through the olfactories of my mind. I walked up the High Street, past a kebab joint with menus in English, French, Spanish, and Korean plastered to the windows, and across the way, a World War I memorial—a
dutiful young soldier, forever striding with rucksack and rifle, a grim, defiant expression wiped across his thin-lipped face.

Burrows's office was in the zoology department, just off the sort of pretty, winding cobblestone street that English university towns do so well. The shelves were jammed with vials, each containing a dead insect, as if suspended in mid–buzzy leap. I had come hoping to learn something about the elusive mechanics of jumping, and about why some species had been selected for their leaping ability. For years, Burrows had performed locust surgery, perfecting, like one of those artists who paint landscapes on a grain of rice, superfine movements with forceps to implant electrodes on nerve cells only 30 microns in diameter, about the size of
a very fine human hair. But promoted to department chair, where he had to busy himself with the muck of academic administration—faculty complaints about parking permits and the like—he fell out of practice. By 2003, his best days of locust surgery behind him, he decided he needed something new and engaging. That's what brought him to the froghopper.

The insect was selected for its jumping prowess either because jumping is a more efficient way to get from one tree to the next than crawling down and back up again, or because it's a very fast way to “get away from nasty things that want to eat them,” Burrows told me. Jumping gets you out of a bad situation faster than flying, which requires the beating of wings to take off—imagine how long it takes a helicopter to get its blades up to speed before takeoff.

How fast is the froghopper's jumping action?
An average human being's top reaction time is 200 milliseconds—that's how long we need, minimum, to recognize and dodge a baseball headed for our face or, put more poetically, to identify emotions in the countenance of a fellow human. The froghopper can jump in about one millisecond. So fast, Burrows told me, that something beyond muscle contraction must explain its jumping ability.

I was interviewing Burrows at his desk, which is tucked beneath
a window in one corner of the lab. In front of me, in some vials, sat some insects. They were froghoppers, he said. Still alive. He had captured them the previous evening with his eight-year-old grandson in his backyard garden. He took down a butterfly net—a short-handled one with an old, beaten canvas bag attached, its holes minuscule—and, in a brief hand ballet, gracefully whooshed it this way and that along the ground in a demonstration.

“May I tap them?” I asked, nodding at the vials, as if I were a kid wondering about banging on an aquarium glass.

“Of course,” he said.

I tapped—and not much happened. Just like at the aquarium.

Minus the specs, maybe it was the Clark Kent of insects: mild-mannered, vast powers concealed.

The discovery of the froghopper's jumping talent and technique put Burrows's career on a new trajectory, so to speak. His mind captured by the ingenious jumping mechanisms, he started to look at how other insects measured up as he sought to secure the froghopper's title of highest jumper. He filled books and binders with notes—the spine of one reads, simply, “Jumping Cockroaches.” In his lab, he set up a mini-theater to measure and record the insects' jumping. They were placed in a small glass box, brightly lit by a half-dozen or so lamps, as if on a stage. A foot away sat a video camera capable of taking 100,000 frames per second.

He showed me some of the films. They were beautiful. A lacewing tumbling through the air, in floaty slow motion, and an exquisitely defined silhouette of a praying mantis, perched at one end of its stage as it prepared to leap—and then did, its long abdomen curling forward in a show of fingernail-sized core strength. It was the twenty-first-century equivalent of the Muybridge photos. I could have watched for hours. It was this film work that clued Burrows in to the coordinated mechanisms that explained the insect's spectacularly quick jumping ability.

When I saw him, Burrows was excited, in his modest way, about a forthcoming article in
Science
(something most scientists hope for their entire careers), about a juvenile insect that jumped with the use of gears, the first detected in nature. The insect had developed a mechanism of interlocking gears, like those in an old wristwatch, to make sure that its legs sprang simultaneously.

I asked him if an individual insect could perfect technique, if it had the smarts and creativity to improve what it was born with. If, through practice or insight, it could stretch the evolutionarily determined radius of its species' abilities.

“I shouldn't think so,” he said.

As I was leaving, Burrows asked what I knew about the Fosbury Flop. Only that it's the standard high-jump technique, I said. He smiled a small, knowing smile. As a young post-doc out of Scotland, Burrows had been doing research at Oregon when he decided to attend one of the school's famed track-and-field meets. It was there, at a track meet in 1967, that Burrows saw a pale whippet of a man, from the state school down the road, using an unorthodox, nearly backward high-jumping technique, flinging his head and shoulders back-first, his belly to the sky, to clear an ever-higher bar. This man, in short, was doing what none of his prized insects seemed capable of—jumping beyond his apparent mechanical limits with sheer ingenuity and unorthodox technique. The man was Dick Fosbury.

From the armswing to the stretch of the Achilles, jumping is surprisingly complicated for such a simple maneuver. Biomechanically speaking, the goal of the jump is to raise the center of mass following foot-to-ground contact. So the upward force at the feet has to be
greater than body weight to produce upward acceleration and liftoff. Of course, Sargent was right: Whatever force you generate in the first stage of the jump is followed by the decelerating effect of gravity while you're in the air. Remember, you can't add force once you're airborne, because your feet are no longer touching the ground. “As our upward velocity and consequent shortening velocity of the muscles increase, the ability of the muscles to produce force decreases,” Arthur Chapman writes in his textbook
Biomechanical Analysis of Fundamental Human Movements
. “In this sense
jumping is a self-defeating activity.” (Good old Arthur, always there with an encouraging word.)

Force, you might recall from basic physics, is mass times acceleration. A big dude like me needs more force to generate an equal amount of acceleration as a little guy. Acceleration is key to jumping—it's why Todd Wright is fond of saying that he wants his players to push through the ground
as quickly as possible
. And that quickness comes from those fast-twitch muscles. That's where the plyometrics and the weightlifting—the sweat equity of this endeavor—are meant to help. Stronger muscles, recruited more quickly, mean more force applied to the ground, faster. Stretching is crucial here, too: Just as you can get more force from a hammer if you swing it over a greater arc, you can push through the ground with greater force the higher up you can bring your knees when bounding toward a leaping jump. The bigger the motion, the more opportunity to apply force: Work is force times distance, and power is work divided by time. “
The less ankle flexibility you have, for example, the shorter the arc through which you will be able to apply driving force against the ground,” John Jerome writes in
Staying Supple
, his treatise on flexibility. “With a briefer arc, you'll expend more energy to attain the same speed.”

Directing myself upward as efficiently as possible will also require some old-fashioned improvement of my biomechanics. Newton's
third law of motion holds, famously, that “action and reaction are equal and opposite.” The recoil of a fired handgun, for example. To get a sense of this,
get on your bathroom scale and quickly raise your arms above your head. The scale, you'll notice, will spin rapidly as if you've grown in weight. In effect, you're jumping, even if your feet haven't left ground. That's because the muscular force required to push up your arms is also pushing the rest of your body down toward the earth. The reverse, of course, is also true: Get on the scale with your hands above your head. Now rapidly drop your hands by your sides. The scale, as your arms move through the air, will lighten. You're falling, now, as your body pushes force skyward. Thus, the first lesson of biomechanics: The armswing is an important part of the jump. (These things have been examined closely: Jody Jensen, a University of Texas exercise science professor, titled her PhD thesis “
Intersegmental dynamics: Contribution of the armswing to propulsion mechanics in the vertical jump.” Seriously.)

With roughly eight months to go in my dunking year, fundamental questions involving the physics of explosion remained ahead of me: Should I, for instance, undertake the running one-foot leap or the quick two-foot plant-and-jump? Some dunkers, like Jordan, are known for their running leaps; others, like Amar'e Stoudemire, a forward for the Knicks, typically jump off two feet. That difference gets at the idiosyncrasy of human movement even as we're trying to reach peak performance: Why, for example, is there not a single, obvious way for a baseball player to hold a bat as he awaits a pitch? Professional golfers talk about tinkering with their swing, as if there isn't an empirically, precisely correct style. When I played Little League baseball on Manhattan's Upper West Side, sandlot fields where dads tossed out kitty litter to soak up unwanted puddles and where both teams carefully walked before each game to pick up shards of broken glass, I modeled my stance after that of Darryl Strawberry, my hero on the New York Mets, who pulled his
tall, skinny body in tight, like he was stuck in a crowded elevator. He held his bat up and back and erect, close to his shoulder, as if he were in a color guard, bearing the American flag, churning the bat in small, menacing little vertical circles as he awaited delivery of the pitch: the straw that stirred the drink. That stance was just about the opposite of the pose struck by his teammate Lee Mazzilli, he of the matinee-idol looks, who trailed his bat, limply, almost indifferently, behind him, hanging it just parallel to the ground. He won quicker bat speed, perhaps, because he didn't have to bother dropping his wrists as he swung. But he lacked Strawberry's power. A friend of mine, a baseball scout, tells me that the variety of stances and pitching motions comes down to the fact that “
bodies are different.” “Tall pitchers throw differently than short pitchers,” he said. “Guys with quick arms—looser tendons, better fast-twitch muscles, et cetera—have different mechanics than guys with slower arms.” That must be part of it: “Nature and human life are as
various as our several constitutions,” Thoreau wrote. But I suspect that body movement is like language and accent: You wring out, like a sponge, the steady stream of material and activity in which you soak. The idiosyncrasies of body movement are true in everyday life, too—far removed from the peak moments of hitting a ball or going up for a dunk. Even in cases with an agreed-upon, ideal, set way of doing things, we humans naturally deviate: In elementary school we painstakingly learn to write in print and script, along a sheet of horizontal dotted lines; still, as if we had fallen from a Tower of Babel of penmanship, we have among us a thousand ways of writing (to the extent we handwrite at all anymore). If Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man exemplified what our ideal proportions and postures ought to be, we rarely resemble his noble form. You can tell that just by looking at the postures or sitting positions of any dozen people on the subway. (Do you cross your legs or not? If so, right over left or left over right? At the knee or at the ankle?) The sloppiness
of human idiosyncrasy doesn't help when you're trying to dunk a basketball. And all my kinks that Polly and Jamie had identified many months before had to be slowly unraveled. Physical habits had to be unlearned as I rebuilt myself. Not such an easy task.