Year of the Dunk (9 page)

After that season, with ABA owners keen to shore up their finances, the league merged with the more established NBA. Beyond gaining new franchises, the older league, whose official logo, embroidered into all its jerseys, was the silhouette of a player in the very earthbound act of dribbling, was basically purchasing the rights to Erving—who had led the ABA in scoring for three seasons—and his modern, leaping style of play. Still, the NBA continued to have
misgivings about promoting the dunk. It discontinued the slam-dunk contest, and, in these pre-Magic, pre-Michael years, the league couldn't shake a taint of the moribund. But on a November night in 1979 at Kansas City Municipal Auditorium, when I was about 10 months old, Darryl Dawkins changed all that. Thirty-eight seconds into the third quarter in a game against the Kansas City Kings, Dawkins drove two steps past his defender and dunked the ball so hard that the Plexiglas backboard shattered. Ever the showman, Dawkins, who played for the Philadelphia 76ers, told sportswriters after the game that he had been
possessed by a “chocolate thunder.” “I could feel it surging through my body, fighting to get out,” he explained. “I had no control.”

Several weeks later, Dawkins did it again, in a game against San Antonio, essentially crumpling the rim as he shattered the backboard—and suddenly he was a dunking sensation. Beat writers for the 76ers
started a betting pool about when he would strike next.
A stadium janitor in Detroit implored him to break a backboard so he and his team could show how fast they could replace it. The dunk got at something primal and maybe a little threatening to white refs and white NBA administrators. “When I dunked,
no matter how nice and polite I'd do it, the refs would nail me with a technical foul for swinging on the rim,”
*
writes Dawkins, who, at one point became so popular that he had
a column called “The Dunkateer” for a Philadelphia newspaper. “Even when I wasn't dunking, the refs were putting me in a straitjacket. Then the NBA summoned me to
New York and I was told that the next time I broke a backboard I'd be fined $5,000. Okay. That's cool. It's their fucking league after all. Right? Then a short time later I saw a commercial on TV: The NBA is exciting, blah, blah. Go out and see a game, blah, blah. Then there's a shot of me breaking a backboard.
What the fuck?
That was pure, unadulterated hypocritical bullshit.”

Unadulterated hypocritical bullshit, but also a signal, finally, from the league that it was committed to the dunk. In a sense, it was following the lead of the college ranks, which had shrugged off the embarrassing dunking ban. The NCAA embraced characters like Dr. Dunkenstein, a.k.a. shooting guard Darrell Griffith, who led Louisville to the national championship in 1980, and the players of Phi Slamma Jamma, the irrepressible University of Houston squad of the early 1980s known for its prodigious jamming.

In 1984, David Stern, newly minted as NBA commissioner with a charge of expanding the league's appeal, reintroduced the slam-dunk contest, the one the NBA had unceremoniously retired when it had merged with the ABA. Two years later, Spud Webb won—still the shortest man to win the dunk contest. The embrace of the dunk is what would make basketball a truly international, glamorous sport: Michael Jordan famously won the competition in 1987 and 1988, besting Webb's teammate Dominique Wilkins, launching Jordan's global brand and a worldwide interest in the sport. Basketball officials, once keen to discourage dunking because of its expression of racial exuberance, now eagerly realized its commercial possibilities.

As a player, I'm no wild man. I'm more of the sensitive, spiritual, non-dunking sort, I guess you'd say. “Physical aggression, even
camouflaged by athletic uniforms and official rules and intended to do no harm to Jews, was
not a traditional source of pleasure in our community—advanced degrees were,” Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth's stand-in, explains in
American Pastoral
. But from the hands of Swede Levov, the “household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews,” the basketball shot carried the hopes of an entire community, writes Roth. “Through the Swede, the neighborhood entered into a fantasy about itself and about the world, the fantasy of sports fans everywhere: Almost like Gentiles (as they imagined Gentiles), our families could forget the way things actually work and make an athletic performance the repository of all their hopes. Primarily, they could forget the war.” My own father was, like so many others in those postwar years, a would-be Swede. He had been born in Vienna in 1938, and by the time he was whisked away by his parents to America on February 14, 1939—exactly 40 years before my own birth—Austria had feverishly allowed itself to be absorbed into the Reich, and my father's infant passport was stamped with a swastika. “I was
one of the last Jewish infants to be conceived in Vienna as it once had been,” he wrote in his memoir,
Objects of Remembrance
. The family settled, eventually, in Cincinnati—the war, and murdered relatives, never forgotten. But for that new generation of Jewish-Americans, sports were an avenue of assimilation even as they were a way of consolidating ethnic pride. Who did not count Sandy Koufax as a hero, as a proxy for all that each of us could achieve? What Hebrew school didn't have a copy of
Great Jews in Sports
? (Thicker than you might imagine, by the way.) My father, however, who, along with my mother, bequeathed me so many things, including whatever natural physical potential—or lack thereof—I own, found that he was no Swede. He was thrown off the high school basketball team not because he was a terrible player—though he probably was—but because, clumsily, he injured too many of his teammates during practice.

It was my father, in the mid-1980s, who took me to the public-school
playground a few blocks from our apartment and taught me the pick-and-roll. I grew up into a more competent athlete than he ever was, even if I, too, was never Swedian. I took it as a compliment, then, when, nearly halfway through my dunking year, an Austin friend invited me to join a team he was putting together for a spring basketball league. My chance, I thought, to show off my newfound jumping skills; to show myself, in my own mind at least, as deserving an entry in
Lesser Jews in Sports
.

It turned out we were a bunch of overmatched misfits. I knew we were in for a long season when a teammate, catching a ball just inside the free-throw line, proceeded to shoot the ball over the backboard. We had started the season 0–3. We were terrible. Our next game was against a 3–0 team. Our captain, always game, sent out an email to cheer us up and talk strategy. It also warned us not to get down if our opponents began dunking. I thought he was joking about the dunking. This was a league, after all, for punters and hacks and dreamers. Yes, we had lost three games, but nothing about those other teams was particularly impressive. We were the after-work, receding-hairline equivalent of Little League baseball, with just about every player doing all the little things wrong: the basketball version of allowing grounders to dribble between our feet, sitting cross-legged in the outfield, whiffing on the slow pitches.

Our opponents were the Ball Boys. I underestimated one of their players, a hefty man-child who spotted up and hit 3s all day long. In one of the more humiliating moments of the game, after they had opened up a 30-point lead on us, just as the man-child spotted up to shoot, two of my teammates flew in from opposite directions to try to block the ball; instead, they collided in midair, one of them sustaining a serious knee injury. As they crumpled to the floor, man-child coolly nailed the shot. And when he wasn't shooting, man-child passed the ball inside for an easy bucket.

I was more or less a nonfactor. Besides avoiding injury—I had put in too much time at the gym to see it all go the way of a badly turned ankle—my goal was basically just to rebound and play solid defense. At one point I found myself backtracking desperately as a guard pushed the ball upcourt. Just as we crossed the foul line, he threw up what seemed to me a wild shot. As I turned to collect the ball, I congratulated myself on thwarting what could have been an easy layup. Nice hustle, I thought. But just then, cutting inches away from my face: a pair of knees. One of the Ball Boys was in the process of catching the ball in mid-flight and dunking it. On me. I glanced embarrassedly toward the bleachers, where a collection of girlfriends sat, looking for a raised cell phone. I could have been said to have been “posterized.” That is, captured in a humiliating position in a dunking poster to be taped up on a teenager's closet door. The Ball Boy hung on the rim just long enough for me to get out of his way before he dropped to the parquet. Something like a 50-point lead now for the Ball Boys. We ended up losing, I swear, by 71 points. In a 40-minute game.

I understood, suddenly, and from the wrong perspective, what Dr. J meant when he told the magazine
Black Sports
: “
Dunking is a power game, a way of expressing dominance. It makes your opponent uptight and can shatter his confidence.” By the time I got dunked on, I don't think we had much in the way of confidence to shatter. It didn't help that the same guy dunked three other times in our game, including a flying, two-handed, devastating jam, one so hard that the rim had to thwack itself back after the dunk. It reminded me of what Darryl Dawkins had to say about the curmudgeonly complaint lodged by Oscar Robertson, the splendid, high-scoring guard of the 1960s and 1970s. “
A dunk is just two points,” Robertson told Erving's biographer, Vincent Mallozzi. “I wouldn't spend three cents to go see a Slam Dunk Contest.” Chocolate
Thunder's response, one that serves as a rebuke to those generations of stuffy coaches and sportswriters who dismissed the dunk as nothing more than a gratuitous flourish: “Everybody says a dunk is only two points, but it gets your team hyped, gets the crowd all excited, and takes the starch out of other teams, especially when you dunk on somebody. And I always dunked on somebody.”

Feb. 14, 192 days to go:
Today I turn 34. Carrot cake, for my birthday, made by Rebecca, with my favorite cream cheese icing. “Come on, it's made of carrots, it's practically a vegetable,” she says. Two slivers for me. Then, after Letterman, 45 hops on each leg in the backyard
.

T
he morning of my testicular surgery found me jacking off in an act of filial duty. My mother worried about posterity. Perhaps she imagined I would suddenly become a eunuch, though I would still have one testicle left—this cancer spreads not laterally, but vertically, to the brain. (That was the eventual explanation for the mysterious back pain: Doctors would soon discover that the cancer had spread to my lymph system, with a second mass lodged near my left kidney.) Maybe, she thought, my opportunity to pass down my potential, my very DNA, was at risk of being snuffed out. Having grown concerned about the future of the family line, she suggested to Rebecca's father that we be urged to procreate. She was only half-joking. So on the morning of my surgery, like a good boy, I stopped by the Fairfax Cryobank, on the third floor of an
Austin office building, and nervously made a deposit. Sanctioned masturbation, especially in those circumstances, is not a sexy experience: As I went about fulfilling my obligation, my left nut swollen and sore, I had to keep an eye on the clock—I needed to be at the hospital by 10 a.m.

A few days earlier, an emergency room doctor, the one with the Daffy Duck tie, had told me I had testicular cancer. We left the hospital that clear and dry Saturday hand in hand with shaky steps. At Rebecca's parents' place we hunkered down to call my parents, my brother Josh (my other brother, Gabriel, is Orthodox, so it fell to my parents to inform him after Shabbos ended, at sundown), and my old school friend Nathaniel. When I got my father on the line, all I could manage to get out was that I had bad news. I started blubbering. “I'm so sorry,” my dad said, so sweetly and sympathetically—and he didn't even know what the news was yet. I thrust the phone into Rebecca's hands. I don't know what my parents said to each other after we hung up, what tears they shed, and I still don't want to know. I myself shoved the news aside: That night, tickets already in hand, we headed with a couple of friends to San Antonio, to catch the Spurs play against who-can-remember-now. Watching the players, far below, flutter through the air, I lost myself in the game; Rebecca, not so much. The next morning, my testicular pain having subsided, I hit a tennis ball around with a colleague. I didn't let on about my news. Rebecca sat and watched. She was keeping vigil.

Monday found us in the waiting room of the Urology Team, in an anonymous medical complex in Northwest Austin, just off a road called Jollyville. Nearly all the patients were late-middle-aged
males, many of them, in the Texan style, with moustache and gut. Posters along the walls advertised the da Vinci robotic prostate surgery; artificial sphincters, an antidote to urinary incontinence; and penile implants. I whispered to Rebecca, who was now as fragile as a dry, crackly leaf, that at least all I had was testicular cancer. She wasn't in much of a joking mood.

Dick Chopp, who, I would later learn, had examined the underside of my own father-in-law and other male family friends in town (I came to think of him as the go-to mechanic for men of a certain age), struck me as a very clean man. He was nearly bald, with a shiny forehead. What was left of his hair was closely cropped. He was immaculately shaven and wore the sort of glasses that barely have a frame around the lenses. He had with him the ER doctor's notes, including the results of the sonogram, but, being careful, he asked me to drop my pants. With my pain at least temporarily gone, it occurred to me that the emergency-room diagnosis had been a mistake. Maybe the sonogram had lied, I thought, or maybe there had been a misinterpretation. Chopp reached out, grasped my left testicle, and nodded to himself. He was now the third stranger in as many days to cup my bits, and he would be far from the last.

“You definitely have a tumor,” he said, confidently but gently. “We need to operate immediately.”

“By the end of the week?” I asked.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said.

The surgery is known as an orchiectomy, from the Greek word
orchis
, or testis, and
ektome
, or excision. To my mind it sounded like the bashful act of pinning an orchid on a prom date. I had prudently decided not to ask about the logistics of the procedure before it happened. It had to be done, so what was the point of learning the details of my impending castration? Chopp had given me a choice before the surgery: He could slip into my scrotum a neuticle, or a prosthetic testicle. Evidently, some men, or maybe their partners,
want to maintain the two-testicle illusion. I waved the offer off—I found this option ridiculous and even, from what I had learned, dangerous—neuticles, made of silicone, can grow infected. But, still blessedly ignorant of exactly how my testis and I would be parted from each other, I had a question for him: Would I get local or general anesthesia? I mean, I asked innocently enough, would I be awake for the operation?

He shook his head. “You don't want to be awake for this surgery.”

The four-inch diagonal scar in my lower abdomen is now faded, but that's where Chopp opened my guts and, in a medical sleight of hand, emerged victoriously with my left testis. I awoke shivery, woozy, and swaddled. The nurse wanted me to urinate, to make sure nothing had gone amiss. But as I stood over the toilet, swaying like a drunk, I wanted badly to avoid looking or touching
down there
. As I gingerly peeled away the dressing, I realized, even in my grogginess, that my groin had been shaven clean. I wondered to myself what poor schmo got that assignment—what first-year medical student found herself, as in some twisted initiation, having to take a Schick to the sack of some zonked-out dude. As it turned out, with chemotherapy soon to follow, my junk—what was left of it—would remain hairless for at least six more months.

My body back then was plotting an opposite trajectory from the one it was now charting, tearing itself apart instead of building itself up. As a sedentary cancer patient at an outpatient chemo ward, I soon endured a steady intravenous drip of medicines, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily. I was pumped full of water, too, to make sure the chemotherapy toxins didn't linger about my organs or bloodstream
too long, for fear of lasting damage. I peed frequently, shuffling, stooped, to a bathroom with the burping, wheeling drip tethered to my black-and-blue forearm. By the end of each week, I felt a little more like an octogenarian and less like a 26-year-old. I took slow turns around the garden, my arm interlocked with Rebecca's as I hobbled along. In the shower, my hair fell out, sticking to the soap like metal flakes to a magnet. My face grew puffy from the steroids I took to blunt the side effects. I stopped shaving because I didn't have to—my beard stopped growing. Too weak to do much good, I ceased showing up at the newsroom. I grew weirdly sentimental, crying at scenes of death during episodes of
M*A*S*H
and the old movie
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
. Nauseated, vomiting on and off, I gather I was the closest I'll ever get to those first-trimester blues. I lost any real exuberance, emotional or physical, and if you had asked me just then if I might ever dunk, I would have thought you were being cruel.