Even with my arms stretched as high as they can stretch, I only reach to 7-feet, 10-inches. That means I’d have to jump 26 inches just to touch the rim. To get high enough to dunk, I’d have to add another six to eight inches on top of that. That means I’d have to get my body 34 inches off the ground--nearly three feet--if I wanted to dunk a basketball. The average vertical leap for NCAA Division I basketball players is between 27 and 30 inches. That means I would have to jump higher than your average big-time college basketball player. Division I. These are the guys who go on to play in the NBA. Also, it’s not as if I can rely upon some long dormant muscle memory. I have never done this before. Never dunked. So what have we got? I’m white, I’m 6-foot-1, I’ve never done this before, and, oh yeah, I’m 51. Years old. And now we are getting to the reason why I wanted to do this in the first place.
This quest started when I was 50, an age at which one is confronted with the fact that one is most likely closer to the day he will die than he is to the day he was born. I awoke one morning to the realization that I am sliding down the hill, and at the bottom is a great big hole just waiting to swallow me up. No more Mike Teverbaugh. Bye-bye. My reaction to that: no fucking way. I was going to turn around and start running back up that hill. Or, at the very least, believe that I was. I knew it wasn’t likely that I would find something to actually reverse the aging process, or even that I would start doing things to prolong my life. You know, like eating healthy foods, reducing stress or becoming an adulterous comedian (Bob Hope, George Burns and Milton Berle all lived to be a hundred, or damn close to it; there must be some connection). No, my best hope was to find something that would make me FEEL as though I were still on the north side of the slope. I can’t change physical realities or the limitations of the human body, but I can trick myself. I can make myself believe things that aren’t true just to make myself feel better. It sounds awful, but we all do it. It’s the inspiration for the comb-over (“I’m not bald!”) and the ridiculously young second wife (“I’m her age!”). I have too much hair and too much love for my wife to make either of those options work, so I needed something else. To actually feel in my bones the surge of youth, the promise of countless more days to come, I would have to … make my body do something it had never done before. Then I could say to myself, “Look, you’re not breaking down, you’re breaking new ground.” Yes. I like sentences about myself that have the word “new” in them.
So, what would this thing be? It couldn’t just be some crazy stunt like jumping out of a plane. Hell, you can throw a sack of wheat out of a plane; that doesn’t make it young, vibrant and immortal. It would have to be some act of physical prowess, something that says, “This body, the temple of this soul, is still in the game, and it’s nowhere near halftime.” I thought of running a marathon but then quickly dismissed the idea. I mean, wow, talk about drudgery. Dragging myself around some course for nearly four hours. I’ve tried running the treadmill, riding a stationary bike and believe me, none of that endurance crap is tolerable unless you’re watching TV. And in your average marathon, I probably wouldn’t be allowed to strap a set to my forehead. Besides, old people run marathons. I’ve seen them. Emaciated, wrinkled, sunken cheeks--this is not the image of youth I was looking for. I would need something that requires power and speed, and it would be nice if it also came with an in-your-face, take-that, I-can-kick-your-ass attitude. You know, all the things we associate with youth. And that is why my mind turned toward the dunk. In all of sports, nothing else combines the athleticism and the attitude of the dunk. The dunker soars above everyone else and then slams the ball back in their faces. It’s an incredible release, the ultimate exclamation point, punctuated not by a period but a fist. And it’s completely unnecessary. One could simply lay the ball in the basket. But the dunker dunks for one reason--because he can.
For my purposes, the dunk easily surpasses other iconic acts of sport, such as the home run or the touchdown. Sure, I could join some city league team and hit a home run or score a touchdown--two other things I have never done--but what would that prove? That I could “go yard” against Bob, the checkout guy from the supermarket, or that I could sprint for a TD by outrunning Ted from accounting? Big fucking deal. But the dunk is different. To dunk, one has to hurl one’s body up at the same 10-foot hoop the pros jam it through. To dunk is to legitimately lay claim to some small percentage of similarity to LeBron James, Carmello Anthony, Michael Jordan and Dr. J.
LeBron James.............Dr. J....
Me
You can say with a straight face and a sure finger on the polygraph machine that you can do something those guys can do. There’s your surge of power, of youthfulness, of invincibility. There’s your goddamn fountain of youth. And by God I am determined to drink from that spring--greedily. For me, this has become a case of dunk or die.
In the days that follow, I will chronicle everything involved in achieving this goal--the excruciatingly difficult workouts, the aches and pains, the setbacks. I haven’t dunked yet, but I will. You’ll see. We’ll get there together
No comments:
Post a Comment