Basketball (And Other Things) Page 4
• Should THE GREATEST DUNKER be the one with the best nickname (Darryl Dawkins calling himself “Chocolate Thunder,”6 obviously)? Or the one who was so dominant at dunking that a rule change was set in place (dunking was banned for nine seasons in the NCAA because a bunch of older white men were mad that Lew Alcindor was dunking on the heads of a bunch of younger white men)? Or maybe THE GREATEST DUNKER should be the one who was so perfectly built for dunking on people and then celebrating his own excellence afterward that even his opponents couldn’t do much of anything besides congratulate him for it, and of course I’m talking about the time that Shawn Kemp dunked on Chris Gatling and Gatling responded by nodding his head and dapping up Kemp, which is just about the most ludicrous thing. If someone dunks on me in front of 17,000 people, all that means is there are 17,000 witnesses for the police to talk to when they show up and start trying to find out why I hit someone in the back of the head with a folding chair during a timeout.
• Should THE GREATEST DUNKER be someone who’s had an all-time great in-game dunk? Something like Jordan’s And-One dunk over Patrick Ewing in the 1991 playoffs? Or Dr. J hitting Michael Cooper with the Rock the Baby cradle dunk in 1983? Or Shawn Kemp exorcising Alton Lister’s soul from his body in the 1992 playoffs? Or Darryl Dawkins breaking a backboard any of the times he broke a backboard? Or Blake Griffin jumping up to the 7'1" Timofey Mozgov’s neck and then throwing the ball down into the rim rather than dunking it in 2010?
No. THE GREATEST DUNKER shouldn’t be any one of those things. THE GREATEST DUNKER needs to be all of those things.
Vince Carter is THE GREATEST DUNKER in the history of the NBA.
The first person I ever saw dunk in real life was a man named Cricket. That wasn’t his real name, of course, but one thing I know is if you ever meet anyone nicknamed after a bug, you definitely do not ever ask that person his or her real name. So I didn’t. Nobody did. He was Cricket. We called him Cricket.
Cricket was an unimpressive fellow. He was short. He wasn’t very handsome. He wasn’t very cool. He wasn’t very much of anything, really. I kept hearing about him at this park that I played at; kept hearing about some guy who nobody ever explained gravity to, some guy who was just running around dunking on everyone, apparently. But I also kept hearing he was 5'8" or 5'9", and so I couldn’t allow myself to believe the stories. That’s only an inch taller than me, I told myself. There’s no way someone an inch taller than me is doing anything close to what these people are saying, I told myself.
I think I probably went four or five months of hearing about Cricket before I happened into him. It was at a gym on Lackland Air Force Base when I saw him. I think I was in ninth or tenth grade, and my friends and I would occasionally play there if we were able to finagle a pass from someone because it was walking distance from our houses. We’d been there for a bit that one day and we were just sort of waiting our turn to play, talking shit or whatever. And during the game that preceded ours, one of the guys I was with leaned over and was like, “Ay, I think that’s Cricket right there,” and he pointed to for sure the last person I was expecting him to point to. I responded with something close to “Get the fuck outta here,” to which he replied, “I’m serious.” Maybe three, four, five minutes later, there wasn’t any doubt anymore.
What happened was an errant jumper banged off the back of the rim and ricocheted out toward the three-point line. Cricket snatched it out of the air, then sprinted toward the other end of the court before anyone on either team had realized what was happening. He was running full speed. He picked up the ball near the free throw line, lobbed it up at the backboard, springboarded up into the atmosphere, caught the ball off the rebound, then ultra-mega-dunked it. It was legit the most amazing thing I’d ever seen on a basketball court that I actually played on in real life. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t do anything. Nobody could. We were transfixed.
I know that sounds silly, but look, my friends and I, we were all short, unathletic Mexican kids. Most of the other people we hung out with and played basketball with were, too. We were all doing good just to touch the backboard. None of us had ever seen anyone dunk in person. And it would’ve been one thing if Cricket was this overpowering superhuman who you could just look at and say, “Oh yeah, that guy is something special.” But Cricket wasn’t that. Cricket wasn’t special. Cricket was one of us. And so when he dunked—dude. Okay, imagine you walked outside and saw a sasquatch skateboarding down your street. That’s what this felt like watching it happen. It was total shock and surprise.
But so Cricket threw the ball up, caught it off the bounce off the backboard, dunked it, and that was that. He turned into a beam of light and stardust and disappeared and nobody ever saw him again. Sometimes I think about that day and I get real happy and also real sad. I’ve never dunked it on a regulation goal in my life. I’ve never even touched the rim. Dunking was something hallowed, something incredible. And Cricket could do it. I wonder where Cricket is. I wonder what he’s doing right now. I hope it’s something special. I’m sure it’s not. He probably works at AutoZone or something like that. (I learned months later that Cricket's name was Gerald. I hope his AutoZone name tag says that and not “Cricket.”)
Vince Carter is THE GREATEST DUNKER in the history of the NBA. I’ll go through each of the categories from earlier because he fits in all of them, and he fits near the top of the discussion of each.
• ARTISTRY: Regarding dunking, there are only three NBA superstars who have ever been as captivating as they are graceful as they are athletically beautiful. Dr. J was the first. Jordan came next. And then it’s Vince. Others have obviously been fantastic. Kobe has a string of Oh My God dunks you can pull up on YouTube, but they’re almost always buoyed by another bit (generally someone in the frame getting dunked on). LeBron is a gorgeous basketball player but he’s more bull than eagle in the lane. Tracy McGrady dunked like he was a sonnet that’d come to life. Blake is a masher. Larry Nance was secretly elite, but a tad too waifish.7 Clyde never exhibited that creativity. Spud Webb and Nate Robinson are spark plugs and worthy of your admiration but just too small for the conversation. So again I say: The three at the top here are Dr. J, Jordan, and Vince. Everyone else is tussling underneath them.
• AGGRESSIVELY ATHLETIC: (Please see Dunk Contest below.)
• PERSONAL BRAND: No basketball player made greater use of the dunk-as-brand movement than Michael Jordan (it’s literally his logo). And no player will ever get as close to being as complete a player while also prominently featuring the dunk as a tool. LeBron is the closest we’ve come. And I’ll give you one guess who it is that bridges the gap between those two.
• DUNK CONTEST: The 1988 Dunk Contest is the unquestioned best Dunk Contest of all time.8 But Vince Carter’s performance at the 2000 NBA Dunk Contest is the single most impressive Dunk Contest performance that’s ever been. He was so good in it that he took the dormant, lifeless franchise (there was no Dunk Contest in 1998 or 1999) and turned it into a marquee event again. He was doing things nobody’d ever seen before, and in ways nobody thought were possible. He did a 360-degree windmill, which is easy to type but is a thing maybe 15 people on the entire planet can do. After that, he did a 180-degree windmill from behind the backboard and used just three steps to gather momentum, an athletic feat akin to Tom Brady throwing a 70-yard pass while lying on the ground. He caught a bounce pass in the air and then took it between his legs, dunked it, then pointed up at God and I’m sure God was up there in heaven like, “What the fuck did I just see???” because that’s what everyone who was watching it said. He did one dunk where he put his arm all the way in the rim and then hung from his elbow and nobody knew what to do or say. It was mesmerizing.
• NICKNAME/CELEBRATION: He’s got the Vinsanity nickname and that one’s okay, and he’s got Air Canada from when he played with Toronto and that one’s fun, but he’s also got the Half Man, Half Amazing nickname, and “Half Man, Half Amazing” really is a Hall of Fame ni
ckname. For celebrations, he had the aforementioned God Point9 at the 2000 Dunk Contest, but he also had the more heralded “It’s Over, It’s Over” celebration. A lesser celebrated but equally personally gratifying one was when he dunked it after returning from a knee injury, then paused for a second to look down, dust his knee off so as to say it’s fine, and then jogged back down the court.
• IN-GAME DUNK: Yes. YES. He literally jumped over a human who was 7'2" tall. And he did it in a game. It happened at the 2000 Olympics in the USA’s game against France. It was the second half, the USA was up by 15 with the ball. Gary Payton missed a layup, a Frenchman nabbed the rebound and then tried a doofy no-look outlet pass. Vince stole it just a little outside the three-point line, took three dribbles at the rim, gathered himself, and then jumped over Frederic Weis, a name few people knew and now one that nobody will forget. Nobody had done it before. Nobody’s done it since. The French even gave it a name: Le dunk de la mort, which translates to “The Dunk of Death.” It’s the greatest, most impressive in-game dunk in basketball history. That’s not hyper-bole.
Just think on it like a scale score. No other dunker scores as high as Carter does in as many categories as Carter does. If you approach it that way, then it’s easy to see:
Vince Carter is THE GREATEST DUNKER in the history of the NBA.
1. Did you know it wasn’t until 1972 that the term “slam dunk” started to become popularized? It was Lakers announcer Chick Hearn who did it. Before then, mostly it was called a “dunk shot,” and that’s just about the corniest shit I can think of.
2. Darrell Griffith, a 6'4" shooting guard who played with the Jazz from 1980 to 1991, was also a fake doctor (Dr. Dunkenstein). I think the only fake position higher than fake doctor in the NBA is fake king, a position held by LeBron James. Lower than fake king and fake doctor is Fred “The Mayor” Hoiberg. And lower than everyone is Brian Cardinal, “The Janitor.” Man, imagine you work your whole life to make it to the NBA and you finally get there and someone hits you with “The Janitor” as a nickname.
3. My personal favorite dunker. I watched Dominique dunk on Larry Bird so hard one time that—hand to God—Larry Bird’s eyeballs exploded in his own skull.
4. From the 2001 season to the 2005 season, Shaq dunked it 1,190 times. That’s the most of any player over any five-year stretch since they started recording that stat. For perspective: Shaq had 219 dunks in the 2001 season alone. The next closest person was David Robinson. He had 114. (A fun aside: Shaq’s dunks over that five-year stretch were more than Scottie Pippen had in his entire 17-year career. He finished with 1,116 dunks.)
5. At the time, basketball courts didn’t look like what they look like now. Many of them had cages around them, and hoops were attached to poles at the gates. Inglis climbed up on the cage, received a pass from a teammate, then dropped the ball down into the goal from the gate on some Vega from Street Fighter II Championship Edition shit. I’m super sad that I wasn’t alive in 1910 to see it, but I’m also pretty happy I wasn’t alive in 1910 on account of me not being white so it probably wouldn’t have been that great of a time for me.
6. Stevie Wonder gave Dawkins the name “Chocolate Thunder.” Stevie would regularly attend games. He had a guy who would sit with him and tell him what was happening in the game. That’s probably the most beautiful thing I ever heard. Basketball is such a dope sport that even blind men watch it.
7. His son, Larry Nance Jr., is in the league as I write this and he is already shaping up to be a wonderful dunker.
8. If we’re talking about just straight-up dunking, then the best dunk contest was 2016’s.
9. Dirk Nowitzki re-created this at the 2015 All-Star Game after catching an alley-oop and dunking it while his tippy toes were just barely off the ground. It was a great moment.
WHAT’S THE ORDER OF THE FIRST ROUND OF THE FICTIONAL BASKETBALL PLAYER DRAFT?
PART 1
This is a simple thing because the argument prompt here is a straight arrow: What’s the draft order of the first round of the Fictional Basketball Player Draft? That’s it. That’s all. Which fictional person goes in what fictional spot if you take all of the fictional basketball players and put them in a big fictional room and have a big fictional draft? That’s what this chapter is. Simple.
That said, there are four rules, so let’s start there.
• RULE NO. 1: This will operate the same as the first round of the NBA Draft, in that there will be 30 picks, but it will also not be like the first round of the NBA Draft, in that in this version there aren’t any teams making the picks; we’re just assigning spots. Also, there’s no second round. Also, it goes from the 30th pick to the 1st pick rather than 1st to 30th. Also, there’s no rule against drafting cartoon characters. Or children. Or animals.
• RULE NO. 2: Fictional basketball players portrayed by real NBA players are eligible to be drafted, but real NBA players who portray themselves in movies or TV shows are not eligible. Ex: In 1993, Shaq appeared as himself in the music mockumentary CB4. A year later, he was in Blue Chips as the all-world center Neon Boudeaux. Blue Chips Neon is eligible to be drafted but CB4 Shaq isn’t. This serves as a counterweight to prevent this from becoming an actual NBA draft by just cheat-dipping into movies where a bunch of players had quick cameos (Space Jam, Forget Paris, etc.).
• RULE NO. 3: Rick Fox isn’t allowed to participate in any capacity. There’s no real reason for this rule other than pettiness. In all actuality, his character from the HBO prison drama Oz, a superstar-NBA-player-turned-felon named Jackson Vahue, would’ve probably gone very high in the draft. It’s just that I don’t like Rick Fox, is all. So he ain’t invited.
• RULE NO. 4: If a player from a movie is good because of some version of magic or mysticism (Calvin Cambridge from Like Mike, Scott Howard from Teen Wolf, Brian from Thunderstruck, etc.), then that player will be considered for the draft when they were experiencing the greatest version of their magical powers. Not even if he or she ended up losing them in the movie or TV show.
Now, the draft:
NO. 30 PICK: Derek Vinyard, American History X
HEIGHT: 6'0" WEIGHT: approximately 175 pounds POSITION: point guard
MOST MEMORABLE ON-COURT MOMENT: Winning a race war.
The most surprising thing with Vinyard wasn’t just that he was good at basketball, which, to be sure, was fairly surprising because I’ve never been in a situation where we were short a player for a game and thought, “Man, I wish there was a nazi around so he could fill in this last spot.” No, the most surprising thing isn’t that Vinyard WAS good, it’s the WAY that he was good.
A recap of the basketball scene in AHX: An obese white supremacist named Seth gets goaded into betting $100 on a pickup basketball game he’s playing in. This is troublesome for a number of reasons,1 the most pressing of which being that Seth doesn’t have the $100 he just bet. He wanders over to the bleachers to his nazi support group and begs them to front the money. Nobody believes in him so nobody gives it to him. Instead, Derek, who’s been sitting and watching the game, says, “I’ll take care of this,” then removes his sweatshirt (to reveal a large swastika tattooed on his chest) and wanders out onto the court. He brokers a deal with the other players there: He’ll take all the white guys on his team, all the black guys will form the other team, and they’ll play out the rest of the game that way. In lieu of money, though, they’re going to play for territory now: The losing race has to leave the courts and isn’t allowed to play there anymore. Everyone agrees to the terms, and so the game starts. And that’s where it gets surprising.
Before Vinyard joins the game, the camera shows a shot of him watching everyone play. And during that shot he makes a comment about how one of the black players is being too showy for his tastes. But so when Derek’s scene starts and he’s actually playing in the game, I was 100 percent expecting him to be on his Only Fundamentals shit. But on the very first play, he receives a pass, pump fakes a shot, drives into the lane, and the
n throws an unnecessary behind-the-back pass to a guy for a dunk. On the second play, he brings the ball up the court, dribbles through his legs, does another pump fake, then drives into the lane again and goes behind the back to himself this time as he lays it up. And then on the third play, he intercepts an errant pass, charges down the court fast as he can, and then, all alone, all alone where a layup would’ve been just fine or, even more in character, a two-handed set shot,2 he jumps up and does a reverse two-handed dunk. I’d assumed before the game Vinyard was going to be John Stockton. Turns out, he’s the white Allen Iverson.
So, yes, it’d be risky bringing a reformed skinhead into the locker room. But, given the way he was able to completely control the game despite playing (a) basically 5-on-4 (Seth was useless) and (b) in an extremely pressure-filled situation, it’s probably worth a shot to take him with the 30th pick.3 So here we are: starting the Fictional Basketball Player Draft by picking a nazi.
NO. 29 PICK: Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries
HEIGHT: 6'0" WEIGHT: approximately 150 pounds POSITION: point guard
MOST MEMORABLE ON-COURT MOMENT: Hanging on a rim during a thunderstorm yelling at the universe because being a teenager is hard.
To be clear, I’m talking about Jim when he wasn’t on drugs. That’s the version who gets drafted 29th.