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The Fly or a Jump?
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Basketball is the only game we know whose progress can be measured by flight. Football is waged in the trenches. Hockey glides, slams and crashes on a sheet of ice. Baseball lives on walks and runs. So let's get real here; by comparison, they are Neanderthal sports whose evolution can best be traced to the moments when their participants' knuckles first stopped scrapping the ground. But measuring the progression of hoops is strictly an airborne phenomenon. From its earthbound, peach-basket roots in a Springfield, Mass. gym, to Vince Carter's insane levitation act over Frederic Weis's grill on the Olympic stage, basketball's evolution can be charted on a higher plane by the men who have fearlessly defied Isaac Newton's belief that what goes up must come down. Yet today, because we are surrounded by so many hang-gliding acrobats who play the game above the rim, we tend to take this gift of hang time for granted. We live in the here and now, as if it were Vince or Kobe or Darvin Ham who first developed our theories of hang time evolution. But I am an old-school hoop dreamer who would like to take you on a fantastic journey through the history of hoops' first flight school. Let us trace its roots, explore its hang-gliding pioneers, and offer our insights into basketball's single greatest recorded example of pure hang time (hint: it isn't Vince Carter's dunk). * * * "When does jumping become flying?" - Michael Jordan, pondering his own ability to rise above the floor Damn good question. The scientists will tell you man lacks the ability to fly. Birds do it, bees do it, but you and me? Nah, we can't do it. It's an illusion created by slow motion cameras and creative film editors. Yeah, that's what they say. But I have seen Elgin Baylor, Connie Hawkins, Julius Erving and David Thompson. I have seen Dominique Wilkins and Michael Jordan. And Lord have mercy, I have seen Vince Carter so much, I ought to get frequent flier points. But most of all, I have been on the court, risen off the floor and seen some mad, athletic genius rise two stories above me while I helplessly fell back to the earth. Now here is what we say. I believe somebody's flying. In his autobiography, "For the Love of the Game," Jordan describes the phenomenon of seeing a videotape of a young MJ hang gliding to the hoop for a dunk. "I don't remember what year it was," Jordan said. "But the replay was in slow motion. It looked like one of theose Apollo blastoffs in slow motion. I just kept going up. I knew I was watching myself, but I still couldn't believe how it looked. I remember thinking, 'When does jumping become flying?' That's how it looked to me. When people would ask whether I could fly, especially when I was younger, I always said, 'Yes, for a little while.' But when I saw that dunk, it really did look like I was flying." I did not need a videotape to tell me that. I have positive proof that man can fly. In the early moments of the 1974 NCAA Eastern Regional finals, North Carolina State's David (Skywalker) Thompson drove the lane, leaped up, cocked the ball back behind his head and prepared to throw down a tomahawk dunk versus the University of Pittsburgh. But as the 6-foot-4 forward became airborne and began flying past all the earthbound fools below, a kid in college who was sitting in front of his dorm room television noticed something mad was about to occur. David Skywalker's 6-foot-8 teammate Phil Spence was between him and the basket. What the hell was Thompson was about to do? Twenty-six years before Vince Carter ever thought about it (hell, Vince wasn't even born yet), David Thompson pondered the unimaginable. He decided he could leap over a man on the way to the hole. And he almost made it. But the toes of his low-cut leather Converse All-Stars clipped Spence's shoulders, and DT came crashing to the floor, opening a gash on his head that required 15 stitches to close. Think about that for a moment. Thompson did not do a straddle split over Spence's head (like Vince did). He literally tried to jump all the way over a man standing 6-8 tall. And the only things that separated him from this mind-boggling feat were his feet. Well, actually his toes. Damn. Some folks would say this was basketball's Kitty Hawk, and Thompson was like the Wright brothers. But they are missing the point and minimizing the act. Kitty Hawk? Hardly. This was Cape Canaveral and Thompson was the first hoop test pilot. This time, he crashed and burned. But he explored the possibilities, and forever altered our visions of just how high we might fly. *** The year was 1977, and the world was just discovering the outrageous leaping ability of Louisville's Darrell (Dr. Dunkenstein) Griffith. In the summer of '77, in Sofia, Bulgaria for the World University Games, the 6-foot-4 Griffith went airborne for a mid-game dunk that caused witnesses from all over the Eastern Bloc to wonder what sort of performance-enhancing drugs he was using (and why none of their chemists had concocted a similar brew). Twenty-three years before Vince Carter ever thought about it, Dr. Dunkenstein did it. Griffith leaped completely over a Belgian player to slam down a U.S. teammate's missed shot. When the communist-bloc observers crowded around him after the game seeking an explanation for his feat, Griffith, a good southern boy, explained: "I told them it was a God-given talent, [but] that confused them, because I don't think they believe in God." * * * Basketball historians tend to chart hang time's greatest moments from the 1976 ABA All-Star game, when Dr. J and David Thompson engaged in a high-flying slam dunk contest at halftime. The tape is now a classic (you've seen it on HoopsTV.com), one of the first recorded proofs that man was capable of flying. Julius took a running start from the other end of the floor, and going straight on to the hoop, went airborne from just inside the free throw line for a dunk. The Doctor was all arms and legs, with a big, flowing Afro that seemed aerodynamically perfect for the times. This dunk would forever be the measure of how high we can fly. Eight years later, the evolution would continue, when Michael Jordan took off from just inside the free throw line in the NBA All-Star Game dunk contest, and threw down a dunk just like the Doctor did, but with one noticeable improvement. Michael does not take a running start. He does it off the dribble, making the move more demanding. His Airness is all arms and legs and his gleaming bald head seems so aerodynamically perfect for the times. Sixteen years later, the bar is raised again at the 2000 All-Star Game dunk contest in Oakland. In the midst of all his spectacular between-the-legs and elbow dunks, Vince Carter does Doc and Jordan one better. Though it hardly registers with most of the masses in the sellout crowd, the true basketball wiseguys take notice. Carter takes off from just inside the free throw line and throws down a dunk. He runs, and does not dribble. But this time, Carter does what neither the Doc or MJ ever considered. He throws it down with two hands. The bar had been raised again. * * * So now here we are at the end of the evolutionary track, in the year 2000, and the world believes it has just seen the bar raised to its highest level ever with the Vin-sanity slam at the Olympics. The unenlightened will claim this is the single greatest moment in the history of hang time. And they would be wrong. The single greatest example of pure, unadulterated hang time was not even a dunk. It came during Game 4 of the 1980 NBA Finals in the Philadelphia Spectrum, when 76ers forward Julius Erving performed a shot that defied gravity and every reasonable sensibility of what a man was capable of doing with a basketball in midair. Dribbling along the right baseline against the Lakers, Julius took off about 12 to 14 feet from the basket. But Laker defenders Mark Landsberger and Kareem Abdul Jabbar forced the Doctor to drift behind the backboard, and in the air out of bounds. "Well, he came on the right side and we cut him off, and there was nowhere for him to go but out of bounds," Magic Johnson recalled. "So Julius said, 'If the only place I can go is out of bounds, then I'm gonna go out of bounds.' So he jumped in the air out of bounds. So now here he is walking through the air. I'm thinking, 'There's no way Doc can float all the way from this side. We got him.' I thought he was going to pass [the ball] out." It appeared that Dr. J did have nowhere to go, but he kept drifting, kept floating, kept flying until he ended up miraculously on the other side of the hoop. He then extended his arm and flipped it up under Kareem's arm, and high off the glass for a reverse layup. "Well, I guess I didn't know Julius as well as I thought I did," said Magic. "This man, out of bounds, floated from one side to the other. Now there's no way he can get off a shot, there's no angle there. So he's got the ball and he's floating. And he spun it real high off the top of the glass. It kissed the glass and went in. Well, I guess he fooled me again. I looked at [Michael Cooper] and he looked at me, and I said, 'Coop, you think we should ask him to do it again?'... I could not believe my eyes because of the move this man had just made. And it's still the greatest move I've ever seen in basketball, the all-time greatest." Who am I to argue? |
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