My mid-life quest: Learn to dunk

Everybody wants to dunk, at least metaphorically. We think that if we spent just a year away from our everyday distractions, we could rise above our terrestrial lot: learn Spanish, pick up the piano, remaster calculus, paint. In our fantasies, we think we might all be naturals — capable of mastering some talent hidden inside us. A few years ago, The Onion cheekily mocked our unspent dreams in an obituary with the headline "97-Year-Old Dies Unaware of Being Violin Prodigy."

The notion of a "hidden talent" can haunt, too. My mother stopped making art after a junior high school teacher told her she had little talent; she became an art historian instead, her days spent tromping through museums to examine other people's work. It's a familiar story: We leave our singing in the shower. Most adults never bother to pick up a violin, write fiction, or learn other languages. Why acquire a talent just to explore its limits?

I meant to take the dunking metaphor literally: I wanted to slam a basketball through an orange rim. My quest was to make the most of the piece of flesh I'd been given. At the extreme margin of human talent and effort, elite athletes stretch the boundaries that define our capabilities as a species. Will there come a day, the former Trinidadian sprinter Ato Boldon was once asked, when someone runs the 100-meter dash in less than nine seconds? (The record is now 9.58 seconds, set by Usain Bolt.) "Sprinters believe that — someday — somebody will run the 100 meters and the clock will read 0.00," Boldon said. "It's how you have to think. This idea of human limitation is exactly what we're competing against."

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I would never run as fast as Bolt or Boldon. But the test I had set for myself was just possibly manageable: Given my height and vague athleticism, I felt that with a lot of effort I should be able to push a nine-and-a-half-inch ball through a 10-foot-high hoop.

I faced some challenges. I'm of Austro-Hungarian stock — more closely associated with making good pastries than with jumping ability. At the start of this project I could only swipe the rim with the tips of my middle and index fingers. I owned healthy love handles — I weighed 203 pounds — so I was going to have to lose weight and put on muscle.

But I had some things going for me: height — I'm 6 feet, 2½ inches, with orangutan arms; what a former coworker once called a "big ol' sprinter's butt," just the kind of powerful posterior I'd need to propel myself hoopward; and, as I neared my 34th birthday, some leftover sportiness. (I had never played a varsity sport, but once upon a time I had captained my college Frisbee team.) I had never weight-lifted, either — I despise weight lifting — and so, to my mind, at least, I remained a tabula rasa. "Pure potential," my wife, Rebecca, said, with a not-so-small degree of skepticism.

In its bones this is a peculiarly American story, a story about optimism, about self-reliance, about the ability to remake oneself. The dunk is, yes, as American as jazz or apple pie. But it stretches beyond that — it is literally about upward mobility, about the very American idea that everyone is capable of self-improvement, of rising above her lot. For me, the test was physical; for others, the barriers, involving everything from class to gender, are obviously harder to overcome. Americans have long thought that they could move on up, as they say in The Jeffersons. They believe in self-made men, and that's what I was trying to do: remake myself.

I was no kid, making this my last chance to dunk. I gave myself from the end of one August to the end of the next to improve. It was a year to discover whether, embedded in my bones, muscles, and DNA, was some grand jumping potential. A year was long enough to train my feet, hips, legs, and butt in the strange art of explosive movement. Any longer and I figured I'd see diminishing returns.

To transform my average-Joe body into a svelte jumping machine, I had decided to get some professional help. If I was truly going to test my capabilities and scientifically go about monitoring my performance, I needed some top-shelf trainers on board.

I hadn't expected anyone to take me seriously. I wanted to dunk, yes, but the notion of an adult going deliberately about it seemed ridiculous. I wrote emails: "I'm interested in the limits of human potential," I explained, as I laid out my project. And then: "I want to dunk." Many of these emails, unsurprisingly, went unanswered.

And then a real-life scientist, a very nice man named Stephen Doty, who had played high school basketball in the 1950s, wrote me back. "What a great idea for a story. I, too, only reached the rim, never over it."

A couple of weeks later, I found myself hustling to Manhattan's swank Upper East Side neighborhood to meet Stephen, a senior scientist who specialized in the loss of bone density at the Hospital for Special Surgery. He introduced me to a crew of physical trainers who had gamely agreed to help me.

The hospital's Performance Lab looks a little like an overgrown, high-end preschool playroom: Large, brightly colored inflatable balls sit on the softly matted ground. Stacks of stepping blocks stand in a corner. Fluorescent lights buzz overhead. This is where the New York Knicks have been put through their paces.

"So we're going to get you to dunk, right?" Polly de Mille, a handsome, sandy-haired reed of a woman said. Over three hours, Polly put me through a battery of exercises to test my capabilities. Or "deficiencies," as one of her colleagues described them. As it turned out, I was quite deficient.

She began by taking baseline measurements of my body, an accounting of my flesh-and-blood vital statistics. First she performed a skinfold test. I felt a little like a piece of meat on a hook as she measured the body fat around my chest, arms, and legs with a pair of calipers. Her findings: About a fifth of my overall weight was body fat, just worse than average for men my age. Between my love handles were the modest beginnings of a gut.

Polly, who wore a T-shirt that said "Train Like a Knick," told me that basketball players have body-fat percentages of only 10 percent. To reach that goal, and achieve the physique of a prototypical dunker, at my current level of fat-free mass, I would have to cut my overall weight to 171.6 pounds.

And it fast became apparent I would have to add some serious muscle. "We want you to be strong enough so that it feels like you're jumping off a solid concrete platform," Polly told me.

We were joined by Jamie, a small, muscular trainer. "We're putting together a 52-week regimen for you," he said. He had gotten up at 5:30 that morning to finish it up. I get up that early only if I have to catch an airplane. As I lay down to do some crunches, I suddenly didn't want to disappoint these two people. They already believed in me more than I did. Beneath those fluorescent lights, I told myself I would succeed — I would slam the ball home.

The day of the dunk was a Monday in late August. It was my last chance. I had taken it easy the previous few days, tapering off my workouts to rest my leg muscles before their big liftoff. I felt fresh and loose. Charles, my trainer, dribbled the ball by the basket, and I readied myself at half-court, running through, in my mind's eye, the keys to getting up.

A small audience gathered: Rebecca, for moral support; Charles' assistant, Terrell; a half-dozen or so 12-year-olds, all aspiring dunkers, who took a break from their basketball game to watch. It was like high noon, a face-off between me, at half-court, and my nemesis, the rim.

On the first jump, I exploded up, swatting the ball toward the back iron and then hanging, for a second, on the rim. Yes, I was ready. Everyone was watching, egging me on. I was getting higher up than I ever really thought possible, but I was not quite putting the dunk down.

Again, again, the ball would leave my hand, only to rattle against the inside back lip of the rim, and out. I could not get my arm high enough for the right angle to slam it true. Fifteen tries. I glanced down at the palm of my left hand to find the joints of my middle and forefinger bloodied from scraping against the rim.

Twenty minutes later, and my body was out of energy. I had swatted the ball into the hoop, but these efforts didn't quite have the feel and control — the snap — that suggested a true dunk. Charles had thrown the ball up perfectly, tossing it so that it hung in the air like a full moon, and I had, more times than not, gotten my palm onto it. But I hadn't quite gotten all the way on top of the ball — it was just an inch too far — and so I was left slapping the ball toward the basket and hoping it would rattle in.

A few did, and a few of these felt right — there had been something of that snappish feeling, and the friction of my sliding hand against the warm, curved metal — but as soon as I landed and twisted toward Charles, I would see him shaking his head. "So I didn't dunk it?" I'd ask, sincerely unsure and genuinely hopeful. He'd turn to one of the folks watching — a bearded paunchy guy in glasses, another gymgoer caught up in the hullaballoo. "Almost," he said, holding his thick thumb and forefinger in the air, a delicate centimeter apart. This stranger, this random witness, casually pinching my potential between his fingers like a bug.

They were turning away, now, the boys, one by one standing up and going back to their kids' basket in the corner of the gym, blithely dunking and horsing around. The moment of possibility had imperceptibly turned to a moment of desperation.

Charles had a client waiting now. His next appointment. My year was up.

"Just once more," he said for the fifth time. I relaxed. I imagined that thousands of fans were stomping their feet, that cheerleaders waved their pom-poms, that Michael Jordan himself was watching, and that Rebecca, filming all this, was NBC television. This was it, the last gasp. I pumped my knees, flew forward, planted hard, drove myself up through the air.

I couldn't quite get my hand over the rim. Perhaps if I had tried a thousand more times, like a kid mastering a video game, I would have. But I hadn't. I had failed.

Months after my final dunk attempt, a bag of protein-shake mix slumps untouched in the kitchen. My gym membership is long canceled. But I still play pickup basketball.

I'm quicker, partly as a matter of confidence. I take guys off the dribble, or back them up in the post and try a turnaround jumper — my elevation is still better than it was before I began my crazy experiment. I emerged sinewy, tough, and lean. My weight remains pretty good. I eat dessert more freely and am back to my happy pasta-eating ways. But asceticism clings. I used to be a whole-milk person; now I'm a 1 percent kind of guy. I've been known, even now, to decline the services of a bun with my burger. It's a little sad.

One evening every couple of weeks, just as the sun starts to set and the grackles muster along the power lines for their evening gabfest, I make my way to the nearby middle school track to do a lonely set of sprints. I put myself through some push-ups and sit-ups, lowering myself to the ground with the enthusiasm of a man getting into a cold bath. It's mostly vanity now. This is what happens once you've found yourself with a six-pack, with higher hops. You find it hard to let yourself go. But I'm trying.

Adapted from Year of the Dunk: A Modest Defiance of Gravity. Copyright © 2015 by Asher Price. Published by Crown Publishers, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.