Books: "Magic in the Air,” A History Of The Slam Dunk, By Mike Sielski

 

Magic in the Air: The Myth, the Mystery, and the Soul of the Slam Dunk

By Mike Sielski

St. Martin's Press; hardcover, 320 pages, with a 24-page photo insert; $32.00; available today, Tuesday, February 11th

Mike Sielski is a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the author of four books, including the bestseller The Rise: Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality. He was formerly a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, and his work has been anthologized three times in The Best American Sports Writing and The Year's Best Sports Writing.

There are few things in sports that can make people stop everything they're doing, catch them transfixed on one moment, and leave a crowd screaming at the top of their lungs. 

That is the slam dunk, and it is examined more than ever in Sielski's new book, Magic In The Air, in which he examines the journey it has taken, while balancing the socio-racial history and commentary of the time, telling a deep history of American sports and culture.

Some of the things Sielski discovered in his voluminous research include the story of how Wilt Chamberlain learned how to dunk via his high school team, taught by an NBA legend in his own right, Hal Lear; Darnell Hillman and the bare-bones nature of the NBA's first slam-dunk contest; the dunking pioneers of women's basketball; and how Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and Dr. J, Julius Erving, were three all-time greats who shared one of the greatest eras of basketball, but only the first two are credited with "saving the NBA," which Erving takes exception with.

While the focus is, of course, on the slam dunk, this book will introduce you to players who were at the beginning of it becoming a professional sport. One of those is Jack Inglis, who took the game to another level in the 1910s, and was known as "king of the cagers." The reason he was known as that was, going back to 1896, in Trenton, New Jersey, the court would be lined by a twelve-foot high wire fence to prevent the leather, stitched-up ball from getting into the stands. Eventually, more and more courts were wrapped in fencing, leading to basketball players being called cagers.

There also are new connections revealed about players you thought you knew everything about. 1955 was a pivotal year for Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain. That story is introduced through the memories of Carl Lacy, who played against Wilt in the Philadelphia Public League Championship, which was played in front of 8,500 people at the Palestra on a Friday night in March. 15 days later, on March 19, 1955, Lacy would be listening on the radio to the LaSalle Explorers, the defending NCAA champions who hailed from his hometown, and they were taking on the San Francisco Dons, who were led by Bill Russell.

San Francisco went on to win this championship game, 77-63, giving Russell his first big national recognition. Sielski sees that, as well as Chamberlain completing his high school career, as a pivotal moment in the history of the sport, just as there were major movements in the civil rights movement that year, including the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that May, and Rosa Parks' refusal to move to the "colored section" of a bus in Alabama on December 1, 1955.

The slam dunk really took hold in the public consciousness in the 1960s. The United States was undergoing a culture change across college campuses, the American inner cities, and even into the suburbs that make up the heartland. This rapid change in society was reflected in sports, in particular basketball from high schools to college to the NBA. The main thing that brought about this revolution was the slam dunk.

Since it created such a change in the game of basketball, Sielski makes the case that it altered American society and culture at large. Since its origin, the college and professional game was prevalent among the white population, but as it became integrated, the slam dunk was a revolutionary innovation for black people, a form of rebellion.

Sielski contends that, because of that, the NCAA banned the slam dunk for almost a full decade, from 1967 to 1976. One the given reason was that it sought to prevent player injuries, while another  was to keep the game close to its modest origins, as the dunk was viewed as an individual expression that was part of the fabric of how the game was played in urban areas.

The movement to ban the dunk was crystallized in a cover story of the 1967 college basketball preview in Sports Illustrated titled, "The Case for the 12-Foot Basket." One of the targets of the ban was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, while he was part of UCLA's dynasty under John Wooden, and went by Lew Alcindor. The NCAA did not allow him to view internal documents or archives related to the ban on the dunk.

Sielski writes in this excerpt of the unstoppable force of the dunk: "That individuality would nevertheless creep into basketball's highest levels, bubbling up from the playgrounds and parks until those qualities defined the sport's most fascinating players: players such as Connie Hawkins, David Thompson, and, of course, Julius Erving, who ushered the NBA into the modern era. Dunking became so identified with Black culture, in fact, that by the early 1990s it became acceptable to assert - as in the title of a major Hollywood movie - that white men could not do it.

The dunk has been a mechanism for growing the NBA into a global Goliath. Magic Johnson and Larry Bird carried the league back to the top of the public's consciousness with their arrivals in 1979, but it was Michael Jordan - a singular sensation for his acrobatics - who transformed the NBA into a billion-dollar leviathan. The dunk turned basketball into a sport of corporate America. The dunk sold sneakers. The dunk spread the gospel of JUST DO IT across the nation.

The dunk, finally, remains a door that, when opened, allows access to the most colorful figures and moments from the sport's past. It introduces even the most passionate fan to people and episodes long forgotten but full of drama and even humor, people and episodes whose significance resonates still. More than that, the dunk and the history around it are just plain fun. And in an age when every shot, every pass, every dribble, every foul, and every spot on the floor where a player has taken a shot or thrown a pass or dribbled the ball or committed a foul are recorded  and dropped into algorithmic formulas to try to optimize performance and increase our understanding of what the hell is happening out there, when following basketball or any major sport can feel like a never-ending battle to keep your mental hard drive from crashing due to information overload, the sport could use more fun. Professional basketball has become so analytical, so soulless at times that a player whose game and fame are predicated on pulling off spectacular dunks - a player such as Ja Morant, the Memphis Grizzlies' incandescent and troubled guard - stands out like a beam of light. This wasn't always the case. Joy used to be the rule, not a secondary consideration. Maybe we can get back there again."