A star in the NBA All-Star Dunk Contest
It's hard to tell what's happening when you're made to look too closely.
This won’t be a detailed chronology of the night. I’ve done that, and believe me, I love doing that, but the sun is slipping down the washed stone sides of the gothic buildings clustered snug around Monument Circle, glinting off the bronze torch in the hand of Victory standing proud on her obelisk perch at the top of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ monument, and the big game begins soon — though the DJ that’s been set up in the square every day, who starts around noon and goes til forever, is finding renewed enthusiasm for the 2000 hit, ‘Ride Wit Me’, pulsing it all through the snow crusted cul-de-sac.
It also can’t be a chronology because for the first time in my recent Dunk Contest memory, I’m not even sure what happened.
It’s not like I missed any of it. Even as I, furious at myself for wearing a jumpsuit, fumbled over the buttons to do it up in a bathroom stall, I still made it back out to the media ramparts to watch all of the first round standing, rocking back and forward with nerves on the heels of my cowboy boots, stomping on the polished cement floor. Jerome came to stand with me, and Bill and Robby were in their seats right in front, a little like the Dunk Contest trenches, and we all conferred after each dunk got done. There were plenty of eyes, is what I’m saying.
In the dunk-off, after Jaime Jaquez Jr. and Jacob Toppin’s names were unceremoniously greyed out (I legitimately hate this treatment) on the giant screens rigged up all over the converted half of the Colts’ football stadium where the LED court had been laid, some up so high the structural steel girders that keep the building up obscured the scores and relevant details, I returned to our row. More eyes there, but just as many confused faces. Glancing down at Holland and Taylor, who rode this wave with Mac McClung at last year’s Contest, shadowing him through the prep and the pomp and finally holding the prize, who cocked their heads or made the same face back at me I was making at them — a nervous mix of trepidation and soft bewilderment while straining toward upbeat. Isaiah, who seemed to be holding his breath for the same stretches as me, Wos who groaned and booed and added more animation than the pulsing lurid LED court, and Rob, who was patient through my jostles and clinging and flinging arms, taking me in bemusedly like a sociological field study.
Maybe it was all that confusion, a tangle of strange new setting still working out the kinks and the night’s programming, prior to the Contest, following the same-but-different theme of the evening. Glitches and gaps made more noticeable because the scale was bigger, purposefully grander, a slow build of the rising expectation that always comes leading up to the Contest and the rising disconnect of the space being so large it felt like everyone watching it live was watching it on a delay.
Though I’d been waiting all night for it, when it finally started I had the sense that I’d missed the start. Missed the start while watching the first dunk, Jaquez Jr.’s leap to clear Shaq on the way up to the basket. This usually goes last, I thought, or probably murmured out loud. The people-as-props portion of the Dunk Contest comes after the more impressive technical feats that set the tone of each competitor.
Am I the rube? Frazzled because familiarity was nowhere in sight? Could a lot of this been alleviated if I hadn’t forgotten my glasses in Toronto? Maybe, but it wasn’t just me. The volume of a Dunk Contest audience, while watching the Dunk Contest, should be low to silent. Silent is the ideal. Wowed into it by what’s happened and maybe abut to happen again. The emcees instead prodded at every natural settling in sound for the crowd to get loud.
They feed off your energy! The host shouted into the mic, again and again.
Later, walking in the clean and biting cold of a midwestern night to media hospitality, Kyle and I joked that it’s the reverse. The relationship is not a parasitic one, where dunkers suck noise and bodily vibrations from the buzzing area of the arena. The relationship is that we feed off them. So, I suppose, still concerned with taking, but for sustenance to support what comes next.
Jaylen Brown was trying so hard. Performance in the Dunk Contest is the same as performance reliant on a live audience in any medium. Effort cannot be picked up on unless it’s in retrospect. To think how hard a comedian made you laugh while it seemed they were hardly trying, to think how easy an athlete makes a dunk look. The former easier than the latter to picture yourself doing, for most people, but that’s the ruse. The buy-in. The problem was that everyone knew he was the Capital S Star from the start, that he was meant to prove why that mattered.
How long have we fielded complaints, or been told the Dunk Contest would be that much better if only the stars of the league competed? That it welcomed stars in the budding of their careers a decade or two ago is true. When Nate Robinson rattled some of their names off to me over the phone earlier this week, it felt like an incantation to memory.
“Dr. J, Dominique Wilkins, Michael Jordan, Spud Webb, Zach LaVine — the guys that you see now — Vince Carter, Jason Richardson — so many greats — Tracy McGrady!” Robinson interrupted himself, “They made their names — Kobe Bryant as well — in the Dunk Contest as rookies first, as young guys. And then they solidified being a Hall of Famer and All-Star and all that stuff.”
And all that stuff. This Dunk Contest felt more concerned with all that stuff than with the natural rhythms of performance, of playing off what came before. On the surface, Brown had the formula, but it was hard to discern his commitment from the pressure to get him, a name like him, to commit. I especially hate that I can’t tell. Brown, in every likelihood, wanted to do it, but we’d’ve never been able to look at it that way because of being told how singularly important it was for the Dunk Contest to get itself a star.
Like Robinson said, Carter was in his third season when he did the best dunk in Contest history, then or since. Jordan was also in his third, Bryant was a rookie. The Dunk Contest has stars, but they’ve more in common with the real ones. We look back on their performances and find them so bright because we can’t look back without taking in the whole of what they went on to become, all that light.
We couldn’t, or the crowd in the arena certainly couldn’t, see Brown as genuine for how they booed him at every landed effort. The judges’ drastically sloping scoring didn’t help either. I don’t know if it was seeing the bounce and practice and gaffes that went into McClung and Toppin and Jaquez Jr.’s entries, and feeling the crowd turn whenever Brown tried, but the longer things went the worse I felt for him. He was trapped in something he could not have seen coming. Even if the dunks weren’t creative, or played into the right gimmicks (the glove), they were technically sound. It never would have mattered what he did because in that field he was always going to be the outlier. Even if Ja Morant, or Anthony Edwards (who, every time he’s been asked, up to and including his All-Star availability earlier Saturday, has said no — he doesn’t have the creativity, the flair, he says), deigned to put themselves in it, two people known and loved for their formulaic mastery of bounce x force, the collective lens would zoom too close. Like when recording something in front of you with your phone instead of just looking at the thing in front of you, we’d all miss the action itself.
I did record the last dunks. Brown’s and McClung’s. In Brown’s, the dunk is almost like a xerox, made duller, an abstraction of sound and light and lost somewhere in there the dunk itself. In McClung’s, I hit the button a half second too late and got him on the leap into takeoff, it’s too brief. The only reason I can tell, watching back, the dunk is over is because the peacock-tailed gouts of flame fan from the backboard — also a half-second staggered.
In Brown’s postgame presser he repeated something else that Robinson had sad to me over the phone, when I asked why he thought guys seemed hesitant to enter the Dunk Contest. He said he thought it was partially because of social media, that guys were afraid of being turned into a meme. Brown said he just wanted to come in and have fun with it, but him saying it was still a bit like a preface, he was getting ahead of what could be said or clipped about the night.
The answer isn’t no stars, or some mix of stars and “not”. It’s not a problem that needs an answer. The problem is pre-empting the actual experience. The purpose of a star in the Dunk Contest is to get people to want to watch, to make sure they don’t look away. The problem with that attention is it’s always going to have a preface. Like the other instruction the night’s host was constantly shouting, to make sure we all had our phones out, we were too primed for something to see what had happened.
When the judges shorted McClung on his first dunk (my favorite of the night fwiw), the whole arena came to the conclusion that the fix was in for Jaylen. Felt bad for Jaylen, like he was the unaware patsy in a conspiracy, or how I felt that time my mom wrote a letter about me to Oprah (no response).
It feels like Steph and Sarbina carried the All-Star weekend on their backs. I am not sure what happened to the dunking contest, but I think the rise of social media, which lets everyone see how talented people are at something we used to be amazed by, like Vince Carter east baying, makes us take for granted a person who can do something magical with a ball on a 10ft rim.
Every year, All-Star weekend proves to me that the game has changed. We used to run to the rim screaming "Kobe" and "Jordan," but now everyone is shooting from half court yelling "Curry." I think the reaction to the dunking contest and what we saw on Sunday proves it's a different time and a different game.