Rough glee, steady trust
Exhaustion is beating me like a drum but when I think about Saturday night, my throat gets tight and the reserves I’ve got left do something like thrum. If you told me a year ago I’d be going to the Dunk Contest, sitting 2 rows behind the All-Star stage, blood roaring up to meet everyone else’s in that arena shouting, screaming, after every dunk made, I wouldn’t even have known how to picture it. But I’ll try to lay out what it was like.
Fast, for starters. The whole night felt accelerated, the little pops of joy in players letting their guard slip, cheering their friends on, was enough to ease forward several notches in emotional velocity. It was a kind of rolling momentum, one that by the end, dunk contest narrowed down to Derrick Jones Jr. and Aaron Gordon, had every person in media row leaning forward, on their feet, phones up and mouths gaped open, looking around for affirmation after everything that happened to make sure that it had. I don’t think there was a single person in the arena at large not on their feet. One thing that hemmed at my heart was that with each consecutive dunk players standing on their feet spread wider and farther out onto the floor. Like they couldn’t get close enough. Couldn’t wait for what was happening. Their arms out to either side to daisy-chain the chests of the guys beside them, doing the same, so it was one giant and loose-knit group tangling up and falling all over their friends when the inevitable happened.
And it did, so many times. Before it even got to Gordon and Jones Jr. it happened with Connaughton, going up for his Billy Hoyle, then lifting his body up and over the basket, arms gone gigantic with adrenalin. He did it again jumping over Giannis, whose reactions all night were the same, just a wide-mouthed glee, speechless; Connaughton’s body slipping around in air still smokey from Damian Lillard’s getting to perform in front of his colleagues and friends and several thousand strangers. Connaughton knocking the ball first against the glass, decisively, time to spare, before rocketing it down into the basket. The look on his face when he landed what roaring in your ears feels like, an airplane’s engines, vroom.
Dwight Howard’s attempts made me nervous. For him, for what he could do, what he’d try to do, what if he couldn’t pull it off. The way it happened, him slipping sort of silently out of the running seemed for the best, and the shots of him standing courtside with everyone else later at least showed how happy he was watching time pass him by, forcefully, again and again, when someone else’s feet left the floor and headed for orbit.
Derrick Jones Jr. is a fierce sort of small wonder. The way his length and power and coiled up muscles all come loose at once to deliver. His velocity something that’s going to undo you as you try to work it out. The way he dunks isn’t as artistic as Zach LaVine did it, LaVine who genteelly sluices through air like it were water, but it is the feeling of dropping into water from way up high, the moment of suspension right after you hit and pass under, bubbles in pearled strings around you. The way he positioned Bam Adebayo, perfectly, little adjustments here, there, before he took two steps back to survey over Adebayo’s head his trajectory. Silent math in seconds. And then, like the kind of interruption you get walking in on someone crooning with their eyes closed, that big slab birthday cake got rolled out onto the court and the whole arena sang for him. He accepted. He conducted the familiar rise and fall of the tune. He got back to it, wrapping an arm around Bam’s belly and pulling him tenderly backward into place again.
There’s this moment that Adebayo looks back down the tunnel of dancers who rolled the cake out, to check on Jones Jr., that will split your heart like a tooth coming down perfect on a popcorn kernel.
And Jone Jr. misses. But he did it again. Lifting in the air like he was jumping off a cliff, at one split-second he was eye level with the rim, then above it, then coming down to it, enough time to whip his arm back before driving it forward.
After that, coming from the side to 360 between the legs, jumping over two guys and going between the legs as he cleared their heads, getting it bounced off the backboard by a guy he’d go up and over to catch the lob and swing it like a big, romantic Dutch windmill. The side backboard bounce, the coming from half-court to leap from the free throw line—his legs scissored at the knees, his chest forward like a Roman statue just chilling in a piazza fountain under a lazy Tuscan sun—flying forward, and up, at speed.
And what can you say about Aaron Gordon that you don’t already understand, inherently, by watching him being the only one bouncing up and down on the stage during Dunk Contest introductions? He loves this. The joy rolling off him was infrared. When they got to the dunk off there was never any hesitation from him, any indication that he was coming up short on ideas. The way the rest of us will sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and frantically jot down things that have come to us in dreams is what Gordon does with dunk ideas, but his are coherent when he reads them back the next morning. More than that, the mechanics completely worked out.
They had him go last in the first round and he was still bouncing when he got out there. He missed, too, which might be the signal for the champion dunker getting their nerves out. When he delivered it, it went with two hands. First palmed, between his legs, then backward, over his head, his body spun out and around, landing to skip sidelong down the court, screaming. When Gordon dunks you get the feeling he is consuming something for how high energy spikes, like it’s working all the way down in his blood.
He used a very game but ginger with nerves Chance the Rapper as a pedestal a few times. And I have to stress again that if you watch these dunks back, before every one, Gordon is GRINNING. He is hopping and smiling and shouting out to himself, he is so happy to be doing this. The first time he sort of pounces over Chance, bringing the ball down between his knees before yanking it back up over his shoulder. Then what, there was a one handed halfway around the world, a bounce against the side of the backboard that he moves heaven and earth in time to grab and lift with one arm as he spins, his other arm somehow laying down at his side like he doesn’t even need it for push. One handed under his leg taking off from outside the key and then the thing that had thousands of people audibly gasp.
Tacko. He was going to jump over Tacko Fall—7’5” and shy as they come. Fall walking onto the court, hands folded in front of his chest. Players coming up beside him to cheer, hold to his jacket like some kind of general or saint. Kemba Walker at his elbow, a familiar. Dwight Howard, maybe too excited.
If you want to talk about things that crystallize this contest—the quiet seconds that stretch, everyone trying to time their breath right, how physical power will knock you flat before you’ve seen it coming, rough glee, steady trust—it’s Fall’s face as he waits in front of the hoop.
And Gordon does it. Leap frogs up and over, connecting only where Fall’s hands stayed up over his head and maybe, a split second depending on the replay you watch, where the ball fit in the space between their bodies. The wilder thing is that it seemed a less likely thing that he wouldn’t. All my nerves were for Fall, who walked through the resulting crush going for Gordon when he finished. I know Fall and Gordon shared words after but I wish he could have been in the middle of that bacchanal mob too.
You already know what happened. You know Gordon should have won, or Gordon and Jones Jr. should have tied, you know the numbers might have been wrong. But the look on Gordon’s face when the scores came up, all the looks on his face as he goes through it in real time, in front of everyone, his hands roving all over his head, hiding his face, all that joy he had, inverting. Derrick Jones Jr. didn’t smile, had a hard time raising his arms. Watching in the arena I got the sense that him, along with everyone else, had already conceded. Had maybe conceded it three dunks prior but was along for the rare, extended ride, not wanting a winner as much as not wanting it to stop. I’d never been in a place before where so much joy, its imperceptible element infused in the air, was sucked out so quickly. It felt like we were heaving, a little for breath and more for where it all went. Everyone was waiting for an explanation, for someone to fess up to the crime we’d all witnessed or at least admit they really blew the math.
At the postgame table Gordon lifted a shaky hand to show his wrist where it was cut and bruised, swelling each second. He said his body was “intolerant to dunking”, he meant it honestly, explained how you can condition your body to knocking its softest parts against an unyielding rim (“That's just kind of like what happens when you dunk hard? People forget that that's iron?” The inflection is direct from the official transcript and how he said it, like he was asking us to see what this was doing to him). The hardest was his disbelief, his eyes wide and head shaking between the questions. Someone asked him how to jump as high as he did and he was incredulous, not upset, that that could be a question, right then. But he answered,
“You want to learn how to dunk? You want to go through dunk training?”
“Yeah.” Replied the reporter, a poor soul whose shock, I hoped, had just worn them in a weird way.
“Well, you got to work out a lot. You got to work your legs. Plyometrics, jump, weight bands. You got to work out a lot. Work out every day I do this.”
My heart dropped into my stomach and my stomach pushed into my throat. When Gordon said he was done with the contest I was still waiting for someone to rush in with the error, everyone was. Saturday was the best Dunk Contest I’d ever seen and not because the heavy thunks of the ball being delivered so close to me metronomed with my pulse. It just was. It was lucky moments stretched to gauze that wrapped so securely your sense that joy was a real thing, capable of replicating via human will and your own witness to it. That you can bolster your own heart by taking something way too serious, exactly as you’re meant to.