The heady historical past of the slam dunk (and the way avenue model stormed the NBA)

Likelihood is you’ve heard of Julius Erving and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. You would need to be culturally illiterate to be unfamiliar with Michael Jordan. However I’d wager cash that you simply don’t know the story of Jack Inglis, who shares area with the legends in Mike Sielski’s new guide “Magic within the Air.”

Inglis performed professional basketball within the World Warfare I period within the New York State League and Pennsylvania State League. This was when basketball courts have been wrapped in wire fencing, or cages (therefore using the phrase “cagers” to explain basketball gamers). Inglis, an outstanding athlete for his day, was identified to climb up the fence alongside the basket, seize a move with one hand, and drop it into the ring from above. It was, as Sielski writes, “an early model of the slam dunk.”

That is the type of hoops historical past you didn’t know you craved, and which Sielski’s quick break of a dunk examine delivers in abundance. However “Magic” does greater than present juicy tidbits. In lacing up a vigorous historical past of the slam dunk, Sielski, a sports activities columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer who writes along with his occupation’s attribute taste and aptitude, digs into the social and racial implications of sports activities’ most fun play. He makes use of the tales of key athletes and moments to color a much bigger image of a sport’s evolution from earthbound (and somewhat gradual) competitors to sky-high (and really quick) exuberance. “Magic within the Air” honors the dunk as an incredible feat of American improvisation, in all probability not as vital as jazz however not solely dissimilar.

Mike Sielski, creator of “Magic within the Air.”

(Bob Zilahy)

Like most revolutionary developments, the rise of the dunk struck concern within the institution’s coronary heart. The NCAA even banned the dunk from 1967 to 1976, which, when you consider it, is remarkably silly: Hey, let’s get rid of probably the most kinetic a part of the sport, the play that makes followers stand and cheer like no different. As Sielski writes, “The rule appeared at the beginning a strategy to squelch the person expression and athleticism that characterised the game all through city America and that was intrinsic to the style during which Black athletes performed it.”

Briefly, the dunk was simply too avenue. The ban was loudly championed by legendary Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp, whose all-white squad had simply been spanked within the finals by a Texas Western (now College of Texas at El Paso) group that made historical past by beginning 5 Black gamers. “It wasn’t simply that gamers have been dunking,” Sielski writes. “It was that Black gamers have been dunking. They usually have been dunking whereas they have been beating his group.” (Paradoxically, one of the best participant on that Kentucky group, Pat Riley, would go on to preside over the dunk-happy Showtime Lakers groups of the ’80s).

There are a lot of approaches one may take towards writing such a guide. A stats and analytics obsessive, like Henry Abbott, may unfurl a examine of leaping launch factors and recreation conditions during which the dunk makes probably the most sense. A run-of-the-mill aggregator may produce a glorified, book-length weblog publish rating one of the best dunks and dunkers. Sielski chooses to use a refreshingly human, old-school contact; “Magic within the Air” reads like a sequence of deeply reported, interconnected characteristic tales, wealthy in historical past and authorial voice.

When Sielski writes in regards to the saga of Earl “The Goat” Manigault, a 6-foot-1 New York playground legend who soared among the many giants however couldn’t keep away from heroin and different lures of the streets, he’s additionally writing about why Manigault’s story is catnip to (normally white) journalists searching for a sure type of story — a narrative Manigault was at all times joyful to inform. “Go forward,” Sielski writes. “Pull up a chair or knock on his door, should you may pin down the place he lived. He would inform you all about it, be genuinely wistful about his missed alternatives, open up and provide the items. No athlete was within the passenger’s seat for extra reporter ride-alongs than The Goat.”

There are, after all, larger names right here as nicely. They embody Jordan, whose model, hold time and acrobatic dunking have been as well-liked in company boardrooms as they have been on playgrounds; Invoice Russell and Wilt Chamberlain, who shook up the sport with their athleticism and dimension within the ’50s and ’60s; and David “Skywalker” Thompson, who, at 6-foot-4, dominated faculty basketball whereas starring for North Carolina State however needed to accept gently laying the ball in as a result of dunk ban. (Did we point out how silly the dunk ban was?)

This has quietly been an incredible period for basketball books, together with Wealthy Cohen’s “When the Sport Was Warfare,” Chris Herring’s “Blood within the Backyard,” Jeff Pearlman’s “Showtime” (about these Riley Laker groups), and Hanif Abdurraqib’s “There’s All the time This 12 months.” “Magic within the Air” belongs on the highest shelf with these. For a examine of life above the rim, its tone is down-to-earth and in addition briskly colloquial and infused with infectious ardour for the game.

Chris Vognar is a contract tradition author.