How to dunk on basketball legends

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Dunks - the desperate beauty of basketball: who figured out how dangerous they are and were they really banned because of racism? - Bank shot - Blogs

Answering the main questions.

Where did dunks come from?

When James Naismith invented basketball, he couldn't even imagine how his idea could be perverted like this: no dunks, that is, the direct direction of the ball into the basket with his hands touching it, were certainly not supposed. The defect was a consequence of the existing infrastructure. In the gyms of that era, the treadmill was on the balcony, at a height of three meters, and it was there that it was decided to hang peach baskets. The architectural feature of the building determined the history of the game.

Naismith was guided by the fact that basketball would be a sport for people of a standard build, and therefore no one would reach into the basket with their hands.

The erroneous calculations were revealed rather quickly.

Already in the 10s, there were people in the regional leagues in the American East who knew how to score from above. For this, it was not even always necessary to have good height and jump. For example, we know of a dodgy, sly-eyed citizen named Jack Inglis from New York. Some matches then took place on playgrounds fenced with nets. As he writes in the book "Stories of the Knicks" -1969/70" Bill Gutman, the aforementioned gentleman, "jumped onto the net under the hoop, climbed on it to ring height, and while the defenders watched helplessly, took the pass from a partner and put it in the goal."

Officially, the first dunk was recorded at the Olympics in 1936 and, of course, caused a scandal. Its author is Joe Fortenberry, the two-meter captain of the American team. He decided that the unsportsmanlike connotations of a throw from above, which were in use within the country, could be forgotten in the framework of an international tournament, and therefore began to demonstrate his physical superiority over Japanese athletes, including with the help of ethically unacceptable techniques. Fortenberry - as the New York Times wrote at the time - "showed an amazing ability to plunge the ball right into the ring as if a cafeteria visitor plunged a bun into coffee. "

The Japanese then came up with the idea of ​​banning players over 187 centimeters tall from participating in basketball games. Not only did Fortenberry demoralize them with unprecedented dunks, but the rest of the Americans were passing the ball at a height that was inaccessible to the Asians.

White can jump. Best white dunkers in NBA history

Fortenberry has gone down in history, but has always said he wasn't the first person to dunk. There are a number of indications that by the 1930s, overhead throws were already firmly labeled “dunk shots”. Thus, the publication of the Woodland Daily Democrat at 1933rd reports on the exploits of UCLA star Barney Dobbas, who scored 27 out of 42 points against the Gentlemen of Chico State and also "cut through the defense, dribbled the floor and hit another 'dunk' shot to take out your team ahead.

In general, both the dunks themselves and their designation were present in basketball almost from the very beginning (they say that in the zero years of the 20th century, the term “dunk” could mean any defeat of the hoop). The problem is that this version of the ring attack remained semi-forbidden, and therefore was perceived as the “ugly duckling” of the basketball world - as something obscene, violating the principles of the sport of the game, immoral.

Why were dunks banned?

By the 1940s and beyond, basketball looked less and less like the game that gained interest at the turn of the century. More and more players under two meters appeared in the teams, and the ball was passed to each other with much less enthusiasm (initially, it was in gambling that its meaning was).

Dunks, however, had many internal limitations.

Ethical stigma did not disappear until the 70s.

“I knew how to bet on top, translate behind my back and everything else,” said Oscar Robertson. – I got nailed from above back in school, and my coach gave me a blast, so I never did that again. Dunks are bullshit, public game . All the stars of my era could bet on top, but did not understand why they needed it. We respected each other too much to put each other through. Dunk, transfer behind the back and other rubbish - this does not require any equipment. I was taught in school what a good shot is, how to get close to the rim, how every possession counts.”

And besides, it was simply dangerous to health. The person who put it on top was obviously considered a provocateur and they tried to punish him right on the floor - for example, they rolled under him when he landed. In an era when full-scale fights, fisticuffs, elbow strikes were a common part of the process, no one really wanted to take risks. It is known that Wilt Chamberlain put in a ring suspended at a height of 3.5 meters, but in the NBA the super-scoring center was not famous for his dunks, but for his elegant hanging of the ball over the ring. This was explained by the fact that the giant was embarrassed by his strength and was worried that he was portrayed as an ordinary thug, and not a skilled player.

“In those days, the unwritten rule was that a high jumper would be taken out of the game,” explained Satch Sanders.

But still, the dunks crawled under the surface. Occasionally, in the form of entertainment for fans before matches, as demonstrative acts of revenge (for example, an enraged Chamberlain crippled several rivals in his hearts - Johnny Kerr assured that he scored the ball with such force that he broke his toe).

Bill Russell was the first to start batting regularly. A legend of such magnitude and such harmfulness (the center was famous for his quarrelsome character, was constantly dissatisfied with everyone and personally dealt with offenders) dunks said goodbye.

“Russell dropped his parachutes after Kuzi's passes, but there was no outrageousness,” Slater Martin explained. - He just caught the ball in the air and sent it to the ring. Nothing special. We put up with it: it was Bill's throw. He did not stick out himself in any way, did not say anything, did not wave his hands. We didn't see the dunk as a throw that required special skill. If you can jump up, then you are able to get the ball into the ring. And what's next?

And, of course, the aesthetic component of the dunks was completely inaccessible to the participants of the competition. On the contrary: they were considered the epitome of the ugliness of the changed game, since the 40s, the movement has become louder and louder to raise the rings higher and deprive the big players of the opportunity to score from above (and then only the “big” ones were dunked, for whom it was simply more convenient than inventing any another throw).

Fog Allen, a student of James Naismith in Kansas, formed a group of coaches and journalists who, for decades, have expressed concern about the declining technique of basketball players and exposed the giants who are trying to take basketball away from kids.

« There shouldn't be any dunks in basketball. The dunk is not a demonstration of basketball skill, but only a demonstration of the growth of , Allen wrote in the 37th in the book For the Best Basketball. “Someday there will be a whole team of giants, both smart and fast, they will put the ball into the ring with one hand, like children who dip coins into gum machines . .. But let them look for some other sport for themselves.”

The activists who joined Allen didn't like anything.

No retreat from throws. They complained that instead of shooting from a distance, the ball was simply delivered under the ring, where it was ferried to the target.

Not that tall players brush off balls falling into the hoop. (Then there was no rule forbidding this).

No increase in performance. In their opinion, this devalued the importance of the points scored.

The way out seemed simple to them: lift the rings half a meter. Such experiments were carried out repeatedly: in the 34th year, during the life of James Naismith, at the University of Kansas, in the 40th - at the University of Washington, in the 54th - already in the NBA, in the match between the Lakers and Milwaukee.

Although all the participants gave overwhelmingly positive feedback, no one had the guts to get it all down on paper.

The rules, of course, did not change at all in the way that Allen and his supporters wanted. The ring remained in place, and the role of the “big ones” was limited due to the restriction of “paint” and the ban on “holtending”.

And the NCAA came to an outright ban on the dunk. In the student league, it was impossible to bet on top from 67th to 76th.

The NCAA dunks came from Oklahoma's Bob Courland: one of basketball's first seven-footers "accidentally" hit overhead in '44, after which overhand throws became acceptable as unobtrusive "accidents."

Introducing the ban, the league argued it all the same: a large number of injuries under the shields (one and a half thousand cases per year), damaged property (allegedly the Houston players somehow bent the ring), as well as the standard argument “dunk is a throw that does not require no skill” ...

But the timing was extremely unfortunate.

First, in the 66th NCAA champion was the team of Don Haskins from West Texas, the same team that first had a starting five of black guys.

Secondly, in 1967, young Lew Elsindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) set the NCAA on fire: a UCLA record in the first match, an undefeated game, a champion title and a bunch of personal regalia.

The dunking ban became known as the Lew Elsindor Rule. And he himself saw the true reasons not even for the desire to restrain himself, but in the broader factor of racism.

“For me, the no-dunk rule is blatant discrimination,” he said at the time. - If you analyze the situation, you will understand that those who can bet on top are mostly blacks. Dunk is one of the main ways to entertain people, and there is no reason to refuse it, except for one: to prevent this and other niggas from commanding this sport .

The funny thing is that many years later it turned out that one of the initiators of the ban was John Wooden, Jabbar's coach at UCLA.

“Coach, how could you vote for a ban?” retells their explanation in the center's autobiography. “I thought it would be a boon for the game.” "Whose games? It has made life more difficult for UCLA than for anyone else. " "It's an ugly throw, Karim, it's nothing but brute force." I was amazed: I was not famous for brute force. “Basketball is a team effort. A dunk is just a way to humiliate an opponent.”

Dunk has not ceased to be a source of scandal. But now it has also acquired pronounced cultural associations. Coach Robert Bounce further tightened Jabbar's language: " They're trying to stop the 190cm bros from jacking off the crowds and dunking the huge white guys... Everybody knows that dunking is a trademark of black street basketball."

How did the dunk come into fashion?

America lived in a state of racial segregation. Basketball also lived in a state of racial segregation.

The NBA celebrated team basketball and treated dunking as something offensive. At the same time, stories about the legendary dunkers of street basketball were heard from a parallel dimension: Earl "Goat" Manigault, Herman "Helicopter" Novings, Joe "Destroyer" Hammond ...

Philosophical differences were irreconcilable.

“I look at today's players, all these 360 ​​dunks and all that crap, and I'm like, 'We've never done that kind of stuff,'” said Wilt Chamberlain. Not because we didn't know how to do it. Do you really think that Wilt Chamberlain or Elgin Baylor couldn't make a mind-blowing dunk? You should look at our trainings. But there was a strict code of conduct. Yes, you could sometimes score from above, but not in order to humiliate the opponent . I saw a guy put in a crazy dunk here, even though his team is burning 20 points. What the hell is this? If you tried that in my time, you'd have your leg broken. It's all the psychology of the Globetrotters, the show comes first. Our game was number one."

The differences were irreconcilable... But the parallel reality was impossible to hide.

Michael Jordan's idol David Thompson spent his entire career at the university during the dunking ban. Somehow, he couldn't resist.

“It was very difficult for me not to score from above when you are constantly flying over the ring,” he said. – It would have been easier to catch passes and put them in the basket right away, but I had to dodge. At the end of the last game of my last season, I ran away. Couldn't turn down this opportunity. They gave me a technical one, but the stands exploded with applause. My coach Norm Sloan replaced me immediately."

Dunks broke into the official world. Even smuggling.

In the late 60s, the strict, conservative NBA has a daring competitor with crazy innovations - the ABA. First of all, the new league is moving away from team basketball and focusing on promoting strong personalities, offensive basketball, and the hardest hitting game in the game, which is 90,135 three-pointers 90,136 dunks. It is no coincidence that the most exciting performers of the era are in the new league: David Thompson, Julius Irving, George Gervin, Gus Johnson, Moses Malone ... The ABA has taken the power of black street basketball and released it into the professional basketball dimension.

“In the NBA, if they bet through you, you had to clean his face,” Irving said. “But in the ABA, dunking has become part of the game. The ABA was betting on everything new. So we didn't bother with dunks. When I got into the NBA, Dave Cowens told me: “If you bet through someone, your head will be torn off.” I told him that I would still continue to bet from above, because this is the most effective throw, this is part of my game. He was not mistaken: they really tried to tear off my head, but they did not succeed.

In 1976, the last year of its existence, the ABA logically came up with the idea of ​​an overhand throw contest.

"The dunk meant a lot more to the ABA than it does to the NBA today," Dan Issel explained. – It was a declaration of your talent and your male superiority . He was so important to the ABA that the pre-match warm-ups turned into a show. For example, the Nets had this guy Ollie Taylor, who just went crazy. He did windmills, he did roundabout dunks, everything you can imagine, and the stands were on their ears before the game even started. The competition was a continuation of this idea.”

It is important to understand that everything was spontaneous in that first competition. And he himself was invented simply as a way to somehow keep the fans busy during the break. And the dunkers spent about zero minutes preparing something original, and mostly improvised. And there was no special basis for organizing a real competition.

But that very first contest summed up everything that ABA was. And that's why it happened.

76th is the time of the first great dunk, Julius Irving's final run from the free throw line.

The 76th is an official confirmation that dunks are not only legalized (the NCAA lifted the ban just then), but have already come into vogue with might and main.

The 76th is the moment that radically changes basketball and its entire history. Dunk returns as a beautiful swan and almost the main symbol of the game - its marketing ram, evidence of its athletic superiority, its claim to violate the laws of physics and reveal alien connections.

The help of the ABA and its creative approach accelerated the inevitable process. In the 70s, basketball is increasingly becoming a game of blacks, which, in particular, implies serious adjustments to the gentleman's code.

Interestingly, the dissatisfaction with the fact that basketball is going "black" in the media turns into dissatisfaction with the fact that basketball is becoming a game of dunking. In 1981, one author complains that "if the gorillas broke out of the zoo and started playing basketball, they would only bet from above" . An LA Times journalist complains that the dimensions of modern basketball players "no longer fit the shackles of slave courts." And when NBC chose college league games over professional games, their manager explained that "the NBA has become too black for many fans to like."

How did dunk become art?

Aestheticization of dunk is such an integral part of the 80s that it is not customary to talk about it. The NBA is believed to have been saved by Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. Well, maximum - Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and David Stern. In fact, the NBA was saved by Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, David Stern and dunks, beautiful and varied.

First of all, it is worth noting the diversity.

For all their ability to fly, Irving, Thompson and the others were pretty straight forward. The first who began to discover new essences of dunk was a man from that very Jordanian "cocaine circus" - Orlando Woolridge. He scored first from above, carrying the ball between his legs. And he showed that there is much more to the dunk than pure athleticism, the amplitude of the jump, or even the flowing Afro hairstyle.

The great ones followed him.

Michael Jordan did not conquer the world in one fell swoop. It took him several stages to do this, and at the first of them he appeared as His Air, a person who seemed to be able to soar on the top, as if inaccessible to gravity, as if he was a realistic version of a superhero. Superman flies unnaturally, Spiderman, Carlson and Batman use additional devices, but Jordan, Jordan is the embodiment of harmony and confirmation that this element is not so alien, albeit for not quite a person.

In the late 80s, Jordan and Dominic Wilkins make the dunk contest one of the NBA calendar year's highlights.

Their numbers don't look very good now. But three key things need to be said:

1. These contests produced some legendary dunks, including Jordan's dunk, where he almost lays down in the air, and Wilkins' dunk mill.

2. At this point, slamdunk contests become a very prestigious event and a special pride of the league: the NBA managed to make something, strictly speaking, very loosely related to basketball, an original standalone spectacle and considered it necessary to stimulate interest further.

3. The League saw an abyss of aesthetic potential in the throw from above and managed to draw from it for more than 30 years.

The history of competitions is very unstable: they turn out to be completely different, sometimes disastrous, sometimes contradictory, they alternate depressive fiascos and return to resonant confrontations between Jordan and Wilkins, they balance between closing and opening a window to a separate sport. It is already clear that all these fluctuations are normal. Competitions evolve, albeit in fits and starts, and systematically explore the beauty and originality of the dunk: the athletic greatness of Jordan and Wilkins is taken to a new level by the athletic greatness of first Vince Carter and Jason Richardson, and then Aron Gordon and Zach Lavin; the fantasies of Dee Brown and Cedric Cebalos return with the fantasies of Blake Griffin, JaVale McGee and Dwight Howard, the need for crumbs in the 80s is satisfied by Spudd Webb, the need for crumbs in the 2000s is Nate Robinson, every year the balance between the originality of the idea and the effect of execution is adjusted ...

Dunk - in this case, as an autonomous element, echoing and exceeding in elegance any body movement from figure skating - added a much-needed component of pure aesthetics to basketball . In other sports, exceptional goals bring beauty, but in basketball they found a way to correct standardized shots like this.

It can hardly be considered a coincidence that the league started to grow at the moment when they stopped considering dunks as a scandal.

How did the dunk turn into a weapon of destruction?

The aesthetics of dunk, however, like any aesthetics, is not clear to everyone. What feels much better is the humiliation/destruction/self-affirmation that this element has from the very beginning.

Dunks developed in two directions.

From above - from the NBA office - they set the course for technicality, fantasy, new horizons of possibilities.

From below - from the non-NBA ghetto - an impulse of a different nature came.

Basketball philosophers and purists saw no place for the dunk in basketball as early as the aristocratic 1920s and 1930s. In the 60s, Wilt Chamberlain and Oscar Robertson did not understand where the desire to destroy colleagues comes from. Even the guys from the semi-underground ABA arranged everything as delicately as possible.

Here, for example, is another legendary dunk - Julius Irving esthetes against the tangible background of Michael Cooper. It's obvious that the Lakers forward isn't having a lot of fun, but it's hard to find a snub in this moment.

One way or another, the NBA player culture went downhill in the late 80s. Boys from high school, mommy gangsters, "too much too soon"... The League was still badass, but it had lost the respect for each other that previous generations had. For the new one, the dunk turned out to be the best way to settle scores, stick out oneself, and discredit enemies.

The cultural change was evident.

“Throwing is a lost art,” lamented Doug Collins. - Now the entire NBA is obsessed with a one-on-one game, a constant confrontation, the main weapon of which is the dunk. You run in and bet through me, then I land six shots through you, but your one dunk counts as a stronger statement than my six mid-range shots.”

One of the most significant figures of the era is Sean Kemp. The beast of street basketball infiltrated the NBA in the form of a hyper-athletic power forward who didn't even make it to a year of college due to various dubious stories. The consequences were horrendous: by acquiring assistant Payton and liberal coach Carl as partners, Kemp emphasized his physical dominance with a hurricane of alley-ups, crazy passes, fearless flights. Moreover, his dunks have always been an expression of contempt, forceful suppression, metaphysical destruction. Therefore, he did not limit himself only to them, but also mocked the defeated, conveyed his thoughts in a variety of ways, celebrated picturesquely and generally made a whole ritual out of dunk, noting that something completely unusual had happened, forever disgracing the opponent and affirming the complete superiority of Kemp himself.

A bunch of Payton and Kemp drove the opponent through the corridor of endless parachutes and dunks and never hid that this offensive procedure was the main reason for entering the floor. Representatives of the old school paid attention to something else. Sonics signature combo is not alley-oops. Sonics' trademark combo is when an unclean pair ran out to the ring and could easily put the ball in the ring, but instead they started to invent some kind of game, the ball bounced off the opponent, and their team received an immediate counterattack and a four-point slap in the face.

This attitude - a commitment to constant confrontation, where the dunk was the only argument - infected the entire league. From the early 90s to the mid 2000s, we saw some of the best dunks in basketball history. And, of course, what makes them the best is precisely the fact that they grew out of sincere, unrestrained, splashing hatred .

Tom Chambers plunged his knees into Mark Jackson's chest.

Dominic Wilkins killed Larry Bird.

Dikembe Mutombo begged Michael Jordan to do something humiliating to him.

Kobe baptized Dwight Howard.

Vince Carter shook the fundamentality of Tim Duncan.

Shaquille O'Neal wrapped his panties around Chris Dudley's head.

Baron Davis crushed Andrey Kirilenko.

Kevin Johnson stuck through Hakim Olajuwon.

John Starks at least put Chicago in its place.

Ricky Davis inflicted a mental injury on Steve Nash.

Scottie Pippen wiped his feet on the corpse of Patrick Ewing.

Each of these moments is a separate story with an original plot, unique relationships between characters, unique surroundings. But it is important to understand that they all grew out of the atmosphere of a particular era, which glorified the destruction dunk as the highest value in basketball.

It was against this backdrop that the undisputedly best dunk in basketball history, the death dunk, was born: Vince Carter climbed into the clouds to jump over a seven-foot mountain in the form of Frederick Weiss.

Carter has taken all the best from the great masters of the 80s-90s and compiled a variety of messages in his now classic style. Here are the turntables of Dominic Wilkins, and the “lulling of the ball” by Julius Irving, and the removals from below by Jordan - but there are already enough imitators, and in the case of Carter, everything was determined by the ability to take off above the floor and soar above it as only he could.

The cleanliness here is simply cinematic. We won't see anything better. Including because those ideals - no matter how controversial they may be - are gone forever.

How dangerous are dunks?

Very.

But somehow it was not customary to think and reason about this.

For quite a long time, the danger from dunks was assessed only by the degree of material damage. Both the NCAA leadership and the club bosses did not hide the fact that they are much more worried about expensive equipment than for their players. And therefore they were forbidden to bet on top not only during games, but also during warm-ups. There were also direct threats that the cost of broken shields and mangled rings would be deducted from tiny salaries.

It only helped a little. In the 1960s, Baltimore's 198-centimeter Gus Johnson became famous for breaking three shields over the course of several years. (For entourage: he had a gold star inserted on his tooth, and once he touched a point at a height of 3. 5 meters from the floor in a bar on a dare). And in '70, Pittsburgh's Charlie "Helicopter" Hentz took the ABA's emphasis on dunking and fun too literally and won the game against the Carolinas in the original way. In the course of one game, he managed to first tear off the ring, and then also break the shield after replacing the rack: the hosts' coach consulted with the referees and decided to end the matter and give the victory to the raging vandal.

In 1976, not only did the dunk revolution take place, but also the shield revolution: Arthur Erhat proposed a new ring design that minimized damage from the most powerful throws from above. There were more and more danks, but only a few managed to imagine a throw from above in its dangerous form. Michael Jordan is extremely lucky. But Darryl Dawkins and Shaquille O'Neal deliberately created the image of omnipotent destroyers and raped the shields with all their remarkable strength.

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