In the 1980's, the world was divided in a way that only young minds could truly understand:
There were those who could graze the bottom of the net.
There were those who could grab the net.
There were those who could touch the rim.
There were those who could grab the rim.
There were those who could dunk a small, round object—maybe a tennis ball or a volleyball—through the rim.
There were those who could dunk.
And then, there was Darryl F*cking Dawkins.
I was still a kid then, and this hierarchy settled deep within me, coursing from my feet to my fingertips like a fire of wonder and want. I was somewhere in that first group, occasionally, desperately leaping with all the might my small body could summon, just managing to graze the soft, puffy threads of the net in the elementary school gym in Seal Beach, California. I’d been playing basketball for three years by then, mastering my hook shot on McGaugh's asphalt courts when I wasn't in the gym with my team, but one year, the team I was on lost every game. And so, it was that year I began to see myself for what I was—a resident of the very bottom of the pyramid. With this came an intensification of a fantasy life, filled with dreams of power, of flight, of soaring beyond the limitations of my own body.
That hierarchy, of course, would eventually give way to the more nebulous traps of adulthood, where the vertical gains of our youth are replaced with less tangible, less triumphant pursuits. I never did make it to the sixth level. I got close once, though. Just once. I can still picture it, a kind of fading photograph in my memory, me, a teenager, pushing a ball through an outdoor rim. The shot felt like a dunk. It felt as if I’d broken through some invisible barrier. But because I could never repeat it with any kind of regularity, I’ve come to believe that the rim was slightly lower than regulation, or that maybe it was a dream—those blurry, half-remembered moments that never quite settle into reality.
Dreams come and go. That’s the truth of it. Now I’m pushing fifty, an age when it’s hard to see life as anything but a slow descent—a decline, if I’m being honest. And yet, even now, life can astonish you. Think about it—being just short of touching the bottom of the net, feeling the weight of that impossible distance, and then discovering that somewhere, out there in the world, there’s a man who can leap so high, so forcefully, that he shatters the entire backboard with his dunk. That’s something else, isn’t it? The counterpoint to the feeling of loss isn’t, exactly, winning. It’s imagining what Darryl Dawkins could do. It’s that moment when the limits you know are shattered by the force of something wild, something beyond.
May you all know Lovetron.
