The dunk contest holds a very special place in our hearts over here at No Regard, as it does in the hearts of most NBA fans. While the All-Star game itself is generally a fairly entertaining event, the weekend's pinnacle arguably comes at the end of Saturday night, when we get to watch four of the world's greatest jumpers face off in a battle of athleticism and creativity.
This year's competition seems poised to generate some memorable jams, but DeMar, Serge, Blake, and JaVale will have to step it up if they want to match these staff all-time favorites.
Andrew Abides: Dwight Howard's Superman (2008)
My infatuation with the dunk contest has long bordered on mania. Since I first learned the names Cedric Ceballos and Harold Miner, my love for dunks has resided within 10 feet on either side of the border between obsession and sickness. To put it bluntly: I still have the page I ripped out of Slam Magazine that featured Lil Penny bemoaning that cancelled 1998 dunk contest.
Needless to say, I was deeply affected as I watched the contest become stale in the years leading up to Dwight's ascension.
I was one of the many who proclaimed at the time that the slam exhibition absolutely needed saving. But not only because the league's big names were afraid to follow Vince's act from 2000, leaving the dunking responsibilities to players like Chris Anderson and Jason Richardson, but also because the contest had started to resemble a figure skating competition. There was an established set of maneuvers that a dunker needed to present, in whatever order and fashion he deemed worthy, if he wanted a real shot at being mentioned alongside Michael and Dominique and JR Rider. Even Vince adhered to the canon (giving his own astronomical takes on both the East Bay Funk Dunk and the free throw line jam), before adding his own flourish to it (the elbow finish).
On February 16, 2008—the same night Gerald Green’s NBA career peaked—Dwight eschewed all the previous tropes and reinvented what a dunk looked like. The knock on this dunk has always been that he didn’t actually dunk the ball, he just threw it through the hoop from a few inches away. So what was it then? A floater? Stop it. This is dunking 2.0. Instead of worrying about precisely where he took off from or executing any number of arbitrary maneuvers that allow us to categorize dunks, he simply leaped from as far out as he could muster, jumped as high as he possibly could, and threw the ball down with great vengeance and furious anger.
It’s possible to read this burst of sickening fury as a direct and contrarian response to LeBron’s corporate assertion that “the dunk contest is bourgeois.” No, LeBron, it’s not. For all it's seemingly high-class spectacle and pageantry (which, ironically, Dwight would escalate to nauseating heights the next year, almost breaking the goddamn Lincoln Log tower he just rebuilt), the contest works because dunks are, at their best, visceral reminders of human potential. A great dunk reaches into our soul and tickles our most base sensory receptors, regularly forcing us to react physically, violently shudder at the carnage being wrought by Dwight or Rose or Kemp or Griffin or Smith (you can pick which one I'm talking about). There’s no barrier—educational, fiscal, professional or otherwise—to enjoying a really perfect dunk.
And Dwight’s Superman dunk was damn close to perfect. Only he should have done one thing differently: Leave the cape at home. This dunk was not superhuman, it was, in fact extraordinarily terrestrial. It was the dunk of the working class, of the people.
The panel of judges they got for this contest is pretty sick.
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