Free Year of the Dunk by Asher Price

totally efficient. Almost all these guys look like they’re trying.”
    The players, wearing black uniforms—some sized as large as XXXL—rotated, over the course of a couple of hours, between the different workout stations. The place was oddly quiet, muffledlike a mitten, despite the huge men stomping around. In the vast, hollowed-out belly of the practice facility bubble, they appeared to me as a thousand Jonahs, each mumbling a prayer for his salvation. So much—contracts, money, esteem—rode on the outcome of just a few tests.
    Gathered in a corner of the practice bubble by the facility’s concrete loading dock, one group, including Jamal Carter, prepared to jump. One at a time they stood next to a tall vertical staff hinged up high with a host of perpendicular rods that were ready to swing with the slightest nudge. This device is called a Vertec. The aim is to touch the highest possible rod. Eric Lougas, the friendly football official from Atlanta, stood above them on a stepladder, going through the instructions.
    “First I’m going to measure your reach with your arm straight above your head,” he said, striking the role of a benevolent teacher. “Then you’re going to get two jumps. Don’t swing the hell out of your hand, because if you do, what does that mean? It means you’re using all your energy to bring your hand all the way back. Just tap it.”
    Soon it was Jamal’s turn. He rolled his neck back and forth and peered up at the Vertec. Then he went into a half squat and rolled his way up: 18 inches. About my vertical, except he had at least 120 pounds on me.
    Lougas used the stick like a croupier to reset the rods.
    Next up was Tommy White, a handsome six-foot-tall, 210-pound cornerback who had graduated from Grambling two years earlier. He had told me he’d spent the last two years as a vegetarian while dedicating his life to working out and practicing yoga. He stepped beneath the Vertec and rocked down and up, down and up, down and up, and each time I was sure he would jump. Finally, he exploded into the air with a wail and snapped the rods.
    “Thirty-eight inches!” Lougas boomed. “Now let’s get forty! Get forty!”
    The other athletes, none of whom had been paying attention, were now suddenly into it.
    “C’mon, bro!” shouted one.
    “Get on up!” shouted another.
    Forty inches would turn heads among scouts. Calvin Johnson, the star wide receiver for the Detroit Lions known as Megatron, had notched a 46-inch vertical at the NFL combine.
    Again, White went into his up-and-down, springlike gyrations, as if he were trying to fake us all out. Again, he yelped as he heaved upward. Once more: 38 inches.
    I thought White would be pleased, but he looked deflated.
    “I could do better,” he told me.
    That seemed to be a theme, to a man. Each of the athletes I interviewed claimed to have performed better in his own workouts, at his own gym. Disappointment lingered in the air, pressed out through the cold mechanism of assessment.
    —
    Presiding over this mass of men was Coach Stephen Austin, a small, trim tyrant. “We are guests at this facility,” he told the players, assembled on bended knee before him. “If when I get to the restroom I see as much as a piece of tissue on the ground, there’s going to be trouble. Demeanor, focus—we evaluate everything; it’s as important as your athletic ability.” Privately, I very much doubted that anything much mattered other than those “measurables” of athleticism. “This is serious business,” Austin continued. “This is a day you’re going to remember for a long, long time.”
    That part I believed. Besides participating in the jumping and sprinting tests and some football drills, before men in clipboardsand polo shirts who unfeelingly jotted down notes that could shape their lives, the players had to strip down, one by one, and stand in front of a video camera, whose operator slowly panned up and down their bodies, front and back.