Free Year of the Dunk by Asher Price Page A

There was a peculiar cast to the whole thing, of young men, almost all black, being examined by a group of largely white men, of being poked and prodded, and of being told to strip to their underwear so that a young white man could videotape their physiques. On the auction block, slaves had to, among other things, jump for their would-be buyers. A Sargent test before Sargent was even born, and another act of humiliation, surely, in a life of humiliation and worse. Beyond the degradation, it was meant, along with looking at teeth and musculature, as a crude way to test their potential. The film clips, I was told, would eventually be uploaded to the Internet, sortable by player, and I imagined team executives sitting before the glow of their computers, in a dark room, gazing at the physique of one man and then another.
    At a lunch buffet reserved for the scouts and NFL staff, I started chatting with Austin. I asked him where he had been a coach. No, he told me, he was merely acting the role. “I’m a businessman,” he said. “I play many parts.” He had started his company in the late 1980s, one of many to scout out college kids as football became big business. “My big innovation,” he said—and here I waited for something profound, some insight into the mix of qualitative and quantitative examination—“was pre-registration.” I glanced from side to side as I tried to figure out if I was missing something. Evidently, little had been tabulated about the prior experience of the players—what college football conferences they had played in, for instance. So he kept and built up data so that players could be compared as apples to apples. I didn’t quite understand, since a vertical is a vertical is a vertical, but I think his point was that the consequence of all this pre-registration was that he could distribute tables to general managers and football teams.
    “You ever really read what I send you?” he told me he once asked Ozzie Newsome, a big man, a former football player, who had become one of the few black general managers in the league. They were in Newsome’s office, and like a cloud passing on a sunny day, Newsome pushed himself, sitting in a swivel chair, to the side, and gestured toward a shelf of binders that were behind him.
    “All the time.”
    Austin told this story with obvious relish: Newsome’s Baltimore Ravens had become Super Bowl champions only a couple of weeks earlier, and Newsome had been credited with building the franchise through savvy scouting.
    Evidently the key was pre-registration.
    —
    At the end of the day, the players assembled again on bended knees before Austin. They had carefully aligned themselves at midfield, between the hash marks, as they had been instructed by Lougas, one of Austin’s underlings. “If you don’t want to make Coach Austin mad, do as I tell you,” he whispered to the athletes. These would-be players, it was clear to me, would do anything, small as it might be, to move to the super-regional. I knew Jamal Carter wasn’t going to make it—I saw him icing his hamstring, which he had popped during the 40-yard dash. And Tommy White had rubbed Coach Austin the wrong way by taking a little longer than the others to get into a three-point stance before starting his dash: “What is this guy, a prima donna?” Austin shouted to no one in particular. Tommy compounded matters by complaining that the officials had not recorded his correct time—he insisted that he was consistently faster. (Of the dozen or so players I interviewed, only one, I would laterlearn, made it past the Houston event. He was invited to a Washington Redskins minicamp before getting cut.)
    “You need to have a second dream,” Austin told them. Then they heard a couple of spiels. An NFL officer told them about officiating opportunities. “Whether you make the NFL or not, there are other job opportunities so you can be involved in the game,” she told them, touching on the necessity of