Free Year of the Dunk by Asher Price Page B

clock operators to a group still unready to recognize the shortcomings of their own potential. “Officials maintain the integrity of the game. And you can be officiating the rest of your lives.” The players remained politely quiet, even if many of them appeared to be staring into space. And then a chief with the Navy SEALs, a sponsor of the regional combines, spoke warmly about military camaraderie. He was tall, broad-shouldered, curly-haired, and wearing camouflage. “You guys have what the SEALs are looking for,” he said. As the group finally disbanded—“We’ll call you if we want you to come to Dallas,” the site of the next round of tryouts, Austin told them—several of the players came up to the SEAL chief. “How much does it pay?” they wanted to know.
    There was something admirable, touchingly sincere, and maybe a little desperate about these men. Most of us surrender our rockstar dreams at an early age. They still wanted to see what they could make of themselves even as the realities of the world bore down on them. Just as I was packing up to leave, a player came up to me, a slender, muscular kid. He wanted me to take a look at a DVD he had prepared of his football highlights; he hoped, I realized, that I was an agent or maybe a scout—another white dude with a notepad who might offer a bit of help. No second dream—not yet, at least.
    —
    Dec. 26, 242 days left:
Back to 188 on the scale. Oy gevalt. No big surprise: Christmas Eve dinner of cuminy pork loin in cognac cream sauce with pears; Brussels sprouts broiled with
onion and bacon; Linzer torte, baked by yours truly, with fat dollops of whipped cream. Why should I run from my Austro-Hungarian destiny? Squatting 120 pounds, more than twice my starting weight
.
    Progress report: Setbacks. A New Year’s Eve scooter accident—braking suddenly on a rain-slick road—left me tumbling along the concrete like a stuntman; I was largely uninjured, save a bloody elbow and a bruised left hip. And then, three days ago, I tweaked my back while squatting. I wasn’t lifting much—roughly the weight of a small woman lying across my shoulders—but I’m laying off the weights for a couple of weeks.
    ----
    * 1 The relationship between morality and physical robustness was a common thread in Sargent’s time. “Even if the day ever dawns in which [muscular vigor] will not be needed for fighting the old heavy battles against nature,” William James, the psychologist and brother of Henry James, wrote in his 1911
Gospel of Relaxation
, “it will still always be needed to furnish the background of sanity, serenity, and cheerfulness to life, to give moral elasticity to our disposition,to round off the wiry edge of our fretfulness, and make us good-humored and easy of approach.”
    * 2 He derived, through some odd mathematics,a “vitality coefficient.” In an 1887 treatise on the principal characteristics of the human body, Sargent describes the vitality coefficient as equal to the respiratory-height coefficient multiplied by the organic health coefficient. Got that? The same pamphlet, which gives directions for measuring abdomen depth, limb girth, and chest expansion—to determine said coefficients—offers health tips. “Rub vigorously after a cold bath; secure a fine glow, becoming thoroughly alive.”

5
A Natural History of Leaping
    I n 2003, Malcolm Burrows, a professor at Cambridge who specializes in the nervous system of locusts, was leading some of his students in field research in the lovely English coastal town of Wells-next-the-Sea when he decided to ask them to capture some froghoppers, also known as the spittlebug for the frothy liquid in which their babies immerse themselves. They are wet, incontinent creatures. “There are constantly little drops of water coming off them,” Burrows told me. “So when you’re in the forests of northern Canada and it feels wet, that’s because they’re peeing on you all the time.” Burrows had read recently