COLUMN: As basketball season returns, an ode to the dunk

Is it possible to watch a dunk at a basketball game and not say “Ohhhhhhhhh!” when the player slams it down?

I don’t think it is.

There’s some ground rules to that statement, I suppose — it has to be an in-person viewing. Watching a dunk on a screen is certainly still fun, but you don’t always react as viscerally or emphatically as when you’re physically in the gym with a crowd.

The viewer then also has to be engaged with the game, of course. The lead-up to the dunk is half the battle, and if you’re not paying attention to the floor, you miss all the moving pieces that lead up to the jam. And, most of the time, it needs to be a player on “your” team, the squad you’re there to root for.

If you’re there in the flesh and rapt, though, can you keep yourself from making that round-faced “oooohhh” sound — the dunk sound, one might call it — when a player on your team breaks away and jams? 

I think not. Assuming you’re a fan and not a journalist, at least, though even in a professional capacity I find it hard not to react.

If you couldn’t tell, I’m very glad basketball is back on the sports schedule.

The anticipation as a player gets open on a fast break and leaps toward the hoop is, in sports, rivaled only by the moment of uncertainty waiting for a home run to land beyond the fence on the baseball diamond.

While I will always love that moment in baseball more since the so-called national pastime is easily my favorite sport, the dunk is a close second, starkly different though it is. 

The anticipatory framework is much smaller; a basketball player, for obvious reasons, cannot hang in the air as long as a moonshot home run ball can, though that lends itself to more excitement in some ways.

Nor does the dunk tend to carry as much momentum or change the course of a game the way a home run can — although this, too, depends on the context; some dunks, surely, have changed entire franchises. Michael Jordan and Vince Carter permanently altered the NBA with slams that weren’t even during games but instead part of the dunk contest.

The Mercer men’s team solidified my theory about dunk reactions last week in their season opener.

It was, as is typical of early games for college basketball teams, a bit of a mismatch. The Bears went up against Virginia University-Lynchburg, an NAIA team that brought only seven players on the road trip after their head coach was let go and some players transferred out. One of the starters had just joined the basketball team a few days earlier and had come over from the football team.

Mercer won 125-54 in a lopsided tilt, although the Dragons actually proved one of my theories about the enjoyment of slam dunks wrong despite the loss — when one Lynchburg player threw down an unexpected jam on an alley-oop, even Mercer fans let out a hint of that trademark “ooooh” sound.

Mercer had their fair share of slams, too, and the crowd reacted. Like I said, it’s almost impossible not to when the dunk is a decent one — and really, what fun is it if you keep a round face and a closed mouth on a jam?

As much as I’ve espoused the dunk and its magnetism, I don’t understand basketball super well. 

I did not grow up with the game — aside from a brief little league hoops stint — or become infatuated with it the way I did baseball. I cannot break down plays, I cannot observe a player’s skill set with a keen eye and break down his best abilities the way I can identify a contact hitter or control pitcher with ease on the diamond.

But dunks are pretty darn easy to understand.

My favorite thing to cover in high school sports is the basketball state championship at the Macon Coliseum. It beats even the football title games in the Falcons’ shiny new dome in Atlanta — I think the run of games in a row and the courtside row of tables at the Coliseum has more charm.

While I’ll cover plenty of Mercer basketball across the next several months, that’s where I’m hoping to go when this new hoops season culminates. Here’s to a Macon team that can journey that far to help me out.

And hopefully some Bibb County teams can throw down some dunks on the way there.