When I came across the title of the book, Year of the Dunk while browsing through new books section at my local public library, I almost immediately knew what the book was going to be about before I even started reading through the synopsis on the back cover and I was delighted to have my hunch validated. It was a story about a middle-aged man (in his mid-30’s) who decided to take the self-imposed challenge of dunking the ball within a year. Although he was tall (6 feet 2.5 inches) and gifted with an unusually wide wing span, he wasn’t an athletic type but a journalist who even seemed a bit out of shape at the beginning. Over the course of the book, he engages in series of dietary change, professional coaching and prolonged self-determination to get into a fighting shape to possibly achieve a feat.  So did the author successfully pull it off? I don’t want to spoil the ending for the un-initiated readers but I would word it as a “pleasant” surprise.

Most importantly, the book revived the dormant desire of my own that had been swept away in the deep corner of my mind inside the box labeled “what could have been” in my life.  Even though I religiously followed the NBA as a teen, grew up to the tune of “I wanna be like Mike” jingle and played recreational basketball throughout my college and most of my adult life, I never seriously thought I could dunk a basketball.   I knew I reserved a “chance” given my 6 feet two frame but as a guy known for his “credit card hops”, I never seriously chased after this endeavor.

Sure, I imagined it several time but each time, I was quick to conclude that “it wasn’t me” as if I was genetically challenged to never rise above the rim.  I hardly saw anybody in my own race who dunked a basketball on the street courts unless they were far taller than me and the lack of NBA players in the Asian descent on TV (literally zero during my formative years) certainly didn’t help.

Given my track record of trying ‘something’ that appears seemingly “screwy” – case in point, in 2005, I trained and successfully ran a full marathon without so much as completing a 5K run prior to that endeavor and in 2013, I tried out the Olympic distance triathlon without know how to swim.  After learning how to swim by watching a DVD and going for a mile in a controlled lap pool at the local 24 hour fitness gym, I mistakenly thought I was “ready”. Although I fared fine in the running and biking portions, I was crushed under the frigid, salty water of Red Hook, NJ after barely making it out of the shore.  Clearly, open water swimming was a far different beast than my calm room temperature lap pool simulated.

Given my current age of 36, I know that the window for dunking is closing on me rapidly (if not shut and sealed already) and as I watch my 6-year old son start in his first basketball game, I feel a more strong motivation to just bite down and at least give myself a noble try to defy what appears to be impossible at my age and dare I say, my race. So mission is set, I’m going to prove to myself that ‘yellow man can jump’ with the binary of goal of being able to dunk the official basketball cleanly over the official basket height of 10 feet within a year from now.