Every slam dunk contest, at every level, is sort of doomed to be a losing race against various types of gravity. There are only so many things the human body can do, and there are only so many things that the human body hasn't either already done or been injured while attempting to do in a slam dunk contest setting. Until there's some sort of quantum leap in either of those, we're stuck watching people jump over dependable mid-price sedans with NBA sponsorships. Which is fine, there's a ceiling for everything.
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It took until 2006, for instance, for anyone to even attempt to dunk by jumping clean over another human being. Even then, the human attempting it was Nate Robinson--whose entire delightful career is built on whatever the opposite is of Knowing One's Limitations--and the person being jumped over was Spud Webb, who is a legendary slam dunk champion in his own right, and is also shorter than my wife.This is the trick of it, it seems: to do a new thing in a slam dunk contest, you have to believe yourself capable of doing something that no one has ever done before. If you don't believe that, you've already lost. And if you do believe it, you can do almost anything.Almost.Almost!Or not really almost anything, let's be realistic.Let's say a person with sufficient self-belief can do "almost anything within reason." A person would not, for instance, attempt to dunk over five humans, with the one of those that's furthest from the basket standing a big step outside the charge semicircle. That is not within reason, and so a person wouldn't do that if that person had any understanding of what a dunking body--let alone the breakable, fluffy-haired, extremely and frankly poignantly deluded body in question--was capable of doing. This is exactly why it should be attempted, and exactly why it shouldn't.More to the point, a person with an understanding of what a dunking body can do would have no place in professional sports, let alone a slam dunk contest, and especially let alone the reliably psychotic Chinese Basketball Association dunk contest, which in years past has ranged, in terms of general ambient vibe, between Garage Sale On Fire and Unreleasable Todd Solondz Movie. In the 2010 edition, a competitor tied a Superman cape around his neck, pulled on a Superman-logo t-shirt, and then missed dunk attempts by heartrendingly wide margins for what felt like half an hour.There are better slam dunk contests in this big world, of course. But there is none that more reliably captures what it means to be human than the Chinese Basketball Association slam dunk contest. May all the competitors recover swiftly from their kind of serious-looking self-inflicted physical injuries, and never, ever, ever question their ability to do obviously impossible things.(H/T on the original amazing dunk-pileup to Jake Pavorsky.)