NBA Dunk of the Week: Manu Ginobili Drinks From The Fountain of Youth

Here is a dunk by Manu Ginobli, a 40-year old man, assisted by Pau Gasol, a 37-year-old man. This dunk is beautiful, old dude, ball sharing, San Antonio Spurs shit, which is not really what this column was supposed to be about.

I wrote this wanting to see blood and guts spilled all over the key. I wanted broken noses, I wanted grown men sheepishly jogging back onto offense, their spirits broken by abs getting thrust into their faces, I wanted to gawk at hoops violence in its purest forms.

But, like, what are you supposed to do, when you see this? When you see a middle-aged man throw one down on account of a truly beautiful wrist-flip pass from another middle aged man, IN THE NBA. I would have watched this if it happened in like, the Upper-Eastern New York Men’s league, or something. I would watch this if it were someone’s high school science teacher throwing this down. I would watch this if it were two old dudes in a driveway, balling out against, like, fifty dogs, in the 2-on-50 basketball throwdown of the animal kingdom’s wildest dreams. The fact that it took place in THE NBA, the best basketball league in the world, is just the icing on the cake.

The Spurs could not stop posting this shit. I mean why should they, I suppose. When you’re the Spurs social media person, you only get so many brain-breakingly dope highlights you can share every year, and when it happens, you have to do everything you can to rack up as many RTs as possible. These people have a punishing, bizarre job, the kind where your bosses look at reports and tell you “Engagements are down,” and you are compelled to feel extraordinarily threatened by this sentence, to worry that you won’t be able to feed your children, and so the gift, to you, of a 40-year old man—a professional basketball player, certainly, but, more notably, a 40-year old man—who has been an old dude in the NBA for like… six years, or so, mashing a pinpoint pass, snapped up off a backwards-flipping wrist of a string bean man who is also very old for a professional athlete, this is a gift you do not turn away from, for even a second. You get as much blood out of that stone as possible. It cakes your hands. Scabs form, you share it so much. This is a gift from God, a solar eclipse, and you are the town that waves tourists in from around the area to have a carnival and sell lunch.

Truly, has anything ever been Spursier than this clip? Black and white photography over a jacked, weird old 2005-ass sounding hip hop track, an advertisement for some obscure Texas Liquor brand, all set up to frame a big-to-guard pass by two aging European stars? This is, fundamentally, everything the Spurs have been about since Duncan stepped on a court for them back in ‘97. Shit, Richard Jefferson, the only dude the Spurs ever signed and then didn’t like that much, is WATCHING this dunk happen. It’s so Spurs that it contains banal revenge in its DNA.

The best part of all this is that Manu knows, SEES this shit happen, sees himself, at 40, heaving himself up for yet another NBA dunk, and he is nearly giddy about it. Watch his face, captured here by one of the eight thousand cameras that photograph every basketball game, slowly evolve as his mind catches up to his basketball execution instincts:

It begins with the fear and confusion of normal, run of play hooping, the slow realization that you have the ball and are near the hoop, that pass from Gasol surprising even you, Manu Ginobili, a player who does weird unexpected shit all the time.

It evolves, very quickly, into joy and bliss, a Proustian resurrection in middle age, Manu for one brief moment seeing himself, feeling himself, floppy hair and all, dunking for the first time, somewhere in some gym in Argentina. It is a moment of pure joy, a resurrection of the self he once was. It is something that most athletes, MOST PEOPLE, never get to feel, the youth rushing back into their bones and spirit. It is very nearly moving…

…until, of course, we see, once again, the anxiety of middle age and of sport itself come back. This dunk will be costly, he says to himself, even if it is necessary and pleasing, it will wear on the body. There’s only so many of these left, say Manu’s eyes as they drift closer and closer to the rim. The tragedy of youth is that it ends, sooner rather than later, and even though I am free in this moment, the prison of a broken body hovers in front of me, waiting for me to walk in.

He strolls back on defense, his face imprinted with the Spursian look of equanimity, the type Pop teaches you on your first day, concealing joy and despair all at once.