by Asher Price
—
Genes alone don’t make someone a good basketball player. Writing of his fellow African-Americans, John Edgar Wideman once observed that “our stories, songs, dreams, dances, social forms, style of walk, talk, dressing, cooking, sport, our heroes and heroines provide a record…so distinctive and abiding that its origins in culture have been misconstrued as rooted in biology.”
Families build identities in similar ways. Keen to suggest bookishness runs in our blood, my own family fancifully traces its lineage to a fifth-century BC scholar—BC! Take that, you Mayflower-descended motherfuckers!—named Ezra the Scribe. Twenty-five hundred years ago, with many of the Israelites stranded in Babylonian exile, the Persian king granted Ezra, a renowned scholar eager to return his people to their homeland, passage to Jerusalem to teach the laws of God. When he arrived, after a six-month journey, he found that left-behind Jewish men had been marrying non-Jewish women—Samaritans, actually. (The good ones didn’t come around until centuries later, materializing when people needed help with their flat tires.) Ezra tore his garments in despair before ordering and enforcing the dissolution of such sinful wedlocks. He then declaimed the Torah to assembled Jews, and the people and the chief rabbis swore to keep themselves separate from gentiles. I take an amused, skeptical pleasure in my rabbinical roots, but I was disappointed, having scoured the Bible and the Midrash, the Talmud, and other sources, to find no evidence that Ezra had any jumping abilities. Nothing.
We like to gaze upon the more recent, greener branches of our family trees to explain our current generation’s talents and predilections. I tell the story that I chose journalism in part because it was my dad’s first career—but it was an inheritance separate from the blue eyes he bestowed upon me. As a swashbuckling college reporter in the late 1950s, he wrote dispatches from Russia and revolutionary Cuba. My father had himself been enthralled by the ultimately grim stories about his Viennese great-uncle, Gabor Engelsman, who ran the Sonn-und-Montag Zeitung, a newspaper with a reputation for reportage and satire discomfiting to the Austrian authorities and hardly reverential toward the Germans. With the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by the Third Reich that precipitated my grandparents’ flight to the U.S., Gabor knew the Nazis would arrest him, and he jumped from an office window to his death. As a boy, the fates of my forebears were relayed to me, of course, as reminders of the Holocaust. But they were also meant to describe lives that might have been, and one of those was another in a dynasty of quick-thinking journalists.
But is there anything in my genetic code that suggests a talent for asking questions or sharing stories? Sounding out the echo of the parent in the kid is an old and confounding pastime. Maybe one can tell whether a toddler has the mouth of the mother. But the gait of the father—is that inherited, or learned? To what extent was Allex Austin’s jumping ability learned through the intimate, lifelong observation of his father, Charles, and to what extent was it genetically conferred upon him? I asked Terry Todd, the former champion weightlifter who presides over the Lutcher Stark Center, an Austin museum and library dedicated to the study of what the human body can do, whether strength ran in his family. Visitors to the center are greeted by a cast of the colossal Farnese Hercules—vulgar, carnivorous, and mounted on a faux-marble, slow-spinning turntable. We were seated at the large oval mahogany table in the center’s library, a life-size oil painting of Arnold Schwarzenegger, in Speedo and mid-flex, looming behind us. Todd, still a massive, broad-chested man at age 76, looks as if he could overturn all sorts of furniture, even this table, if he were so inclined. The question, straightforward as it was, is one he had long pondered himself. When he was about nine years old, he told me, out fishing with his grandfather, a “mallet-handed” 5′10″ Texas rancher, the old man picked up a native pecan, an oblong nut guarded by a shell so tightly constructed it requires a special nutcracker to break, and crushed it between his thumb and forefinger. “Bud,” he told Todd, “few men and no boys can do that.” Todd himself would become a world champion power-lifter, but try as he might, he was never able to duplicate the feat his grandfather pulled off. It’s a story he also tells in “Philosophical and Practical Considerations for a ‘Strongest Man’ Contest,” an essay about designing obstacle courses challenging enough for outsized humans. His grandfather “broke quite a few more such pecans for me, and each time he did it he chuckled, especially since it was a feat I was never able to match no matter how large I became or how hard I tried,” he writes. “How was it that a man in late middle age who had done no systematic training could be as strong in any part of his body as a much younger man who stood four inches taller and outweighed him by over a hundred pounds?”
—
I was gathering spit in my mouth, hovering over the little tube I had ordered from 23andMe, a genetic testing company named for the number of pairs of chromosomes coded with genetic information that are littered throughout our bodies. I was hoping to learn more about the genetic makeup of my muscles. Rebecca was sitting next to me, directions in hand, eyes averted.
“You don’t mind terribly, right?” I said to her as I gathered a bit more saliva on my tongue. For years following my cancer diagnosis, Rebecca treated the slightest symptoms with obsessive anxiety. She worried that headaches might be signs of brain tumors; that a cramping foot was an early signal of MS; that a sore throat suggested esophageal cancer. The idea of a test that promised something like medical clairvoyance—my future health history laid out for me—both drew and appalled her.
Seven years out from my cancer, I still make annual visits to my oncologist. Routine as they are—a draw of blood; a listen, by stethoscope, to my lungs; a gentle squeeze of my remaining testicle; a quick massage of my lymph nodes; an X-ray, to see whether any new tumors are forming about my chest—they fill Rebecca with a profound anxiety. Though she’s a confirmed atheist, after my initial chemotherapy treatment she bought me a jade Chinese talisman of an abstracted unicorn. (Einhorn, the name of my oncologist, means unicorn in German.) She thought I could wear it for luck, not so much as a safeguard of good health as a symbol of it. One evening, I foolishly, accidentally, broke it, dropping it into our porcelain sink as I prepared for bed. It cracked in jagged halves. Of course the accident meant little, other than the breaking of a gift from my dearest, but the split medallion gained for her, despite herself, a half-real cosmic significance. With Rebecca fretting about the smallest possible ache, I had to check myself before telling her about back pains or headaches and stifle coughs—all, oddly enough, possible signs of a return of the cancer. But I myself didn’t get anxious about these doctor visits. I was, in a sense, a lightbulb, and Rebecca the moth.
I had embarked on this dunking project to see how far my flesh and bones could take me, to know about the frontiers of my capability; Rebecca, a self-described homebody—an eater of plain bagels, a vanilla-ice-cream girl—shunned frontiers. She didn’t want to know what the Fates had planned for me. But by dint of scientific breakthroughs in the mapping out of the genome, we now can have a pretty good sense of our natural potential for everything from dunking a basketball to going blind. Here, suddenly, in a way that overturned all that was sacred in Western literature, from Adam onward, free will would be reduced to a website that presented me with the cold data of my essence. “Know thyself,” Socrates commanded. But surely the ancient Greeks had something very different in mind; Oedipus Rex is warning enough of the risks of prophecy. The mysteries of my future, including the sort of natural death I might endure, would be distilled to a game of percentages, as if I were a deck of cards. Is that sort of certainty really a desirable thing? Rebecca had wondered, as I breezily plonked down the hundred bucks to be dealt my hand.
“You don’t mind, right?” I asked as a kind of afterthought. I had grown so accustomed to her anxieties that I could be cavalier about them, and even, at times, dismissive.
“Let’s not talk about it,” Rebecca said.
“Because of the cancer stuff?” I managed to
warble as I spat, for the fourth time, into the test tube.
“Because it’s gross,” she said.
It was hard to disagree: My DNA was now slithering down a bit of plastic I gently held between my thumb and forefinger.
It was time, I had decided, to figure out whether my genetic makeup had put me at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to dunking. It’s easy to discover whether you (or your child) has the so-called sports gene: In 2008, Atlas Sports Genetics began selling, for $149, a screening test for variants of the gene ACTN3. Since then at least a half-dozen other companies have gotten in on the act. Federal regulators are dubious. Not long after I took this test, the Food and Drug Administration sent a letter excoriating 23andMe for failing to prove up its testing and notification procedures.
“The commercial tests are very reliable in the sense of telling you which genetic variants you have,” Vishy Iyer, a molecular geneticist and microbiologist at the University of Texas, told me. “But in terms of actually predicting something about your success in one sport versus another, they’re currently unproven at best, or worthless at worst, in my opinion.” He estimated I had an 80 percent chance of having at least one copy of the speed gene. “Many people have this fatalistic sense that our lives are determined by our genetic code,” Iyer continued. “But with sports that’s really unknowable. It’s hard to get at.” Iyer, a tall, thin man—a marathoner, with elbows slightly akimbo, as if he were ready at any second to start racing—took me seriously enough to get out of his office chair and chart, on his whiteboard, the relationship between genes and muscle mass. But as he filled the board with jottings and arrows, the air busy with the moist squeaks and faintly chemical scent emanating from his clutch of red, green, and black markers, he turned to tell me that in the final analysis the ACTN3 gene is only a small component of physical activity. The question of athletic excellence is far more complex than one simple gene or its variant. We started having the sort of conversation that straddles philosophy and science, about magical twins who were identical in every respect except one: One possessed two copies of the gene, the other no copies. The first twin might have a marginally better ability to dunk than the second. I was sorry Rebecca wasn’t with me; she gets excited about twins, mostly because she and her twin are extremely close. “Twinpathy,” they call their mind-meldedness. If Rebecca spots twins, infant or adult, when we’re out for a stroll, she pokes me surreptitiously. Sometimes I think she wants to give a little wave of acknowledgment, the way bus drivers do as they pass each other in opposite directions.
—
Eight weeks after putting the test tube in a biomedical bag and popping it in the mail, I got the results—via email, of course.
Rebecca, for her part, didn’t want to know any of it, especially the parts predicting my medical future. “Haven’t you submitted yourself to enough tests? Haven’t you had to wait for enough results? Haven’t you been poked and prodded enough?” she asked plaintively.
“There was no poking; I only drooled into a tube.”
I argued that the results were probably predictable. My father had endured prostate cancer, for example, and my maternal grandmother had suffered through Alzheimer’s—that must leave me at greater risk for both. Oddly enough, she didn’t find my way of looking at it all that comforting. As a concession, I decided to forbear from clicking open most of the health results, confining myself to information relevant to my jumping genealogy. It would be the virtual equivalent of covering your eyes at a scary movie, peeking only now and then through a web of fingers to catch fascinating bits of backstory.
Between you and me, a tiny part of me had hoped to find out that I was partly black. But no, I learned from the backlit laptop in my living room, I am fully Ashkenazic, as plainly white as one of those long fluorescent office bulbs. On my mother’s side, my genes suggested I belong to a branch of humans who trace their lineage to a quartet of women who lived around 700 AD, according to the genetics company. Those women, who settled in what is now Germany’s Rhine Valley, were Jews, and their descendants now number in the millions. On my father’s side, my genetic makeup is similarly Western European. (I’m in the 87th percentile of Neanderthalishness, I’m proud to say; the genetics company tells me that 3 percent of my genetic makeup can be traced to our distant hairy relatives, as if I didn’t know that by just taking off my shirt.)
What I really wanted to know was whether, genetically speaking, I was swimming with or against the current. Was Vishy Iyer correct that I was almost surely in the genetic middle, in the muddle of humans with one, but not two, copies of the speed gene?
No, as it turned out. The genetic test turned up neither of the copies of the speed gene. I am apparently in the narrow minority of only about 18 percent of humans who lack even a single copy. My Neanderthal qualities notwithstanding, one way of looking at this result is that, physically speaking, I’m highly evolved; through a long chain of natural selection, some humans have cast off their sprinting abilities, which are far less needed than they were hundreds of thousands of years ago, when our arboreal selves still sprung about for their dinner. I’m better suited, I was learning, to the long game, the persistent stalking of prey over great distances that became our M.O. as we descended to the plains. Another, less happy thought: Despite my height and long arms, the genetics were always stacked against my dunking endeavor. Thanks a lot, Mom and Dad.
—
July 15, 41 days left: Michael Jordan’s outstretched hand measured 11.375 inches from tip of thumb to tip of pinkie. Mine’s about half that. One way of thinking about this: I’m adorable. But if your hand is too small, you have to hold the ball gingerly, painstakingly, like a child handling a spoon in an Easter-egg race. There’s nothing I can do about hand size, obviously, but I can improve tensile strength. So now I’m undertaking a few fingertip push-ups. And while watching television my left hand dangles down, my fingertips clamping a basketball like a spider perched atop a pumpkin. I try to keep it squeezed for 30 seconds, or until my fingers ache.
Progress report: With a month or so left, on an unusually cool summer night, cool enough that I thought I could palm the basketball, even after warm-ups left my skin moist, I decided to try to dunk. The outdoor court at the nearby Boys & Girls Club was deserted. I was grateful. A live oak, a fairy-tale tree with low, sprawling limbs, easy for climbing, gave me some cover from any passersby. No one would catch my embarrassing efforts. I started a run-up at the rim and felt the ball slip out of my hand. I tried again. Same thing. Again with the run-up, and again the ball slipped out. Okay, take it easy. I pulled back and shot the ball a few times, blew on my hand, as if it had just handled an unexpectedly hot pot, wiped it off on my shirt. And grabbed the ball, solidly. I walked to the three-point line, squinted at the basket like it was an outlaw in an old Western, squeezed the ball at my hip, and drove forward. I took off and brought my left hand high into the air, as if I were an airborne Statue of Liberty—and pushed the ball down into the hoop, the fingers of my left hand sliding against the cold orange metal as the ball rattled down. “Holy shit!” I shouted, to no one in particular. I had dunked a full-size basketball on a rim that adults used to play basketball. Except it wasn’t quite a 10-foot rim. Still, I was thrilled. Like a little boy, I ran home the block and a half to tell Rebecca the news.
A few days later, on a Sunday afternoon, I went back out with Rebecca to get the dunk on video. I wanted to prove it to her as much as to anyone else. A little blond boy broke off a walk with his father to press his face to the fence as I tried—and failed. “Honey, keep up,” the father said to the boy as he continued walking. “But Dad, he’s going to dunk.” You’re right, wee one, I thought. And here I go…and I missed again, the ball slipping out of my hand like I was playing water polo. The boy padded away. I wondered, for a brief minute, whether I had imagined my triumph of the other night. But I banished the thoughts and convinced myself, Charles Austin–style, that I had already dunked on these baskets. (After all, I had.)<
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And so it happened, in this year of our Lord 2013, that I dunked a basketball, before my lovely wife and on video. And I let out a roar. Be it noted, once more, sotto voce, that it was on a rim a couple of inches short of regulation. But I was pumped for the full-on dunk with just a month to go.
* * *
* The Bárány story resonates with me. A few years ago, my family reconnected with my grandmother’s cousin, a man much younger than she, named Milan. He turned up in Ottawa, where he was working as an engineer. Milan’s very existence had long been a sort of rumor. The story was that his parents and his older sister had survived the war in hiding, each separate from the others. Milan was born after the war, once the family reunited. As with the Báránys, the Hungarian property belonging to Milan’s family was seized, never to be returned. Sensing little in the way of opportunity, they decided to flee—to Austria, where some relatives lived. But the crossing attempt went very wrong. They were caught by border guards, possibly because their guide was a turncoat. Milan’s parents and his sister were shot to death. He himself would have been killed had his mother not shielded him. As it was, he was shot in the back. When the family never showed up in Austria, the news made it all the way to my grandmother, in Queens, another in a line of tragedies. No one knew for sure what had become of the boy, though there was word that he had survived and been adopted. About five years ago, my aunt tracked him down. He was as pleased to get to know us as we were to get to know him—he had known virtually none of his biological family. Milan, twinkly-eyed, round-faced, intellectually minded, and his wife, Laeora, are now fixtures at our Passover seder. They were present, in fact, at my grandmother’s last seder in 2013, and I think her death struck him as profoundly as it did us.
