Blake Griffin dunk: Remember when it was against the rules?
Blake Griffin’s dunk-of-the-year Monday night against the Thunder has spawned all kinds of discussion about basketball’s most popular play. Including our man Darnell Mayberry discussing exactly what constitutes a dunk. His very interesting blog can be read here:
Basically, RFD says that if your hands don’t hit the rim, it’s not a dunk. If your hands hit the rim, it’s a dunk. Seems solid to me. But it made me think about the evolution of the dunk rule. You remember when college basketball disallowed the dunk? The great image of those days was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Bill Walton rising above the rim and dropping the ball through, careful not to touch the iron.
The no-dunking rule was a marketing anvil. It painted college basketball as a regressive sport. The rule was instituted in 1967 and wasn’t changed until 1976. 1976 was a watershed year in college hoops. It was the season that signaled the end of the UCLA dynasty — Indiana went unbeaten and won the NCAA championship, and UCLA didn’t win again until 1995. A few years later, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson came along, and college hoops was off and running.
The dunk rule wasn’t the spark that launched college basketball, but it was indicative of the new thinking in college basketball. The old ways were gone. New thinking, new ideas carried the day. Some of college basketball’s most famous teams came from that era, defined by what they did at the rim. Louisville’s Doctors of Dunk. Houston’s Phi Slama Jama. Jim Valvano running around crazy, looking for someone to hug, because Lorenzo Charles dunked at the buzzer.
To imagine college basketball today without the dunk is like imagining college basketball played by guys in short shorts. It’s silly. You could sell 21st-century fans on games played on Mars before you could sell them on games without dunks.
But I have one question. Are we certain that college basketball had it wrong from 1967 through 1976? Not from a marketing standpoint, but from a basketball standpoint.
Is dunking fair? Defenders can’t touch the rim or even the net. It’s goaltending if they do. But a certain offensive player — the guy with the ball — can touch the rim. The dunk is basically a suspension of a long-existing rule.
In the same way that Jabbar (as Lew Alcindor) provoked a rule change (no dunking), Bob Kurland of Oklahoma A&M in the 1940s provoked a rule. Goaltending. The rim became neutral territory. A veritable Switzerland. Stay away from it. Can’t touch a shot on its way down, and can’t touch the rim or the ball when it’s on the rim. It’s a great rule. It’s a rule that has to exist, for the game to continue in any form of sanity.
And yet, that rule is suspended in the name of marketing. Dunks, which by definition are offensive goaltending, which by definition are someone with their hand on the rim or their hand on the ball while it’s on the rim, are allowed.
I’m not arguing to go back. It would be a marketing disaster, in college and the NBA. Fans have come to expect dunks. Fans have come to demands dunks. Dunks are much like the extra step on layups. They’ve become part of the game, in the name of offense, and to change things would disrupt the cosmos too much. An entire cottage industry within the NBA exists on dunking.
The Dunk Doctors are in the NBA now, not on college campuses, and dunks A’s popularity are a reason for the NBA’s popularity of the last 30 years. Julius Erving, Michael Jordan, LeBron James. Generation after generation of stars have soared through the air, thrown down the ball and lit up NBA box offices. You don’t go messing with that cash cow.
But just remember what the dunk is, at the core. A suspension of the rules. An exception to the accepted order of the game.
-------------Berry Tramel can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including AM-640 and FM-98.1. You can e-mail him here and follow him on Twitter @BerryTramel. Visit Berry's website here.
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Comments
It was a great marketing ploy. I wish wrestling would have done something similar in going to Freestyle wrestling in college and having the Grand Amplitude Takedown (I think that’s what it’s called) as it’s Dunk to market the sport better. Now, OSU students can get into wrestling events free with a student ID and the sport keeps losing fans while basketball keeps increasing their fan base. People like one-on-one type competitions (see MMA events). People would like wrestling too I believe if only marketed as well as basketball.
I’ve always thought that the college game had it right in disallowing the dunk. I’m not old enough to remember watching college hoops before the disallowal, but I do remember when dunking became allowed, and I thought then that it was just allowing offensive goaltending.
It’s still the same–dunking is offensive goaltending.
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Dunking is somewhat akin to taunting. I do not like it, whether it’s my team or not.