A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DUNK
CHAPTER III: A REAL LIFE DUNK
Countless ages passed while proto-humans performed their accidental dunks. A modern NBA fan would find most of these dunks to be unsatisfactory, and most dunk scholars would agree with that sentiment. Simply put, none of those prehistoric dunks would ever make it into any sort of dunkilation, even if video cameras had existed to capture footage of the event.
With the dawn of civilization, a new concept was born from the towering stone walls and emerging metropolises: recreational activity. A small, yet growing, class of people occupied positions of such power that they were not beholden to the ever-toiling ways of their underlings; in fact, their needs were entirely met by the labor of these same underlings. All across the globe, the luxury of “free time” was granted to these elite few.
Most of these oligarchs were too dumb to do much of anything with this new abundance of leisure time, but a few realized that engaging in activities such as wrestling and swimming could be a fun use of one’s time, especially when done competitively. It was not too long at all before these activities merged with the training exercises of increasingly-powerful militaries to create “team sports”.
That’s a good thing because wrestling and swimming obviously would not result in dunks as we know them today. Crude team sports, however, would lay the foundation for executing tremendous slam-jams in the context of a sporting contest. Even more progress was made when the Egyptian pharaoh Neferefre, who ruled during the fifth dynasty, fashioned a crude ball out of papyrus reeds and found it to be very fun to kick and throw. Chinese, Indian, Mesoamerican, and Greek innovators also invented balls within a few centuries of Neferefre’s original concept.
From there, one would think that a bona-fide slam dunk could only be a few decades away at most. However, one has to remember that the underclasses still had no opportunity to participate in, or otherwise contribute to the development of, any kind of sport. Participation in this sort of recreation was limited mainly to the soldiery, for the ruling classes had quickly realized that spectating these games was much easier than playing in them.
No, it would be centuries more before an in-game dunk was finally thrown down. In what is now central Mexico, the Toltec king Topiltzin challenged a few surrounding kings to a not-so-friendly contest of a sport known at the time as Ollamaliztli. The punishment for losing this game would not only be forfeiture of their respective kingdoms, but ritual sacrifice and beheadal as well.
Topiltzin started the game off slowly, but near the beginning of the second quarter, he used his ass (the only body part allowed to touch the ball) to bounce the ball into the stone ring which stood several meters up the arena wall. Given that the ring was barely large enough for the ball to fit through, and that it’s hard to aim the ball when you’re only using your ass, this was the first time anybody had actually managed to accomplish the feat. Nobody realized it at the time, but this was a real dunk, and not only was it a real dunk, it was the FIRST real dunk. Ever.
It goes without saying that the match was immediately halted and Topiltzin was declared victor. Later contests of the sport would use his foes’ skulls as the ball. However, nobody ever managed to dunk when using a skull, which is too bad because that would have been cool.
It is in this way that competing civilizations on other continents fell far behind in the dunking race, for they had no comparable sports in which they could dunk. Perhaps this was a portent of things to come, a portent of a coming age where North America dominated the dunking landscape…