LOS ANGELES _ For Dennis Smith Jr., defying gravity began in a garage with a small refrigerator and a basketball hoop set at eight feet, a concession to the ceiling that often was in danger of being head-butted.
Not far into his teenage years, Smith and his buddies would play basketball wherever they could. Often, it meant lowering the goal and moving it into the garage at his house.
That's where things got interesting. It's where Smith started his fascination with floating on air.
"When I stayed in (the neighborhood) Tera Gardens, we had a couple goals, and they'd get stolen," Smith recalled. "We'd steal them back.
"But at my grandmother's house, she had a goal that we had in the street. And she'd get upset, like, 'Don't be playing in the street.' So we moved it into the garage. The garage was very small, but we had the goal at eight feet and we'd be dunking on it, having dunk contests, playing H-O-R-S-E.
"We were practicing dunks. We'd do stuff like jump off the refrigerator and go between the legs, all kinds of stuff. I think I got some videos on Facebook. We used to do that all the time. And then we'd go to the gym and try real dunks on real goals."
And those regulation rims that he eventually started rattling never stood a chance once Smith got the hang of this dunking thing.
Smith, now 20, still remembers the first time he dunked in a competitive situation.
He spent a lot of time on the basketball court during his seventh- and eighth-grade school years. That's when he began to see how blessed he was with God-given ability to jump like few others.
"Summer before ninth grade," Smith said. "When I started dunking on people, I started realizing I could jump a lot higher than a lot of guys. I had the highest jumpers on my team. Once I started to catch those guys, I was like, if I'm jumping with them, nobody could jump with them before I got there.
"So once I caught them, I knew I could really start taking off."
Smith's weekend will start with the Rising Stars game Friday night, when the best first- and second-year players are grouped in teams from the U.S. and the rest of the world.
Then on Saturday, he'll dunk against Cleveland's Larry Nance Jr., Indiana's Victor Oladipo and Utah's Donovan Mitchell.
He's known Mitchell, quickly pressing Philadelphia's Ben Simmons as rookie of the year favorite, for a few years. The two played together on an elite club team for a year.
But that was after Smith had felt that first euphoric moment _ his first dunk.
"It was my eighth-grade summer at Seabrook Rec Center. Somebody threw me an alley-oop and I dunked it with two hands. And like the next week, I learned how to tomahawk and then it took off to the windmill."
The rest is history.
His coaches at the time said they'd never seen anybody move so quickly from not dunking at all to being able to do the sort of creative slams that would eventually land him in the NBA's premier event of All-Star weekend.
"All-Star experiences are very memorable," coach Rick Carlisle said. "There's a lot going on, a lot of attention, a lot of hype. So I hope he enjoys it. I really do.
"Interestingly, guys that are the high-flying slam-dunk guys _ Vince (Carter), Michael Jordan and others _ once they win it, they usually aren't very keen on going back and doing it again. So we'll see. But on a first-time basis, I'm excited to see it, and I think everybody else should be, too."
Carlisle hinted that he'd seen some of the things Smith has planned for the dunk contest and promised that we would see things from a 6-foot-3 point guard that we haven't seen before.
That's a heck of a teaser.
As for Smith, he hasn't gotten too hung up on the hype. But he's got a lot of people in his corner. On Tuesday, the last game before the Mavericks scattered for the break, he received a good-luck package delivered to the locker room from the Bojangles' restaurant chain that he loves so much back in North Carolina.
Smith is trying his best to remain even-keeled, which he's tried to do throughout the ups and downs of his rookie season.
"I haven't gotten overly excited. With me, it's about taking everything in stride. I'm wherever my feet are, that's how I try to approach things."
While he's been mum on the strategy for his dunks, everybody expects his Fayetteville friend, rapper J. Cole, to be a prop or at least play some sort of role during Smith's dunks.
He said nobody would know that until it happens.
"But I got some 50s up my sleeve," Smith said, referring to a perfect score on a single dunk.
Apart from that, Smith is just happy to be back doing what he does best, "like I did before the ACL." Indeed, his 2015 surgery to fix a torn anterior cruciate ligament seems almost like another lifetime ago.
Less than three years later, he's accomplishing heady stuff for a first-year pro.
So what will he be thinking about leading up to the contest?
"I'm just looking forward to winning," he said. "That's all I'm worried about."
