PITTSBURGH _ Two days into this horrendous year, I contacted former Pitt basketball star Brandin Knight for a story about a dunk.
It was the 20-year anniversary of Julius Page's legendary leap-and-smash over Georgetown's Ruben Boumtje-Boumtje (aka "Boom-Boom"). My text exchange with Knight took a turn when I asked if Page going boom-boom on Boom-Boom was the best dunk he ever saw in person.
Knight: "2nd best. Maybe 1-B."
Me: "You can't leave me hangin' on 1-A!!"
Knight: "I played with Vince Carter in a summer league. (Ex-NBA player) Tim Thomas had an event called Playaz Ball. On one back-door play I threw Vince a chest pass, and he'd already jumped. While in midair, he caught it between his legs and dunked it backwards. It looked like I threw him a bad alley-oop pass. He is the best in-game dunker ever."
On Thursday afternoon, a few hours after Carter announced his retirement at age 43, thus ending the longest career in NBA history (22 years), I reached out to Knight to make sure I had interpreted him correctly.
He meant Carter was the best dunker of all time, without qualification, correct?
"Yes, absolutely," Knight said. "He was doing contest dunks in games, in traffic, with defenders in his way."
You know what? Knight's right: Carter is the best dunker of all time, for that very reason _ his best dunks were regular basketball plays that suddenly morphed into mind-blowing, legend-growing, poster-showing flush jobs that the people on hand will remember for the rest of their lives.
One could ask Frederic Weis about that. He was France's 7-2 center in the 2000 Sydney Olympics, and he'd be known as just another first-round Knicks draft bust if not for what Carter did to him.
The guy they called "Half Man, Half Amazing" intercepted a pass, raced toward Weis and literally jumped over his head for one of the most iconic dunks ever.
On the 15-year anniversary of Frederic's Folly, Weis spoke with ESPN, which said the French refer to the play as "le dunk de la morte" (the dunk of death).
"(Carter) deserves to make history," Weis said. "Sadly for me, I was on the video, too. I learned people can fly."
Dante Calabria learned that lesson the easy way _ as Carter's teammate. The two played a season together at North Carolina. Calabria laughed Thursday when he recalled Carter turning a bad alley-oop pass, kind of like Knight's, into a SportsCenter Top-10 play.
"We were playing Clemson in the ACC tournament in 1996, and we have this in-bounds play where we throw a lob," Calabria recalled. "As soon as I let it go, I was like, 'Oh man, that's horrible.' Well, out of the blue came this hawk, and his arm went wide, and he grabbed it and threw it down. I said to myself, 'What a great pass!'
"He could do things like that, and not just once in a while." A few years earlier, Calabria was working the Five-Star summer camp at Robert Morris when he spotted Carter, a skinny, 6-6 jumping bean, for the first time.
"I remember immediately calling the (North Carolina) coaches over and saying, 'Hey, you got to look at this kid,' " Calabria said. "Coach Ford (assistant Phil Ford) said, 'Yeah, we're already on him.' "
Calabria is quick to point out something else: Carter wasn't just a dunker. He was, in fact, one of five players in NBA history with at least 25,000 points, 5,000 rebounds, 4,000 assists and 500 3-pointers. The other four, as Tommy Breer of Forbes pointed out, were Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Paul Pierce and LeBron James.
"And the biggest thing about Vince, basketball aside, is he's one of the nicest guys I've ever met," Calabria said. "Always has a smile, always says hello, always approachable."
Unless, of course, you were in his way.
