Michael Joe figured he'd missed the first dunk because he was trying to show off, and the second because he'd used too much power.
This time, he wouldn't dunk with so much force. He'd just gently lay the ball in under the basket. Surely he couldn't miss again.
Though Wang Yi had passed him the ball three times in a row, which was practically an insult, now that he had the ball, he had to put it in.
So this time, he leaped high. He'd already reached the height of the rim, but instead of throwing down his usual powerful dunk, he simply planned to raise the ball above the rim and gently lay it in.
They said that brute force could work miracles, but dunking was different.
Sometimes, if you used too much power, the ball could hit the back of the rim and bounce right back out.
So this time, he used much less force.
But perhaps he was being too cautious. As he raised the ball, it clipped the underside of the rim.
It slipped right out of his hands and rolled out of bounds.
At that moment, more than twenty thousand people in the Smoothie King Center—including the fans, coaches, players, staff, referees, and commentators—were all dumbfounded.
"Whatthefuck!"
At least one in ten of the more than nineteen thousand spectators swore aloud.
A third of them expressed their disbelief with the same words in their heads.
The rest cried out to God, stunned and unable to believe what they'd seen.
Van Gundy, the commentator at the game, couldn't help grabbing at the few hairs around the edges of his bald spot.
Now that was one determined guy.
And he really was. He'd once been accepted to Yale, one of America's famous Ivy League schools, but transferred