Julius Erving, of the New York Nets, goes for a dunk in the 1976 American Basketball Association championships against the Denver Nuggets.

The First Slam Dunk

How the powerful—and at times illegal—basketball shot made its way from the streetball games of New York City and the plains of West Texas to the N.B.A.

By Mike Sielski

When I began work on my book Magic in the Air: The Myth, the Mystery, and the Soul of the Slam Dunk, I made certain assumptions about where I would have to go so I could research the topic properly. The book was to be an anecdotal, narrative history of basketball, of American popular culture, of civil rights and racial reckoning, of the rise of the Black athlete and the game’s growth into a multi-billion-dollar industry. So … cities. I figured I would spend a lot of time in cities. And gyms. And arenas. And playgrounds. Basketball is primarily an urban sport, after all. I figured I would go where the players are and where the legends had been.

I did not figure that I would be standing on a browned expanse of farmland, on a scorching spring afternoon in West Texas, scanning the earth for rattlesnakes.