risking pain for success

by Ryian

Dunking was never an instant lesson, you learned through smashing your face into the floor, smashing other people in the face, going through dangerous various life-threatening teaching aids, or just failing before the attempt was even made. Sometimes, you might even think you were dying.

It wasn't a big secret that people who've never dunk before, failed in a way that was often painful and overly embarrassing to have to admit to others. But it was always in the history of people who dunked in basketball. NBA players went through it, amateurs went through it; it was almost a rite of passage, a painful one but nonetheless a rite of passage.

Therefore it wasn't much of a stretch to know what despite how amazing the Generation of Miracles were in basketball, they would each have their own painful and embarrassing mistakes. In fact, the first time Kise tried dunking after playing basketball for a month or two; he overdid it and ended up flipping and braining himself on the floor. He couldn't play for the next couple days due to a concussion, as well as a lingering black eye that was painful to look at.

Aomine didn't have much of the same problems in middle school, but it did happen occasionally. On one such event, in the very beginnings of the teamwork between him and Tetsu, he forgot about the shorter player. That was okay in any other circumstance, but not during his attempt to dunk. He actually was in the middle of a jump, arm out when he kneed Tetsu in the face, missed the rim by a mile, and straight landed on his back. To his credit, he made the hoop at the cost of severe pain from his back and the punch that occurred when Tetsu woke up.

Murasakibara didn't pull out dunks very often but one time when he was younger, he stretched too far over the rim that when he slammed it in, he had blood blisters staining his skin on his forearm. That wasn't too embarrassing until the players underneath caught his legs and he landed on the other that knocked the wind out of him. The noises he made, and the fact he was telling others that he was dying because he never had the wind knocked out of him before, made him want to forget that day.

Midorima didn't like dunking at all, so rarely did he try it. But a dare brought out that competitive spirit and he tried it. It was after a hard session of training that the competition took place and when he went up to dunk, he skidded on the sweat soaked floors right into Takao who had already thrown the ball up to him. His glasses went flying, and in a small form of bad luck, they were smashed. The next couple days were hell for the team with a cranky player whose migraine far exceeded what was allowed on the plane of Earth. All for a stupid bet too.

Kuroko and Akashi never really had any embarrassing stories being unable to dunk without the help of others, but they did have a repertoire of blackmail from the rest of the team during their years in Teikou. Some of them were actually stories from parents during dinners, some of them from Momoi, some of from friends that followed from elementary school. All it all, it was good stories to bring out over lunch, or dinner, when the others were too hung up on the short jokes. No matter how many punches were given out, time again later, they were pulled out much to the annoyance of both Akashi and Kuroko.

Kagami, on the other hand, learned what not to dunk on, especially those portable basketball hoops. Trying to dunk on them was a very life-threatening learning experience. He's been pinned underneath them, got a hoop to various parts of his body, ran into the pole, all in all not a very pleasant experience. He used to even have that bolted in hoop on the side of his house in LA, and after a while even that was dangerous and the last time he dunked on that was when it straight just fell off and almost landed on him.

So it honestly didn't matter if you were in the GoM or NBA or just a victim of the basketball high, dunking was serious business, sometimes on the painful side, sometimes on the embarrassing side. No matter what happened, it happened to someone famous, and it'll happen to you. Dunking might have been an insult when it first began, but now it was a way to sway the spectators and lift the spirits of your team. Even if you didn't manage to pull it off right, or you just missed, or was blocked, it didn't matter.

Basketball is basketball.