UPDATE: Word is Bekkering just sat out a season after transferring from Eastern Washington, and next season will be back on the court joining his brother at the University of Calgary.
Meanwhile, Michael Grange of the Toronto Globe & Mail gives me his blessing to reprint a Bekkering article he wrote for the now defunct magazine Toro Magazine:
November, 2004
The arena is half full and the game decided, but when Henry Bekkering checks in for mop-up duty in a Canadian loss at the Under-21 Tournament of the Americas this past summer [July, 2004], a ripple passes through the Halifax Metro Centre. Little kids squeal and nudge their Dads: "It's that guy, the Internet dunking guy." They could have also said, "There's the guy who dunked over that football player on TV." Or, "Check out this white guy. He can fly."
A moment later, the eighteen-year-old with the action-figure build gathers a pass on the baseline, takes a dribble, and bursts to the rim for his specialty, as if jolted off the ground by a booster cable. A loud, painful-sounding slap echoes through the arena. The defender, an Argentinean, has responded with a wicked whack and a mid-air tackle rather than be a prop in a move out of a video game. The extra ballast slows Bekkering's ascent enough that he opts to lay the ball up and take his free throws
The kids giggle. The dads shake their heads. Even the heavy-lidded National Basketball Association scouts smile. Laws of physics and nature suggest that Bekkering should have been sent crashing to the floor, not carrying some South American assault perpetrator to the rim. That he made it as far as he did - dunk or no dunk - backs up what a lot of basketball insiders have been saying for months: When it comes to leaving the ground with a basketball in hand, the son of a feed-lot manager from southern Alberta with a forty-inch vertical jump is among the best in the world
In pure basketball terms, Bekkering is a bit player, a high-school legend who's still trying to prove himself after sitting out his freshman year at Eastern Washington University and barely cracking the rotation as the youngest player on Canada's Under-21 team this summer.
But in human terms, in his relationship to things like force, mass, and gravity, the 6-foot-6, 230-pounder from Taber, Alberta, is a freak. "Henry?" says Kingsley Costain, who played with Bekkering this summer, and will play for Pepperdine University in California this year. "He's abnormal."
Bekkering's current celebrity status can be traced to a high-school all-star game dunk contest in Vancouver a year and a half ago. This being the digital age, the competition was recorded and posted on a little-known Web site called HoopLife.ca. Were this just another sample of the form - a bunch of fairly athletic teenagers trying and failing to mimic Vince Carter, the acknowledged master - the story of the video would have ended there, sampled only by friends and family.
But it wasn't. On his first attempt, leaped over another player standing in the middle of the key and finished with a hard, windmill action. The next trick on the video shows him rising to eye level with the ten-foot rim, dunking hard, and then hanging onto the basket by his elbow, a nod to one of Carter's signature moves, the way an assured young jazzman might bend a note as a nod to Miles Davis. By the time Bekkering dunked from a step inside the foul line off two feet, the contest has been conceded, and the crowd mobbed him on the floor, joyous in the shared knowledge that they had just seen something, well, freaky.
The clip was downloaded and e-mailed, arriving in the inboxes of hoops junkies the world over with subject lines reading, "You've got to see this!" Within a few months, Bekkering's feats were fodder on discussion groups from Russia to Australia, where one post, on a message board devoted to the Adelaide 36ers of the Australian Basketball Association, was entitled simply, and appreciatively, "White Boy Got Hops."
A producer on the Fox Sports Networks' flagship, Best Damn Sports Show Period, saw the clip, tracked Bekkering down, and put him on the program in May - billing him as the "Best Dunker You've Never Seen" - where he met Boston Celtics star Paul Pierce, and dunked over Brian Bosworth, the retired National Football League linebacker and B-movie actor.
In Halifax, the day after the Argentinean assault, Bekkering fingers the large, handprint-shaped welt on his thick shoulder and ponders his version of fame over a post-practice snack of chocolate milk and deep-fried mozzarella sticks. "It's kind of cool, I guess," he says. As much as he enjoys the impact of this rather specific talent ("A big dunk can swing the momentum of a game") and allows himself a quiet pride ("I've never lost a dunk contest"), he's hardly caught up in his own hype.
He dunked for the first time in grade eight when he was six-foot-one. It was no big deal, he says, just a one-handed number off one foot while fooling around with his buddies in Taber, a predominantly Mormon community in southern Alberta about forty kilometres from Lethbridge. A year later and a few inches taller, he was suddenly able to do the same dunks he watched NBA stars do on television. He won his first dunk contest that year at a big tournament in Edmonton that featured the best teams in Alberta and some from south of the border.
Still, Bekkering is never preening, never boastful. Even after the craziest dunks, he jogs back up the court like he's just made an uncontested layup. His modesty, in part, stems from the fact that he's never had to work at his ability to fly. He once tried a training program designed to improve his jumping ability but abandoned it after a few weeks; it was the equivalent of taking sand to the beach.
He is, simply, genetically gifted. His father, Simon, could still dunk at age fifty, and his four brothers and sisters are all talented basketball players too. The best insight into his jumping ability, says Bekkering, comes from his faith. A devout Christian, he credits his ability to reach rare heights to a greater power. "I didn't do anything to get this talent," he says. "I think God gave me this talent because he wants me to use it to spread his word and reach other people. It's not about me, really."
Back at the hotel, I watch the video clip again, and reflect on my own lame, rim-grabbing days. Maybe the kid's onto something.
Praise be to the highest.
