Mac McClung’s secret sauce

Intentional long-term athletic preparation

BY HENRY ABBOTT

EZRA SHAW/GETTY IMAGES

As All-Star weekend unfolded in San Francisco, American mid-distance runner Grant Fisher took the track in Boston and broke a 21-year-old world record, running five kilometers in 12 minutes, 44.09 seconds. It was, somehow, Fisher’s second world record in six days. He had just run three kilometers in 7:22.91 the weekend before at the Millrose Games in New York City.

As he rounded the final curve, the crowd on its feet, Fisher embodied the high intensity, all-out “get after it” that happens in the NBA playoffs—but, to the basketball world’s dismay, not at last weekend’s All-Star weekend by the Bay.

Standing on the track in the aftermath, Fisher described his recipe, saying he had spent the week between races at his girlfriend’s place in Boston, doing almost nothing. Some ice baths, some massages, mostly lying on the couch. In running, it’s called “tapering.”

In stirring the human spirit, somehow this barely televised afterthought of a sport outperformed the NBA’s bazillion-dollar Ultra-HD show. The NBA doesn’t like its athletes to taper. Did anyone notice MVP candidate Shai Gilgeous-Alexander assaulting the rim late Thursday night in Minnesota before catching a who-knows-what-hour flight to San Francisco on Friday to … not be ready for a world record.

Mid-distance runners like Fisher cover about the distance an NBA starter runs in a game. It’s a different sport, but not totally different. After two records in six days, Fisher’s coach, Mike Scanner, said: “We’re going to let the body recover a little bit.”

Fisher explained: “I won’t work out for probably two weeks. I’ll just take a few days of basically nothing. Then slowly start jogging. In two weeks, I’ll start doing some tempos … midway through March I’ll start doing serious stuff again.” The next round of races Fisher’s targeting come in the summer. Fisher says that he’s “the type of athlete who needs to go up and down in intensity. … If I want to be back up in the summer I need to take that down cycle.”

Fisher thinks maybe this is the year he can beat the standard bearer of the sport, Norway’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen, who set his own world record last week. Fisher’s making choices in February to be at his best at the World Championships in September.

That’s how you make athletic magic happen.

In terms of having bodies at their best, All-Star feels like careless schedule litter. It is when it is not because that’s when players are ready to shine, but because that’s when the NFL season has ended and the league wants to grab the public’s attention. NBA bodies are generally in great shape in training camp, spent around now, and … using every trick in the book to be halfway decent again by the playoffs.

Did you notice LeBron saying he has “no regrets” about never being in the dunk contest? That’s athletic wisdom from the all-time NBA minutes leader, who has carried various oddball rosters to the Finals 10 times. It’s the worst time of the year for Ja or Giannis to dunk. They won’t have a week to ice bath, massage, nor lie on the couch.

There’s a reason the high-energy parts of All-Star Weekend generally come from players who are young and new to the NBA—or in Mac McClung’s case, not in the NBA at all. The San Francisco Chronicle said Mac McClung “saved NBA All-Star Weekend.” He flew over a car, missed not one single dunk, earned four perfect scores, and won his third consecutive dunk title.

Why can’t everyone learn from McClung, right?

Because life is about preparation. Insanely, Grant Hill asked McClung: “Do you go out and practice these dunks before you do ’em, or do you do ’em for the first time when you’re out here?”

In a string of interviews following his victory, McClung detailed his process, which sounded like Fisher’s. He had been targeting this night in February, McClung said, for “eight or nine months.” He found gyms that would open their doors wide to a car. Can you imagine spending an hour in some practice gym with a dunk coach failing to jump over a car? McClung went through all that, and learned. He had been furiously sharing videos of different concepts, grilling his friends about which was a “guaranteed 50.” McClung said his buddy, Nate, who served up a ball from a rotating hoverboard, had been practicing five hours a day for two weeks. That’s something like 70 hours of hovering.

Some thousand hours or so goes into peaking at the right time for a performance like that. The reason Mac McClung killed All-Star weekend is because All-Star Weekend was Mac McClung’s top priority. He’s probably the only basketball player in the history of the sport who has earned more money from All-Star Weekend than from basketball.

There’s a YouTube comment under one of McClung’s interviews asserting the NBA “needs his athleticism.” But here’s what this story is missing: The NBA has oodles of McClung-plus athletes—Anthony Edwards, Zach LaVine, Ja Morant, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Jalen Green, Shaedon Sharpe, and many others. What they don’t have is McClung’s luxury of preparation; nobody has a body that can both grind through 55 games and 30-odd flights since the end of October, and take on a secondary athletic goal like super-automotive dunking. The athletes are superb; their legs are ground beef. This exhibition makes no sense as a schedule priority, if you’re counting on your body to win NBA games.

All-Star doesn’t matter to basketball players because All-Star doesn’t matter to basketball.

“I was hoping that it would feel a lot better this morning, but it’s not where I want it to be,” LeBron said while explaining why he wouldn’t play in the All-Star game. He stars for the current fifth-seed in the West and has precious few years left to try to win one last title.

“Thirty games left and us trying to make a playoff push in the wild, wild West,” LeBron continued. “I feel like it’s pretty important for me to take care of myself, and kind of understand what’s coming on. [...] There will be no vacation for me. So, I head back to L.A. tonight and back to rehab tomorrow and back to practice on Tuesday, and hopefully I’ll be ready to play against Charlotte on Wednesday and hopefully against Portland on Thursday. It’s a big stretch for us.”

As the dunk contest is to McClung, the playoffs are to LeBron—and every player who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about winning All-Star Weekend. The jobs, the bonuses, the coaches, the legacies, the Hall of Fame criteria … the whole sport orients around the big goal of winning a title.

During the 3-point contest, commentators Reggie Miller and Kevin Harlan ran so entirely out of things to say that Harlan emphatically explained, not once but twice, how Darius Garland usually wears number 10 but was wearing number 22 to honor his dad. (Yay?) Later, Harlan literally read a list of past contest winners; largely, it seemed, because it happened to be the piece of paper on the desk in front of him. That level of whoop-de-damn-do never happens in the playoffs, because the playoffs matter.

The NBA’s concept has long been that they’ll get the best athletes in the world and then tell them to be athletic, all over the globe and calendar, without ever getting the kind of in-season rest that fuels Fisher. The result is the set and script of the world’s best basketball performance, but currently unfit to perform are the vast majority of the world’s best basketball players, like LeBron James, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Luka Dončić, Joel Embiid, Anthony Edwards, Anthony Davis, Devin Booker, Zion Williamson, Ja Morant, Kawhi Leonard, Jaylen Brown, Jrue Holiday, and so on. Dozens and dozens of NBA players are hurt right now.

McClung’s secret sauce, in other words, is that he’s not in the NBA. This season, McClung has played five minutes in the NBA, and 494 minutes in the G-League. Over the three years McClung has dominated the dunk contest, he has played a grand total of 976 G-League minutes. Already this season, 187 NBA players have played more than 976 minutes.

The Mayo Clinic’s Michael Joyner, M.D. has long led a lab that studies “how humans respond to various forms of physical and mental stress during activities such as exercise.” He has worked with elite marathoners, NASA, and the Department of Defense. Years ago, Joyner told me that “a good rule of thumb is five really hard efforts in two weeks. Make me NBA czar, and I would shoot for no more than five games in a two-week period with no back-to-backs.”

Any more action than that, and athletes are likely to suffer a decrease in performance and an increase in injury risk. Every NBA player does more than that.

Matas Buzelis flew over and around everyone back in summer league—before the grind began. But he did a terrible job in the dunk contest, personifying everything people don’t like about All-Star. After a string of misses, he had the correct take: “I needed more practice. But it’s hard to do it in the season, you know?”

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