Get the MRI.

I was at Arizona State’s basketball gym. I came down from a dunk and landed completely normal.

Then I felt my leg snap.

It was not a big snap. It was slight. I remember thinking, what the hell was that, and then I kept moving. I ran a little. It felt weird, but it did not feel broken.

Then there was a bone floating around my knee.

They all said cartilage

That is not a figure of speech. There was a little piece loose in there and it moved. You could see it sticking out on the outside of my knee.

I went to three different doctors and two different physical therapists. I got an ultrasound. Every one of them told me the same thing. It is cartilage, break it down with a foam roller.

So that is what I did. For eight months.

I want to be clear about what that actually looked like, because when somebody says they were injured you picture a brace and some crutches. This was not that.

That thing would get stuck in the track of my knee during the day. So I would be walking somewhere with people and I would have to stop and say hold on a second, and find the bone with my hand, and move it to a spot where it was not in the way. Then keep walking.

I did that for eight months. In front of people. Mid conversation.

Some days it settled somewhere bad enough that I could not walk at all. I remember sitting in my apartment near the end of it, unable to get up, thinking why is this cartilage not working.

That is the day I finally got the MRI.

If you take one thing out of this, take that. If you get hurt and nobody can tell you what it is, get the MRI immediately. Not after three opinions. Not after eight months of foam rolling something that was never going to foam roll. I lost most of a year being agreeable about it.

I had the surgery. I was cleared in February.

Nobody knew who I was

Here is the part that stung more than the knee did.

Dunk Camp was July 2023, a few months after the injury. I went anyway. I was still walking around with that thing in my leg and I still did not know what was wrong with me.

Nobody there knew who I was. Not one person. I was a guy standing at a dunk camp who could not really dunk.

That was humbling, and I would rather say that than skip past it, because it is the part people usually edit out. I was 20. I had already stopped playing basketball. I had just found the one thing I wanted to do instead. And I was standing in a gym full of dunkers as a nobody with a broken leg.

Eleven and a half months, all in. Call it a year.

Four months later

I went back to Dunk Camp in June 2024. Four months after being cleared.

I made the finals.

I hit an East Bay in the contest. I came close on an under both and on a full reverse 360 East Bay, and I missed them both, and I genuinely do not care. I got to the finals of a dunk contest a year after I could not walk across my own apartment.

Everybody knew who I was after that. Same room, same people, twelve months apart.

Between that camp and the next one I went from about 1,000 followers to 14,000.

I am not telling you this so it lands as a happy ending. I am telling you because of the shape of it. I was down about giving up basketball. Then I found dunking. Then I broke my knee a few months before the thing I was building toward. Then I spent a year moving a bone out of the way with my fingers so I could walk to my car.

That is just how it goes. Down, then up, then down again. If you stay in it long enough, the bad stretch turns out to be the middle of the story instead of the end of it.

But get the MRI.