Shootyhoops Basketmakers: Darryl Dawkins

First Contact

In the 1950s, the United States and the USSR were embroiled in a bitter space race.  Both were desperate to prove their superiority over their rival in any way they could.  The Cold War was in full effect, and nowhere was it colder than in space.  Why both sides decided to define “Cold War” so literally is anyone’s guess, but still.

The United States feared that Russia was pushing forward in order to build spy satellites and space-based weaponry, all to control the U.S. from high above.  The USSR was equally afraid that the United States was enacting the plot to Diamonds are Forever.  Both were very wrong about the other’s intention, as time would tell, but fear was an incredible motivator.  The Russians sent dogs and monkeys into space, presumably because they found dogs wearing space helmets adorable. Unfortunately, a few clerical errors meant that these dogs and monkeys had no way to return to the Earth and would undoubtedly die up there.  This really put a damper on how cute the whole program was.

Knowing that the Russians were pushing the boundaries of safety to claim victory, the U.S. decided to focus on ever greater goals.  The Americans and their pesky need to feed and clothe their citizenry were unable to beat the Russians to space, but they would beat them to the Moon.

America accomplished this.

Indeed, the USSR was the first to space when Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth in 1961.  It was a great scientific leap forward for the entire globe.  It also provided the Americans the legal precedent they needed to push forward.  The United States knew that if they put a man in space first, the Russians would raise a fuss about countries claiming ownership over different portions of the void.  It would have been just another spark of tension between the two nations that very well could have led to war.  

Really, it was better that the Americans lost this battle so that they could win the war.  This is what every member of NASA has told themselves for the last 60 years.

In 1969[1], the Americans finally landed on the Moon, claiming their absolute superiority in the space race.  No one could contest that this was anything but an astounding accomplishment showing the strength of the United States.  It was a great blow against the Russians, who were really more concerned with how bad they were at running their own country at this point.

There was any number of amazing discoveries by the crew of Apollo 11.  Moon rocks, various exotic French cheeses, and reams of data were all brought back by Neil Armstrong and his crewmates, Elton John and Thomas David Bowie.  The most unexpected of these discoveries, however, was that of alien life.

While walking on the moon for the first time, Neil Armstrong came upon something no one would have ever thought possible.  Sitting contentedly on the Moon’s surface, playing the bass guitar to no one, was a 12-year-old alien that looked impressively human.  He was tall, far too tall for a human of his age, and appeared to glow with a purple aura.  Two extra arms plucked at the strings of the bass before receding back into his chest.  Strangest of all, he spoke English, or a close facsimile of it.  Almost everything he said rhymed and made little to no grammatical or narrative sense.  It was as if art were pouring out of his lips.

Hours of conversation led to the alien agreeing to return to Earth with the crew.  A tearful goodbye between he and his girlfriend, Juicy Lucy, followed before Apollo 11 was able to leave and make its way back home.  Once there, the alien was integrated into society[2], passing himself off as just a regular high school student.

Unable to use his true name, the alien decided upon the moniker “Darryl Dawkins.”  This was decided upon because it was not in use by anyone in the United States at the time and has never been used since, in fact.  If you were to look in the phone book and the phone book contained the names of every single American citizen ever born, it would be a very large phone book.

The basketball coach at Maynard Evans High School was a chipper young man by the name of Fred Pennington, who would later change his name to both Chad and Ty at separate occasions in order to succeed in his other ventures.  He took a liking to Dawkins as soon as the alien stepped foot on campus.  Finding a 6’11” freshman is rare at any high school, obviously.  Finding one that has already developed muscle tone and for all intents and purposes appeared to be a grown man was even rarer.  This was because Dawkins was fully grown for his species, but no one ever said aliens can’t play basketball[3].

"Let's coach some basketball!"

It took two full years for Dawkins to grasp the intricacies of basketball.  More accurately, it took two full years for Pennington to give up on trying to change Dawkins’ ways.  For you see, the first time he stepped on a basketball court, Dawkins bumped his head on the backboard.  He swore a vendetta against all backboards at that moment.  For the rest of his career, Dawkins would do everything he could to destroy every backboard he came in contact with.  He found the most efficient way to do this was to dunk so hard that the backboard had no choice but to kill itself in its embarrassment at being so thoroughly bested.  This happened on the regular in Dawkins’ career.  He remains the only person with a recorded instance of forcing a backboard to kill itself out of shame[4].

Pennington realized that dunking was actually a pretty good strategy for a basketball team, especially when they had Dawkins at their disposal.  There was not a man in Florida who could stand up to Dawkins’ thunderous abilities.  He was so impressive, in fact, that he was nicknamed “Chocolate Thunder,” which is the most literal translation of his birth name and in no way reflective of his love for chocolates and/or the Tom Cruise film Days of Thunder.  If people were nicknamed after our favorite movies, everyone would be called Chocolate Mad Max: Fury Road and it would be very confusing.

There was no challenge in the high school ranks for Dawkins.  He plowed through the competition for years[5].  Everyone agreed that there was no reason for Dawkins to go to college.  In fact, the NCAA banned him from entering their ranks, as colleges didn’t have the money to afford that many backboards in those days.

So it was straight to the NBA for Chocolate.  He was drafted by the Philadelphia 76ers.  He joined the golden era of Philadelphia basketball, when the team was concerned only with having the coolest roster ever assembled.  Dawkins was an important part of that, though never the focal point he was in high school.  Still, his success led him to loosening up some.  For the first time, he opened up about his alien past, which surprisingly proved many of Parliament’s lyrics quite prescient.  No one really believed him, but what was important for Chocolate was that he was able to truly be himself for the first time in years.  Amongst Dawkins’ revelations about alien life were:

·         That he was from the planet Lovetron

·         That Lovetron was a multi-colored pyramid, with each sided painted differently

·         That his primary professional goal was to spread interplanetary funksmanship

·         That, while it was too far away for any human to visit, he visited it each offseason

·         That Juicy Lucy still lived there, waiting for his return each summer

·         That alien life actually preferred 100 Grand to Reese’s Pieces.

Oddly, this man was never mentioned by Dawkins.

It was all information the government had learned years ago, during their extensive testing of Dawkins.  None of it was considered harmful and so was allowed to be disseminated to the public, though few in the government believed they could really stop Dawkins if they wanted to.

As Dawkins grew older, his skillset grew more and more refined.  Dawkins began to focus on nothing but dunks, whereas earlier in his career he had tried to grab a rebound once in a while too.  By the 1980 season, Dawkins was shooting 61% from the field, setting a record by not releasing the ball before it was in the basket on any of his shots.  Dawkins recorded a mind-boggling 420 dunks that season, with his three remaining field goals deemed to be layups by vindictive official scorers.

Sadly, injuries began to take their toll on Dawkins.  Unbeknownst to humanity, Chocolate Thunder was well past the peak physical years of his species by the time he was traded to the Nets as a 26-year-old.  He managed to play two more full seasons before missing at least 30 games in his last four seasons.  By 33, he was out of basketball, choosing instead to return to his home planet for some quality time with Juicy Lucy.  Dawkins had grown fond of Earth and still returns regularly to visit.  It is always an enjoyable visit and not even once has he (or any of his brethren) tried to destroy the White House, contrary to what the liberal media would have you think.

Chocolate Thunder was known for naming his dunks, giving them an individual flair that was lacking elsewhere in the NBA.  Below is a selection of Dawkins’ dunk names, with a brief description of the dunk itself.

The Go-Rilla: Dawkins climbed to the top of the Empire State Building, clutching a basketball under his arm, then leapt down from there, angling his jump so that he was able to two-handed slam the ball at Madison Square Garden.  Hundreds were killed.

The Look Out Below: Similar to the Go-Rilla, but with Dawkins only climbing to the rafters of whatever arena he was in, in order to lessen the cost in human lives.

The Chocolate-Thunder-Flying, Robinzine-Crying, Teeth-Shaking, Glass-Breaking, Rump-Roasting, Bun-Toasting, Wham-Bam, Glass-Breaker-I-Am-Jam: Self explanatory.

The In-Your-Face-Disgrace: Dawkins would leap up for a tomahawk jam, holding his defender’s face under the rim so that the ball would crush their skull as he dunked.

The Yo-Mama: Dawkins would read scripts from the MTV program Yo Momma: Atlanta while casually dunking over his shoulder, never once turning to locate the basket.

The Spine-Chiller Supreme: Every “on fire” dunk from NBA Jam, all at once somehow.

The Greyhound Special: Named as an homage to the bus Dawkins would ride to his high school.  Actually just a pretty normal, one-handed dunk.  Hundreds were killed.

Cover Your Head: Dawkins would throw the ball through the roof of the arena, run to the other end of the court, and catch it on its downswing before dunking.  Another of Dawkins’ dunks that sadly ended with enormous loss of human life.

The Space Jam: Dawkins would revert to his most alien form, stretching his arm from half court to the hoop, where he would softly place it through the basket.

"Oops, looks like I made a dunky-pants on you."

Sadly, Dawkins passed away in 2015 at the ripe old age of 92 (by Lovetronian years) after a decades-long battle with health.  Chocolate Thunder had grown to love his adopted homeworld so much that he even had children with a human woman, ensuring that basketball would never fall out of the clutches of his people.  Ever since his retirement, not a game has gone by in which NBA officials have not triple-checked the security of their backboards, lest Chocolate Thunder teleport down from his spaceship and make fools out of them for their shoddy craftsmanship.  This is why all NBA backboards have been made out of Adamantium since its discovery inside the body of Grant Hill in 1999.  Sadly, no sustainable source of the metal has been found, as the reserves within Hill have been bled dry by this point.  It is only a matter of time before Chocolate Thunder returns, perhaps as a cyborg or a ghost or a cyborghost, to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of dunksketball.

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[1] The Year of the Hilarious Inuendos on the Chinese calendar.

[2] After years of scientific study and communication with Jeff Goldblum.

[3] Similarly, nowhere in the rules does it say dogs can’t play basketball, leading to Dawkins’ state championship triumph over a team of golden retrievers.

[4] Shaquille O’Neal forced several backboards to kill themselves through intimidation.

[5] Two of them.