The refs blew the whistle to call a couple technical fouls (Dudley got one for throwing the ball, Shaq got one for shoving Dudley) so the game stopped for a moment, but the camera made sure to stay on Dudley’s face as he was staring at Shaq and you could very plainly see him shout 'FUCK YOU!' at Shaq. And what’s maybe the best part of the whole thing was that Dudley, who-how could you even blame him by that point?-he was so furious from everything that had just happened, he jumped up, grabbed the ball, then threw it at Shaq’s back as hard as he could as Shaq was jogging back down the court. Shaq finished the dunk and as he came down, Dudley was trying to hold on to him to prevent himself from falling, but Shaq being Shaq, he just shoved Dudley to the ground. Since he didn’t fall down, though, he was able to contest the dunk, which only made things more horrible, because when Shaq dunked it, he pulled himself up on the rim a bit, and when he did so he opened his legs up and so there was Dudley, right in the middle of that warfare, with Shaq’s dick all of a sudden on his chest, and, I mean, if we’re ranking places you’d be displeased to find Shaq’s dick on your body, the chest is probably the third or fourth worst.

And what’s worse is that, despite getting banged around, he never all the way lost his balance, which was bad because if he’d lost his balance he could’ve just fallen down and that would’ve been the end of it. He was just getting bounced all over in Shaq’s wake as Shaq pounded on him. Poor Dudley, man-he looked like the boat in that scene in The Perfect Storm when it tries to ride up that giant wave and gets crushed. Shaq caught the ball in the low post, dribbled it a few times as he backed Dudley down closer to the rim, put his shoulder into Dudley’s chest to uproot him, pivoted toward the basket, jumped, and then hit Dudley in the forehead with a dump truck. It was true devastation and real anarchy, the dunk. On March 28, 1999, Shaquille O’Neal, who is like if a mountain came alive and started doing commercials, dunked on Chris Dudley, then a center for the New York Knicks. Which Dunks Are in the Disrespectful Dunk Hall of Fame?: Part 1 I hope you don’t hate it, and I hope that you don’t hate the book. That’s because in the book it’s a double chapter. You’ll notice when you get to the end of this one that it just sort of cuts off. Each of them, though, is (hopefully) good and (hopefully) new and (hopefully) smart and (hopefully) fun. Sometimes the questions are serious, and sometimes the questions are not. The way the book works is simple: Each chapter is a different basketball question that needs to be answered. What follows is an excerpt from my new book, Basketball (and Other Things), which will be published on October 10.

Michael j. shea victory march