What’s in a dunk? Inquirer columnist Mike Sielski discusses his book about the iconic play.

Mike Sielski is a prolific writer, and not just here at The Inquirer. He has written four books, and his latest, Magic in the Air, which came out in February, explores the slam dunk and the social and cultural change it unleashed nationwide.

As part of The Inquirer’s Fitler Club speaker series, Sielski recently sat down with former 76ers center Marc Jackson to discuss his book as well as hoops at large.

Below are three takeaways from the conversation. Check out the full video here.

The idea for Magic in the Air came from another sportswriter with area ties: Tyler Kepner, a Flourtown native who now covers Major League Baseball for the Athletic and wrote K: A History of Baseball in 10 Pitches. Sielski wanted to produce a basketball version of that book.

As he considered basketball’s greats — players like Michael Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, and Julius Erving — he noticed a common thread: They all could play above the rim.

That realization led him to the dunk.

“And the more I learned about it, the more I realized that the dunk was really kind of a vehicle for change, both within the sport and within American society,” Sielski said. “And the thing that really drove that home was the research I started to do into the fact that the slam dunk in this country from 1967 to 1976 was banned.”

Sure, that might be a nice piece of trivia, but was there something deeper to banning the dunk?

The ban came one year after Texas Western became the first team to win an NCAA men’s basketball championship with an all-Black starting five. That next season featured UCLA, which went 30-0 and was led by sophomore dunking sensation Lew Alcindor (now known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).

“And there was some sincere belief in this, but really [the ban went into effect] under the guise that it was for safety reasons; they didn’t want somebody to get hurt by a rim coming down or backboard getting shattered,” Sielski said.

“But there’s really no way that you can look at that rule being put in place in 1967, given what’s happening in the sport, given what’s happening in the country at the time, and draw any other conclusion than it was racially motivated.”

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Like his friend Kepner’s book, each chapter of Magic in the Air is “its own entity” and centers on a player and the era in which he starred. Research for the early portions of the book led Sielski to uncover figures he believes should be more well-known. Meet “Jumpin’” Jackie Jackson and Joe Fortenberry.

Jackie Jackson twice led the nation in rebounding in the early 1960s at Virginia Union, an HBCU in Richmond, Va. While he didn’t have the size or outside shooting capability to play in the NBA, he made a name for himself in semipro basketball and at Rucker Park in the Harlem Rucker League, which Sielski credits with nurturing the flair and skill of dunking.

“Back then in the ’60s and ’70s, the Rucker League was a place where schoolyard legends could play against great college and pro players and kind of test themselves out,” Sielski said. “Julius Erving played there. Wilt Chamberlain played there. And Jackie made his bones by one day at 6-foot-5, catching an alley-oop pass and dunking over Wilt Chamberlain. It didn’t matter that Wilt then dunked the ball the next 10 times that he got it and that his team then won the game. What mattered was the individual skill and showmanship and the force with which Jumpin’ Jackie threw the ball down on Wilt.”

Fortenberry is connected to the term dunk itself. The semipro player and Olympian from Happy, in the Texas panhandle, was playing in an exhibition game at Madison Square Garden in the 1930s. Arthur Daley, a writer from the New York Times, watched Fortenberry and a teammate “drop the ball into the hoop as if they were dunking a roll into coffee.”

Fortenberry had a game-high eight points in the first-ever gold-medal game in Olympic basketball history, a 19-8 win over Canada.

While there’s no way to truly know who dunked for the first time, baseball legend Jackie Robinson was an early dunker while playing semipro ball before his Dodgers days. The closest to a first dunker, by Sielski’s research, though, was Jack Inglis, a semipro player in Northeast Pennsylvania in the sport’s early days.

“So Jack Inglis was the first player, apparently, who got the idea to climb up the fencing [around early basketball courts] and stay there above the rim and have a teammate throw him the ball so he could slam it through the rim like he was Spider-Man, basically,” Sielski said.

“And I found an author who had cited this in one of his books, and the guy’s 80, 85 years old now. And I emailed him and asked him, ‘Where did you get this piece of information?’ And he kind of sort of remembered where he got it from, but he wasn’t 100 percent sure. So even the story of Jack Inglis may or may not be true, but that kind of makes it fun.”

The conversation veered into local hoops, from the Catholic League, in which Marc Jackson’s sons star for powerhouse Roman Catholic, to the Sixers.

Jackson offered sage advice to his oldest son, Shareef, a forward heading to Lafayette: “I always told him, do not rush it. A lot of these people want instant gratification. Be processed to win it.”

“Did you just admit to telling your kid to trust the process?” Sielski responded.

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Jackson starred at Roman and Temple and played for the Sixers, Warriors, Timberwolves, Nets, and Hornets during his seven-year career. He likes to talk shop about his hometown team.

One attendee asked point-blank whether they thought the Sixers could be successful with Josh Harris as the managing partner.

“I think some of the problem of Josh Harris’ ownership is the change in expectations that are attached to the Sixers now,” Sielski said. “The other side is they need to figure out what kind of organization they want to be. They don’t know. The Eagles know who they are. The Eagles pride themselves on being innovative. … The Sixers don’t have it, and they haven’t had it since Josh Harris bought the team.”

Jackson added: “Every year for the last four years, they’ve made adjustments to the roster to make it better. There’s been one caveat all four years: Joel Embiid’s gotten hurt. And as long as your best player, respectfully, is getting hurt when it’s time to win, how far can you truly expect your team to go?”