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Taking Flight with Mike Sielski’s “Magic in the Air”

By Tim Reilly

Published: Oct 23rd, 2025 · 4:31 PM EDT

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Over the summer, I had an opportunity to read Magic in the Air, a book authored by Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Mike Sielski.

It wasn’t an ideal time to pick up a book. Life was busy and getting busier. In between trying to keep up with my two-year-old daughter, I was doing my best to help my wife as she brought our son into the world.

Moreover, Mike’s book, about the history of the slam dunk, would not be a topic toward which I’d normally gravitate. While I like basketball and, as I was growing up, played plenty of pickup games with friends on blacktops and hardwood floors throughout Northeast Philly, my interest level in exploring the origins of a play I could only dream of executing is about as high as my current leaping ability. Which is to say, not very high.

Yet, Mike’s tale is not as simple as a retelling of the development of the dunk. As he guides his readers through the myths and mysteries that shroud the beginnings of the “duffer” (a term used to describe the dunk in the 1940s, we learn), Mike unearths some compelling nuggets about the evolution of basketball and the ways in which the game is influenced by our country’s cultural history.

He does it in a way that is easily accessible for someone who is busy, or gets bored easily, or is bombarded with all the distractions that define life in this internet era. Each chapter serves as a standalone story, so the reader can jump into whatever section that seems interesting. You can put the book down for a week or so—as I did more than a few times—and then pick it back up and not feel completely lost.

If you prefer to begin at the beginning, you might be surprised to find you are actually starting somewhere near the end. Mike’s opening chapter covers the “Rise and Fall” of Ja Morant, the talented but troubled star of the Memphis Grizzlies.     

As someone who is interested in the writing process generally and the decisions that go into how to open a story, I asked Mike about this seemingly-unconventional starting point.

“I wanted to start with a present-day player. I wanted to try to grab people at the start with someone who is relevant,” he explained. “I didn’t want the book to be, just, ‘these were the good old days of basketball.’”

Eventually, he does get to those “good old days,” or at least the early days of the game. It was important to cover this period because, as we find out, it was basketball’s original architects who were among the staunchest opponents of the slam dunk. They had their conception of how the game was supposed to be played, and the dunk did not have a place in their designs.

“James Naismith looked at basketball as a way to improve and reveal character. It was an exercise in discipline, and it was an exercise in exercise,” Mike told me during our conversation.

In Magic in the Air, Mike pulls on this thread a bit further, uncovering how the preacher-turned-sports-inventor Naismith emerged from the Muscular Christianity movement and saw physical activity as a means of developing character.

The height of the rim was established not intentionally but fortuitously. The Springfield College campus where the game was invented had peach baskets lining their track, and they happened to be suspended ten feet in the air.

The point of the game was to work together with the team to score. It was a game meant to be played—and remain—on the ground. Never in his wildest imagination did Naismith conceive of a player leaping above the others to slam the ball through the hoop, let alone soaring through the sky the way dunkers like Dr. J and Michael Jordan would much later.

Mike profiles John McLendon, a disciple of Naismith who learned the intricacies of the game from his mentor at the University of Kansas. He writes that McLendon wanted to play for the Jayhawks but, “as part of an agreement among the schools in the Big Six Conference, Blacks weren’t permitted on any varsity team at Kansas in the 1930s.”

Undeterred, McLendon would go on to enjoy a Hall of Fame coaching career. Although he also disliked the slam dunk, he introduced the fast-break offense that would offer the runway for future dunkers to take off and fly.

I discovered while reading the book how the term “cagers” came into existence. As Mike details, early contests were held on courts surrounded by wiring to keep the ball from bouncing into the stands. One enterprising player, Jack Inglis, would climb the cage and dunk the ball. Inglis was among the millions worldwide who died during the Great Flu pandemic of 1918.

We meet giants of the game like Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain, and we are introduced to obscure dunkers whose legends were forged on the playgrounds where they plied their trade.

Of Earl Manigault, a Rucker Park legend who could take down any opponent except the one staring at him in the mirror, Mike writes: “Earl was never one to play the long game, think big picture. He chased the beautiful moment. Even if the pursuit might kill him. Which, eventually, it did.”

Mike dives into the dunk ban imposed on high schools and colleges from 1967 until 1976, in large part due to the dominance of UCLA Bruins center Lew Alcindor, better known today as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

“He was the manifestation of every fear of somebody in the establishment of what basketball was going to become,” Mike shares with me. The irony of it all is that the ban unlocked all the dominant facets of Alcindor/Abdul-Jabbar’s game while stunting the growth of the game itself.

Two of my favorite sections of the book examined the impacts of Julius Erving and the 1988 Slam Dunk Contest. If you’re a Gen Xer or elder millennial, it’s likely that Dr. J was your favorite player’s favorite player. It seems crazy to say about a man whose jersey hangs in the rafters of whatever we are calling the Wells Fargo Center nowadays, but Dr. J is criminally underrated.

The story we tell of the NBA in the 1980s, of a league saved by Larry Bird and Magic Johnson before the rise of Jordan, makes no space for Erving and the players and teams from the ABA that injected much-needed energy and innovation into the pro game. Mike’s chapter on Erving disrupts that narrative and makes a strong case for Dr. J as a transformational figure in his own right during that pivotal era.

While I don’t have any concrete, personal memories of the 1988 Slam Dunk Contest, I grew up in an era dominated by posters of the star and the moment he created in that dunking exhibition: of Jordan, limbs outstretched and head level with a basket still a good distance away, defying gravity, taking the baton from Erving and raising the game to new heights.

That’s just a sampling of the stories in the book, all of which are thoroughly researched and well-written. If you’re a fan of basketball, or just a fan of a decent story well told, it’s worth checking out Magic in the Air.

Undoubtedly, it’s hard to invest the time needed to read a book. A lot of us struggle with the attention the task requires, me included. The era in which we live has destroyed our focus. We’re surrounded by noise, most of it useless.

But the investment is worth it. Skilled authors can lift you off the page and into another time and place, providing a brief respite from whatever is going on in your life and situating you in someone else’s story.  

They offer freedom, some quiet, and the space to imagine and wonder, and those are invaluable commodities.