SPORTS BITS
Leap year From his office in downtown Phoenix, Brett Meister admits he had never heard of D.J. Stephens. Surprise was followed by intrigue and then by what ultimately sounded like a recruiting pitch. “What year is he? People are really comparing him to Michael Wilson? Do you know how high he can jump? What are his plans?” Meister has reason to be interested. As a senior vice president for the Harlem Globetrotters, he is always on the lookout for fresh talent. “Keep me updated,” he concluded. If the conversation had happened late in the season, Meister’s “surprise” element most certainly would not have been there: dunk by dunk, block by block, Stephens leapt into the hearts of college basketball fans nationwide with over-the-top, eye-popping throw downs. “I think one day he might just jump right over the backboard,” one Tiger fan says.
Jump on board
Stephens with one of his signature dunks. 14
SP R I NG 2013
The question is simple, but Stephens has no easy answer. He can’t tell you how many times it has been asked — “maybe a thousand times at least” — but he figures it is something he will hear when he is 80 years old: How do you jump so high? “I can’t tell you that,” Stephens says with a grin. “That is an everyday question. People ask me if I have springs in my shoes; they ask what I did to start jumping so high. “When I was a kid, I jumped around a lot when we were playing, like from couch to couch pretending that the ground was lava, but I never did anything crazy like wear ankle weights. “It just sort of happened. My junior year in high school, I was in warm-ups before a game and one of my teammates said, ‘D.J., you ought to try to dunk it.’ I was like, ‘OK.’ I went higher than I expected and I dunked it. I was like, ‘Oh man!’ After that, every chance I got, I dunked. Sometimes two or three in a game, sometimes five times. Seems like all I was doing was dunking. It just took off from there.” The dunks, though, at least with FedExForum as the weekly backdrop, nearly never happened. Stephens came to Memphis only
because of another player’s misfortune. Two weeks before entering college in 2009, with only a handful of offers from Division I schools, he was still searching for a scholarship when Josh Pastner came calling. A Tiger recruit from France had become injured during the summer, freeing up a roster spot. “It was a scary recruiting process for me,” Stephens recalls. “It was the end of the summer and all the schools had pulled back their scholarship offers. I was thinking I had nowhere to go because there is only a short window in the recruiting process and that window had seemingly closed. But then the call came from Coach Pastner. Look where I am today.” Stephens’ minutes increased from about eight the first year to 23 this season. He has become Memphis’ “feel-good story,” aptly tagged “pogo stick,” “human highlight reel” and “rocket.” “I consider myself the high-energy guy who is going to block a shot or grab a rebound really high or make a dunk that causes the crowd to go, ‘Oooooh,’ he says, “or the guy who changes the momentum of the game. This year it is more evident because I have been on the floor more. “This has been a special year for me. I consider myself a behind-the-scenes kind of guy, a little bit shy. I have never wanted the attention or wanted to be the guy with the camera stuck in his face. I don’t even like dunk contests because I feel like those cause me to be singled out in front of a lot of people.”
Quantum leap D.J. is up high above the goal, looking down and readying to explode on the rim … so what is he thinking? “If I am by myself, I am thinking about just the dunk. But the times I go up in the air and someone bumps me or undercuts me, those are the times I get worried because by jumping so high, it is a long way down and there is nothing to catch me and the floor is hard. “Fans tell me it scares them every time I hit the floor. Usually it doesn’t bother me until the next day and then I feel the soreness.” Stephens says he hopes his leaping ability carries him to the NBA, something one former
THE UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS