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I am darting in and out of traffic in downtown San Francisco, videotape in hand, desperation in head. We have 15 minutes to make deadline, and we are about a 14-minute drive away from the production house where we have to feed our tape back through space to Toronto. If we don’t make it, our asses are on the line.

To say it is raining cats and dogs on this February afternoon is a cruel understatement. More like goats and llamas. My chest and nipples are clearly visible through my soaked dress shirt. I look so hot, I really should be in a Whitesnake video (Apologies if you are eating while reading this).

My producer Martin Paul is feverishly trying to hail a cab. I have given up on that and have now resorted to jumping in front of moving cars to stop them, then trying to bribe the half-terrified drivers to take us there.

“I will give you $100 to get me to this address!” yells the drenched (yet oddly well-dressed) psycho, as he bangs on countless drivers’ side windows. Most nervously hit the lock button and speed away. We’re screwed.

It’s the Friday of NBA All-Star Weekend 2000. Hosting NBA on TSN is the other half of my first job at TSN, as it begins just as the CFL season is ending, and vice versa. (Aside: The bosses decide I should shun the suit and ties for our NBA coverage to go with a younger, hipper look. Somehow this ends up being mock turtlenecks and plaid jackets. After all, nothing gives you NBA street cred like a mock. I should have really accessorized with a pipe.)

On this miserable Northern California afternoon, we have just finished an interview with Toronto Raptor teammates and cousins Vince Carter and Tracy McGrady. They have spoken candidly about their desire to stay in Toronto and win multiple championships together (and … cue hysterical retrospective laughter!).

I like Vince (February 2000 Vince, anyway). Away from the court and cameras, he is still a polite, soft-spoken kid. As we wait for the crew to set up lights, he asks me about Alcatraz, and whether it’s worth his time to take the boat trip out there. He tells me The Rock is one of his favourite movies. I tell him Escape from Alcatraz, the Clint Eastwood classic, is better. He has never heard of it. I feel like a grandpa.

McGrady shows up a couple of minutes later. I’d only have one other real conversation with T-Mac. It came after I did play-by-play for a Raptors game in Chicago. I was waiting for my cab, and he was waiting for his limo.

“I have a question about TSN,” he says.

“Fire away.”

“What is that curling shit?”

“Ah, it’s a pretty popular sport in Canada.”

“Seriously? People watch that? Guys with brooms standing around pointing at those big pucks with the handles?”

“Rocks. They call them rocks. And yes, lots of people apparently like it.”

“Damn,” he says, shaking his head. Then the limo pulls up with a girl in a fur coat in the back, and off T-Mac goes, into the Chicago night. Pucks with handles. Will never forget that.

T-Mac and Vince are great together in the interview. They are still young and unspoiled, and in many ways, they are the buzz of All-Star Weekend. Especially Vince. His mere entry in the slam-dunk contest has revitalized the event. It had been cancelled two years before. Many believed there were no more tricks to be done. Many were about to be a whole heap of wrong.

Miracle! Marty has found a cab, likely preventing me from being arrested for harassment of innocent commuters. We get there a couple of minutes late, but are able to extend our satellite window a few minutes to get the interview sent back through space to Toronto. This costs the company money, but I don’t feel guilty. I feel like a drowned rodent.

We’ve dried out by Saturday night, and I’m sitting in the arena in Oakland, down near the court before the skills competition begins. I spot Alfonso Ribeiro, Carlton Banks from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, sitting a few seats over. In the 15 minutes or so I’m there, a dozen people yell, “Hey, Carlton! Do the dance, Carlton! Do the dance!” For the few of you who have never watched The Fresh Prince (I feel only sadness for you), Carlton is the ultra-nerdy, preppy, rich cousin of Will Smith, Philadelphia’s streetwise kid. And his dance is … well just google it. You won’t be disappointed.

Ribeiro is dressed very LA chic and has a model by his side, but he can’t escape Carlton. Soon, a group of well-lubricated fans start chanting it: “Do the dance! Do the dance!” Carlton does not do the dance. Carlton looks like he wishes he’d never done the dance. And I quickly realize this is Alfonso Ribeiro’s life. Unless he someday lands a career-resuscitating role as a recovering meth addict in a gritty Ben Affleck film, Alfonso is Carlton for eternity. Every. Single. Day. Everywhere. He. Goes.

“C’mon, Carlton! Just do the damn dance!”

It’s the curse of the One Defining Role actor. I would interview Cuba Gooding Jr. a few years later, and I ask him how many times a day people want him to say, “Show me the money!”

“Hundreds, my man,” he answers, defeated. “You don’t even wanna know.” Of course, I then have to ask him to say it for the sake of the interview. If he hates me, I don’t blame him.

I abandon Carlton’s nightmare to climb up to our set, inside a first-level luxury suite. All-Star Saturday Night is broadcast on TNT (Turner Network Television) in the United States, and TSN picks up the feed. But because of the hype over Vince, TSN NBA analyst Brian Heaney and I are there to open the show and do brief segments in and out of commercial breaks. Heaney played briefly in the NBA and became a coaching legend at St. Mary’s in Halifax. He’s a conservative, fundamentals-first coach. He doesn’t seem much into dunk contests. He’s also very cool and measured. In the two years I have worked with him, I have never seen him really excited. That’s about to change.

The building is buzzing as Carter’s turn approaches. He has tried his best to crush the hype, saying in his TNT interview just before the contest that the whole thing has been “blown out of proportion.” He then walks out on the court and proceeds to blow proportion out of proportion.

As he prepares for his first dunk, the players all stand, many carrying ludicrously large 2000-era video cameras. Carter starts near the baseline, leaps, goes between his legs, and windmill jams. The building explodes. Heaney looks at me, mouth gaping open. Shaquille O’Neal falls backwards like he’s been shot. That dunk would become commonplace within the next decade, but in 2000, it has never been seen before. And it’s otherworldly. In my earpiece, I’m hearing the TNT commentators calling it “maybe the best dunk ever.”

His second dunk is equally absurd, a ferocious 180-degree windmill from a starting point behind the basket. This time, the crowd reaction isn’t quite as loud, as I believe they are a little stunned at what they are seeing. Watch the dunk contests before 2000. No one had ever dunked like Vince.

For dunk number three, Tracy McGrady takes a position under the basket, which only adds to the anticipation. He has the ball and is somehow going to set up his cousin. The building goes quiet as Carter starts his run towards the key, but the pass is a little off, and he abandons the attempt. But he’s given enough away. I can hear TNT analyst Kenny Smith in my earpiece, saying, “He’s going to take it between his legs and dunk it!” After showing T-Mac exactly the height he wants the ball, Carter goes back to his launch position and takes off.

Smith is right. McGrady bounces the ball off the floor and Carter grabs it, already in mid-air. He goes between his legs and destroys the rim. And Oakland blows up. Every person in the building reacts like they have just won the $380 million Powerball. Fans in front of me are leaping off their chairs into their neighbours’ arms, falling into the aisles like a flash mob doing choreographed pretend heart attacks. Then I notice Brian Heaney, the calmest, most conservative commentator at our network. He has fallen off his chair and is lying on the floor of the suite, rolling around in uncontrollable laughter. Hours later over a beer, he can’t explain what happened. He was so blown away by the sheer lunacy of Carter’s acrobatics, he simply lost it.

I have been lucky enough to attend many of the biggest sporting events on the planet. I have still never witnessed an atmosphere like that night in Oakland. Think about it. There was no home team to root for. No buzzer beater or Hail Mary in an actual game that mattered to anyone. Just a silly made-for-TV skills contest. And yet, that crowd went as nuts as a crowd can possibly go.

Carter nails one more mind-blower in the final, where he finishes by hanging from the rim at his elbow joint. He then wraps up the title with an anti-climactic two-handed version of the famous Jordan leap-from-the-foul-line jam (except Vince was a good foot inside the line). It doesn’t matter. The legend has already been cemented by the first three dunks.

I sprint to the locker room and get to the front of the pack rushing to Carter’s stall. Vince knows me now after the long sit-down interview the day before, and turns to me for the first question. At which point, I get the semi-brilliant/semi-idiotic (there’s always a fine line) idea to turn to the rest of the media and say, “We’re TSN from Canada. We were promised a live one-on-one, so stay back for three questions please.” This was:

a. Not true. There was no such promise, and if anyone actually looked, there were no cables sticking out of our camera. There was no chance this was live.

b. An opening for some big angry audio guy from Philly to shove a boom mic down my throat.

But shockingly, they all seem to buy it. We get our one-on-one and race to the truck to feed it back. Carter’s magic show is now the lead on SportsDesk, pushing hockey highlights from the top of the show on a Saturday night for the first time in anyone’s memory. Carter instantly becomes one of the most popular athletes in Canada that night, a label he would throw away in train wreck fashion a couple of years later. He would go on to have a decent, but surprisingly quiet, career.

But man, that night in Oakland. I have still never seen anything like it. He brought the house down. He turned an ultra-calm, hard-to-impress analyst into a little boy having a giggle fit on the carpet. And though I have no proof of this, I think he just might have made Carlton do the dance. 

Excerpted from The Guy on the Left by James Duthie. Copyright © 2015 James Duthie. Published by Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

The Guy on the Left can be purchased here at Indigo.