Dwight Howard made a few jokes about his dunk contest preparation.

It was a little funny. But it was not light-hearted.

A year ago, after losing, he was clearly down -- the victim of a misunderstood, and under-appreciated sticker dunk.

So he didn't go crazy. He went corporate. To become Superman, first he spent a year as Clark Kent. He brainstormed. He workshopped. He field-tested. He focus-grouped with his teammates. As final preparation, he even abstained from candy and music for two weeks, to give himself a razor-sharp mental edge.

He recreated the razzle-dazzle of the ABA, with the goal orientation of an MBA.

Take the entire history of the dunk contest as evidence that coming up with creative new dunks is time-consuming and difficult. Never before has anyone come up with two truly inventive dunks in one competition. Howard? He came up with three.

That involves no small amount of effort.

His first dunk involved passing the ball to himself off the back of the backboard, catching it in mid-air, and flushing it with his left hand while his head lingered somewhere out of bounds. That one, he says, he has been working on for two years.

For another dunk, he started with the ball balanced on a mini-hoop. A reported had a great idea: since Howard had been denied the opportunity to raise the rim to twelve feet, had he considered starting that dunk with the mini-hoop at twelve feet, to prove his hops?

Howard had field-tested it, and didn't think the resulting dunk resulted in enough flair.

The "self-alley?" He had tried it out in front of enough friends that their texts, calls, and emails were enough to convince him to include it.

Just keep trying him. No one had out-prepared Dwight Howard, which is precisely why he won.

The dunks on this night were off-the-charts inventive. Regular dunks -- feats of athleticism -- were not contenders at all. For instance, when Rashad McCa...

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