In the 2000 N.B.A. Slam Dunk Contest, Vince Carter, a 23-year-old second-year guard for the Toronto Raptors, left a camcorder-wielding Shaquille ONeal slack-jawed after his first dunk, a reverse 360-degree windmill. Isiah Thomas skipped over the judges table to congratulate Carter on his third, a between-the-legs slam from an alley-oop. Nearby, the rapper Ludacris looked genuinely bewildered. After Carter hung on the rim by his elbow for his fourth stunt, the Arena in Oakland went quiet. It took a beat to understand what had happened. Carters victory heralded the arrival of a young superstar, set the bar for every dunk contest to follow, and 16 years later garnered a mention in a verse by Drake, who was 13 at the time of the circus act and became the hottest rapper in Canadian history in the intervening period. By director Sean Menards reckoning, it also put the city of Toronto on the cultural map in a way it hadnt been before.
“We always have a kind of a complex or chip on our shoulder coming from Canada,” he said on the phone recently. “But it was just that sense of hes in a slam-dunk contest with Toronto across his chest. That was huge because it felt like everyone was watching us.”
Menards new documentary, The Carter Effect, traces Carters emergence as a player and entertainer and the transformative effect he had on Toronto—sporting and otherwise. The film, which began streaming on Netflix on May 1 and was backed by LeBron James and his manager Maverick Carters multimedia company, UNINTERRUPTED, also acts as a study of the forever-intertwined fates of the N.B.A. and hip hop. (James and Carter are executive producers of the film, along with Drake and the rappers manager, Adel “Future” Nur.) Menard grew up just outside Toronto and now keeps an office near Air Canada Centre, the Raptors home arena. In 2014, the team made the playoffs for the first time in six seasons, and he noticed that “all these people just started showing up very organically to watch on the big screen and it was a very different fan. That building shares space with our hockey team. Its completely multicultural, a younger group [with] the passion to wanna be able to stand outside for an event that you dont have a ticket for.” There was a natural question: “How did we get there? How did we get that type of fan base with that type of energy and that type of passion?”
Vince Carter and Drake embrace.
Courtesy of TIFF.
As recently as five years before Carters breakout dunk contest, when the Raptors were added as an expansion franchise, there was no N.B.A. team in the country. It took some time for hockey-crazed fans to catch on. In early games, some mistakenly waved thundersticks, meant to distract opposing players, during their own teams free throws. But the learning curve was steep in both directions, especially for Florida natives like Carter and his Raptors sidekick (and, they eventually discovered, distant cousin) Tracy McGrady. In the documentary, McGrady recounts his reaction to being drafted by the Raptors in 1997, the year before Carter: “I had no clue where the hell Toronto was, and I was extremely cold. I didnt know anything about the weather until I got up there; 18-year-old kid in this foreign country, legal age is 19, what am I gonna do?”
Carter was the N.B.A.s Rookie of the Year in 1999 and led the Raptors to their first post-season appearance the next season, but the fact of his talent is almost incidental here. It was his swaggering, acrobatic style that was the germ of what Menard came to think of as “the Carter effect.” “If he was just a three-point shooter or a big man, I dont think it wouldve had the same impact,” said Menard. “The way he did it was very easily identifiable to someone who doesnt watch basketball. Its like, wow, thats a slam dunk, thats different than what Ive seen before. That energy.”
Carters showmanship and charisma—the celebrations of the dunks as much as the dunks themselves—amounted to an identity as much as a nickname: Air Canada. In the film, a giddy Drake, sitting in front of an ad hoc exhibit of massive raptor fossils at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, can sound like a 13-year-old again. “Theres always a saying,” he says. “Girls have to want to be with you, guys have to want to be you. Vince just had that.” (“The curator ended up being a huge Drake fan,” Menard said.) Fans began to pick up a new sport that was less expensive than hockey; Carter built an outdoor court for the public and held camps whose alums include future pros like, of all people, Tristan Thompson.
In a bit of Toronto nightlife history that is somehow not apocryphal, Carter introduced bottle service to the city. He came in as a co-owner of the club Inside, showed up to meetings with a clipboard, and sensed a need for that particular American concept. The lounge became a hub for visiting N.B.A. players and other glittering names. “De Niro would be at the club and Samuel L. Jackson,” Menard said. “And these guys were Vince fans, too . . . [in this] early scene, you either had to be from the city or if you traveled here you were a mega-star athlete, or actor, or in the arts. It was a really special time.” By 2002, Carter appeared in a Fabolousmusic video.
Exterior shot of Torontos City Hall.
Courtesy of TIFF.
The Carter Effect gets a lot of mileage out of its two biggest stars, Drake and Carter himself. “When we got [Drake],” Menard recalled, “it was his manager basically telling me right before we sat down, just take as long as you need. . . . I dont think I even got that from anyones handler, not even Vince Carters. The Memphis Grizzlies P.R. told me 20 minutes, and it was Vince telling the P.R. person to sit down, were gonna keep going.” Menard also interviews a constellation of Toronto personalities who lend the film a loving smallness, and all of whom still experience their city through basketball. The event promoter Mona Halem seems to both know everyone in Toronto and have partied with every N.B.A. star. A co-owner of the Toronto shop In Vintage We Trust, Joshua Roter, remembers how during an early 2000s sneaker summit, “there were literally a handful of people down with sneakers . . . it wasnt until Vince that it really started.” Raptors super-fan Nav Bhatia, who immigrated to Toronto from India in 1984, promises that in 22 years, hes never missed a Raptors game, showed up late to one, or left early from one.
At 41, Carter is currently the oldest active player in the N.B.A., an improbable turn for a player whose game was defined by high-flying, city-raising antics. If he was a folk hero then, he remains one for a very different set of reasons: hes an elder statesman in a league thats been wholesale re-styled several times throughout his career. Carter left the Raptors acrimoniously in 2004 after a period of public discontent with management, and for a time his jersey was burned or scribbled on (“CRY BABY”). But in 2014, when the Grizzlies played in Toronto, a Raptors 20th anniversary video tribute to Carter was met with a standing ovation from the crowd and tears from him. After leaving the Raptors, he rarely again scaled the same heights as in those first few seasons. As Carters reputation for explosiveness has faded, he has built a new one for constancy.
In 2016, a rapper whos spent the last 13 weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 for two different songs was made the Raptors official “global ambassador.” The implicit task of The Carter Effect is to capture the degree to which Carter led to Drake, and we may be better equipped to decide next year. Carter says that he has one last season in him, and there are murmurs that it could be back in Toronto. Either way, Bhatia will be there, just a few seats from Drake.
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