Character · Slam Dunk
Hanamichi Sakuragi
Turned down by fifty girls, joins basketball to impress the fifty-first, and turns out to be built for the game.
In Otakana the clue reads: Red-haired delinquent who joins basketball for a girl
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Slam Dunk
- Letters
- 8 · Normal
Sakuragi is a red-haired first-year with a fighting record and no interest in sport until Haruko asks whether he likes basketball. He says yes, having never touched one. What he has is a vertical jump that stops conversations and a refusal to be embarrassed, and the first stretch of the series is him doing layup drills badly in front of people while insisting he is a genius.
The role he grows into is rebounding, which the story treats as heroic and which almost no other sports manga bothers with. He is not the scorer. He is the one who takes the ball off the rim, boxes out someone taller, and hands it to Rukawa, whom he despises. His development is measured in fundamentals: ten thousand shots in the summer, footwork, defence.
Takehiko Inoue built the series around him and then handed the best moments to his least glamorous skill, which is a large part of why Slam Dunk reads differently from the sports manga around it. The hero is loud, tactless and frequently wrong, and the thing he becomes excellent at is the unpaid work nobody watching the highlight reel notices.
Spelling SAKURAGI
SAKURAGI hides an easier word inside it. SAKURA, the cherry blossom, plus gi for tree. Eight letters, four of them vowels, and once SAKUR lands the rest of the row is forced. The given name Hanamichi means flower path, which is also the raised walkway actors enter along in a kabuki theatre. Family name on the tiles, as always in this series.