CAM HAZZARDNobody posts about this part.
The highlight reels show the dunks. They don’t show you sitting on a grounded airplane for two hours, sore from head to toe, watching a storm swallow the airport, three days before the biggest contest of your life.
The flight that didn’t happen
I left Fanatics Fest in New York running on adrenaline and not much else. Three days of the biggest fan festival on earth, a world-record vertical competition, and my body was feeling every bit of it. The plan was simple: fly straight to Atlanta, get three clean days of recovery and preparation, and show up to Group A of DUNKMAN ready to shock the world.
The weather had other plans. A storm rolled over the airport, and after about two hours sitting on the plane, they called us off. Flight canceled. Three days out from the contest, and I’m standing in an airport in New York instead of recovering in Atlanta.
I’m not going to pretend that didn’t get to me. All that sitting threw off my rhythm, I was sore from the Fest, and the clock on my prep was burning. But panicking has never fixed a flight. I caught the first flight out the next morning, got to Atlanta, and got to work. Losing that night meant the margin for error was gone. Every hour left had to count.
No stone unturned
You can’t control a storm, but you can control everything else about your preparation. So that became the mission: leave nothing, and I mean nothing, unturned.
First move was getting with a physical therapist in Atlanta. We went through my whole body, worked out the soreness from Fanatics Fest and the travel, and made sure there was no pain I was carrying into that arena that didn’t need to be there. He got me right.
Then it was the unglamorous stuff, which is really the whole sport. Diet: I obsessed over every single thing I put in my body those three days: the right food and the right supplements at the right times. Recovery: stretching and mobility work every day, exactly on plan. Sleep: the night before the contest, I got ten hours. That’s not luck. That’s treating sleep like it’s part of the competition, because it is.
By the time competition day came, there was nothing I could look at and say “I should have done more.” Whatever happened on that court, I was going to walk in knowing I’d done everything in my power to be ready.
The dinner that reminded me why
A few hours before the show, my family flew in, and my girlfriend and I got to sit down and have dinner with them.
I could tell you about every rep of my prep, but honestly that dinner might have been the most important part of the whole three days. Sitting there with the people who have watched me chase this since I was a kid, hours before I stepped on national television for the first time, it reminded me exactly why I do this. To make my family proud. To show my girlfriend what I pour myself into every single day. All the pressure I’d been carrying about the group I’d drawn (hardest group in the league, on TV first, against the biggest names in the sport) didn’t disappear, but it got put in its place.
I walked out of that dinner calm. Prepared, rested, fed, healthy, and surrounded by my people.
Then it was time to go be a problem.
What happened next deserves its own post, and it’s the story I’ll be telling for the rest of my life.