CAM HAZZARDA couple weeks back I got a call I’ll never forget. DUNKMAN was flying me to New York City for Fanatics Fest, and they weren’t just flying me out to wave at fans. They were putting three of the eight people who have ever tested a 50-inch vertical on the same court, in front of one of the biggest sports crowds on the planet, to try to break the world record for the highest jump ever.
Me. Darius Clark. Dillan McCarthy. One court. One bar that kept going up.
What Fanatics Fest even is
If you haven’t been, Fanatics Fest is the biggest sports fan festival in the world: 200,000 people packed into the Javits Center in NYC over four days, right in the middle of World Cup summer. Athletes, collectors, celebrities, live shows everywhere you look. When we got to the DUNKMAN court to warm up, Kevin Hart was filming a live episode of Cold as Balls with Serena Williams on the stage right next to us. That’s the kind of weekend it was.
Shaq makes it official
Before our show, DUNKMAN held a press conference with Shaquille O’Neal to announce the league to the world: the first professional dunk league, premiering July 21 on TNT, with my group, Group A, going first. Mac McClung, Isaiah Rivera, and Tyler Currie were up there with Shaq, some of the biggest names in the game. And when the press conference wrapped, Shaq pointed everybody to our court and said we were going to try to break the world record. No pressure.
The competition
We put on a dunk show first to get the crowd going, and then Shaq came in and turned the whole place up another level. Then it was time.
Everything was done right. Standing reaches verified by one of the most trusted testers in the sport before anybody jumped. This wasn’t a social media clip. This was legit.
Some context on what we were up against: Darius Clark held the official Guinness World Record at 50.5 inches. But two weeks earlier in Utah, Ethan Pimstone had put up an unofficial 52.5 and beaten Darius head to head. So Darius walked into New York with a serious chip on his shoulder. Dillan had tested 52. I’ve tested a verified 50, and in a height-check test measuring head height instead of hand touch, I measured out at 51. So I came in with high hopes too.
We all started at 48 inches, and all three of us cleared it clean. Then the bar went to 50, and that’s where the night humbled me. Dillan and I both missed it.
But the show was just getting started.
53 inches
Darius clutched up and cleared 51, breaking his own record right there. And then Shaq did the most Shaq thing possible. The prize pool was $10,000, and Shaq looked at Darius and said if you go for 53, I’ll make it twenty.
Darius said bet. No hesitation.
Understand what 53 inches means: that’s the theoretical limit of the human body. Nobody in that building had real expectations he’d get it. And he did it. He cleared 53, smacked the bell, and the flight-time reading came back at 1.017 seconds, the highest ever recorded, backing the jump up with hard data. The place exploded. I’ve been around a lot of athletic feats, and I’ve never heard a crowd like that.
What it meant
The clips went everywhere. Darius got the recognition he deserves, DUNKMAN introduced itself to the world in the loudest way possible, and I got to be on the court for a piece of history, not as a spectator, but as one of the three guys pushing the bar up.
Did I want to jump higher that day? Of course. But watching a world record fall from ten feet away, knowing I’m one of the only humans on earth who belongs in that conversation, put a battery in my back like nothing else.
Because the second that event ended, I was on my way to the airport. New York to Atlanta. Group A of DUNKMAN, the biggest dunk contest in history, was days away, and I had a contest to win.
That trip turned into a story of its own. More on that in the next post.