Inside Shaq’s League of Dunkers
Shaquille O’Neal first messaged Mac McClung a decade ago, when McClung was a seventeen-year-old living in Gate City, Virginia, scoring sixty points in a game and doing reverse-windmill dunks over future accountants and insurance adjusters. O’Neal loved his swag. McClung didn’t get drafted out of college—he’s neither tall nor wide—but he has since played in a total of seventeen N.B.A. contests across four seasons and five teams. He fell into dunking. “The Dunk Contest was never something where I was, like, ‘That’s my goal,’ ” McClung said the other day, as a physical therapist dug into his hip flexors in the bowels of a Midtown Atlanta arena. “But it happened, and it’s been a beautiful thing.” McClung, who currently plays professional basketball in Spain, has won three N.B.A. Slam Dunk Contests, by jumping over a car, over two guys stacked on top of each other, and over Shaq himself. “For one of them, Shaq put on my high-school jersey,” he said. “At my high school, they have that picture hung up.”
This spring, O’Neal asked McClung, now a floppy-haired twenty-seven-year-old who writes poetry (he took inspiration from “The Vibrational Poetry Book” and the work of Greta Gerwig) to star in the first dunking league. “At first, I was kind of, like, ‘I don’t know if I could compete with these guys,’ ’’ McClung said, of the men who have abandoned basketball for its most spectacular component. There’s Cam Hazzard, an “Excel-sheet master” and a finance major at Abilene Christian University, who can do something called a 360 inverted East Bay (it’s impressive); Dengxing (Dunk) Chen, a five-foot-nine Chinese virtuoso with a fifty-two-inch vertical; and Isaiah (the Puerto Rican Airbender) Rivera, the only human to have completed a 360 behind-the-back-between-the-legs dunk.
“Then I started thinking of it like O.K., what kind of ego is that? Like, Oh, are you afraid you’re going to lose?” McClung said. Incidentally, the champion would win five hundred thousand dollars: five times what the N.B.A. pays its top dunker. McClung joined the Dunkman League.
For a dunker, McClung is nearing middle age. He stepped off the trainer’s table and grimaced. “Getting old, man,” he said, walking to a nearby court to play some one-on-one with Bradley Dean, a high-school buddy whom he uses as a human hurdle in dunk contests. (“A privilege,” Dean said.) Then they circled up with a dunking consultant to talk through the first dunk that McClung would attempt at the following day’s championship.
“Either the triple, the crystal, or the two-ball,” McClung said. He turned to Dean: “You come in, you throw that dime.” Dean nodded gravely.
Another idea: “So, what would happen if I did the 720 again?”
An awkward pause. “It still is a score where somebody has to do some real shit,” the consultant offered.
McClung considered the abilities of Chen, his first-round opponent. “He jumps from fucking half-court,” he said. “One thing I do love is trying to get everybody hyped up first. I love winning everybody over.” Twenty minutes later, pacing around the basket, he said, “I just forgot the whole plan.”
“Let Mac overthink,” the consultant said. “It’s a ritual.”
The following evening, the arena was heavy on Hazzard fans. O’Neal, graying and gargantuan, sat in the second row wearing a shirt with his name printed all over it. Asked about McClung, he said, “A little white kid who can do crazy shit. It’s a travesty he doesn’t have a spot on an N.B.A. team.” He shovelled a handful of popcorn into his mouth. “He’s No. 1 here.” McClung was nearby, listening to Justin Bieber and thinking through his first dunk.
The lights dimmed. Eight dunkers bounced out on bulging calves. Wearing a headband and a hard look, Chen took a breath and sailed over a man and two motorcycles. His translator pumped a fist. McClung, in peach-colored shoes, countered by jumping over a convertible with three friends inside. The judges gave Chen’s dunk the edge by two one-hundredths of a point. McClung bowed to his opponent and went to the locker room.
The remaining dunkers dunked: over stacked siblings, girlfriends, and a high-jump crossbar. Hazzard prevailed. O’Neal presented the pimpled twenty-one-year-old with a giant check. Hazzard called himself a “finance bro at heart.” He thanked God for his hops. The other dunkers clapped courtside, except for McClung. He was back at his hotel, packing. Maybe he planned to sort out his feelings by writing some poetry on the plane to Spain. “It’s a nice outlet to be, like, ‘O.K., I feel this way,’ ” he said. “ ‘Let me be deep and weird for a minute.’ ” ♦