YO! Who slam harder?! Onyx or Vince Carter?!

(If you don't get the title of the post, click here)

Hi. Today is one dunk-tastic day, and I'll tell you why: Today is the day when both Vince Carter and Gerald Green entered this world, many years ago. Happy birthday to both of you, and also to Ronald Dupree, another example of an incredible athlete who, if he had gone to college, may have been something very special. Oh, wait, he did go to college. Anyway, for those of you that don't think he deserves mention with this rarefied company of dunkaliciousness viciousness you may be right, but Dupree did have one or two vicious dunks in him. (By the way, why are sportswriters so arrogant and full of themselves about this college development thing? You're telling me worse coaches, tons of sex, drugs, and alcohol are really that great? Why do guys like Darius Rice go to college and come out the same way they went in? Terrence Morris? Maybe someone should just start realizing that sometimes really good athletes can be really dumb and from time to time don't give a shit and don't work hard, wherever they are. I think it just happens that the dumb ones often opt out of college because, uh, they're too dumb to see any value in a college education. And who cares if they fail, anyway? It makes the whole thing much more interesting. Plus it gives one more scholarship to a kid that actually deserves to go to college for being...intelligent.)

I would like to try to pay tribute to these great, great wunderdunkers by eschewing the cheesily produced mixtapes that are so plentiful on youtube. Extolling the virtues of Vince Carter's dunking ability is hard to do without being redundant, as I'm sure most of you have spent a little bit of time with Youtube Vince Carter mixtapes.

Instead, I've got a little rare historical footage and other fun facts about possibly the two premier dunkers in the National Basketball Association.

I'll start with my hometown fellow, Mr. Gerald Green. Interestingly, Green did not play basketball in high school until his sophomore year. He played JV that year, and then was going to play varsity, but had some "academic issues". He ended up playing one year at a prep school and that was all it took for him to enter the NBA draft. (wow) He would have been a Cowboy up at Oklahoma State, following in the footsteps of great dunkers Desmond Mason and Tony Allen, but oh well. He has no right ring finger, because he had to have it amputated when he was eight years old after an accident (possibly involving dunking). So here's one guy that will never wear a ring. (ha, ha)

Gerald has had some notable dunk-ons, though against admittedly inferior defenders. For instance, he gave Jerome James a good old tea bag one time. In high school, at either the ABCD camp or Flight camp (i'm not sure and can't make out the unis), he gave some big stiff a super duper tea bag. In Celtics summer league, he was the recipient of some nice passes from Sebastian Telfair.

It seems to me that Gerald Green is a specialist at these enormous, powerful right-handers. He also seems to have a proclivity for that windmill and the east side funk (yeah JR!). Anyone who has ever been to a Celtics game has seen his warmup routine. I have to be honest, though, as much of an amazing athlete is, Gigi really doesn't excite me that much. He doesn't have a whole heck of a lot of body control, which matters a lot when it comes to making a dunk look good. (For example, see this vs. this or this vs. this.)

One of the best body-control guys of all time is definately Mr. VC and I tried to find some great footage of him in action. Here is a video of him in the All-American dunk contest with Paul Pierce and Kris Clack (who I thought looked very good). Some more great high school footage is available here. These two dunks are old news, but I have to put them in there as a public service to my main man, Red. I'm gonna quote the caption on Youtube for this video: "Damn!I know VC cud dunk, but dis is a rare one I haven't seen before!" Thank you for that. (A linguistic asside: This really is not great use of either proper grammar or ebonics. It's like in the middle of the sentence it switches from black to white. Allow me to illustrate: [For italics, envision Dave Chappelle's white-man voice, for bold, imagine b.i.g.] "Damn! I know VC cud dunk, but dis is a rare one I haven't seen before!" Do you see what I mean? Am I making any sense here? Is this just dragging on?)

Now that I've broken up my flow, here are some players VC has dunked on (click name for video):

Tim Duncan




Amare Stoudemire




Kendrick Persons



And the New York Knickerbockers take... (Rare better angle here) [True wikipedia entry: "The French media later dubbed it 'le dunk de la mort' or 'the Dunk of Death'."]


Donyell Marshall



Brian Grant (!)



Uh, Tim Duncan




Anderson Varejao



Mikki Moore ("same team! same team!")



Antonio Davis (see above)



Andres Nocioni



Stanislav Medvedenko



Dikembe Mutombo



Chris Mihm


I know there are more out there but there's so much VC crap on YouTube that it takes a long time to find anything noteworthy that hasn't been viewed a million times.

I hope you enjoy all of the dunk footage and that it's not overkill. Everybody have a nice weekend.

-Jimmy V

As always, e-mail me at dontgiveupthebasketballblog@gmail.com