Shaquille O’Neal first contacted Mac McClung a decade ago when McClung was a seventeen-year-old in Gate City, Virginia, known for scoring sixty points in a game and performing reverse-windmill dunks. O’Neal admired McClung's style. Although McClung went undrafted from college due to his height and build, he has participated in seventeen NBA games over four seasons with five teams. He began to focus on dunking, stating, “The Dunk Contest was never something where I was, like, ‘That’s my goal,’” during a recent interview while receiving treatment from a physical therapist in a Midtown Atlanta arena. Currently playing professional basketball in Spain, McClung has won three NBA Slam Dunk Contests, including dunks over a car, two stacked individuals, and O’Neal himself, who wore McClung's high school jersey for one of the contests.
This spring, O’Neal invited McClung, now twenty-seven and a poet inspired by works such as “The Vibrational Poetry Book” and Greta Gerwig, to participate in the inaugural dunking league. Initially hesitant about competing against other dunkers, McClung considered the implications of his reluctance. The league offers a prize of five hundred thousand dollars, significantly higher than the NBA's top dunker prize, which encouraged McClung to join.
As a dunker, McClung feels he is approaching middle age. After a training session, he expressed, “Getting old, man,” before engaging in one-on-one practice with a friend, Bradley Dean, who often assists him in dunk contests. They collaborated with a dunking consultant to strategize McClung's first dunk for the upcoming championship.
McClung contemplated various dunking techniques, including a 720-degree dunk, while acknowledging the skills of his first-round opponent, Dengxing (Dunk) Chen, who possesses a fifty-two-inch vertical leap. The following evening, the arena was filled with fans supporting Cam Hazzard, who ultimately won the competition. O’Neal, present in the audience, remarked on McClung's talent, stating, “It’s a travesty he doesn’t have a spot on an NBA team.”
During the competition, Chen executed a dunk over a man and two motorcycles, while McClung responded by jumping over a convertible with friends inside. Chen narrowly won the round by two one-hundredths of a point. After the competition, Hazzard was awarded a giant check by O’Neal, expressing gratitude for his success. Meanwhile, McClung reflected on his experience and considered writing poetry on his flight back to Spain as a means of processing his feelings.