Watch: Hands-down the craziest dunk of all-time
Sometimes, a feat of athleticism happens in such a flash that when you watch the video at full speed, you ask yourself, “What on earth just happened?”
And when the feat is then shown to you in super slow motion, frame-by-frame, and painstakingly broken down and explained, you get a more sensible reaction — something like “No, seriously, I still don’t get it, what on earth just happened?”
Like this playground slam dunk, from Dexton Crutchfield, for example.
A ball comes flying in from about 12 feet off the ground, well above the rim.
It then hits the ground as Crutchfield comes running in, controls the ball, and goes up for a slam dunk.
All of this, so far, is fairly standard stuff, nothing that would get even an “8” for creativity at the dunk contest during NBA All-Star weekend.
But while Crutchfield is in the midst of his approach to the net, he throws the ball back down hard against the ground.
Then, while he’s still in motion, he does what looks like a butterfly stroke the way you’d see a swimmer propel himself forward in that particular event at the Olympics.
Finally, he corrals the ball, which has returned from its brief journey to ground to a height above the rim, and slams it home.
But watching it in real time, you’re like “wait, what?”
Interpretations vary, but what it first looks like is that the ball somehow bounced up through the net and was thrown back down, a nifty bit of accuracy but not a proper dunk, more like a volleyball spike.
This, however, is not the case. The ball remains outside the cylinder, that imaginary piece of Euclidean geometry used to define goaltending and/or basket interference during an actual basketball game.
Likewise, it’s not immediately clear in real time whether Crutchfield even lands the dunk or if he just loses control of the ball.
You have to slow it down to the level of one of those high-speed cameras they used to use on “Mythbusters” to film shockwaves from explosions to see a different sort of explosive shockwave, this one sent through the Internet via the power of viral video.
But once your mind puts all the pieces together, what started as a solid 7 or 8 at the dunk contest becomes something worthy of a score turned up to 11.
Crutchfield didn’t fake the funk, and that was one nasty dunk.
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