by Rickhouse on July 10 at 12:28AM
The reason I bring this up is because SI just ran a story on its website about Shawn Kemp Jr., one of the 43 children of my favorite non-Bulls player ever. Kemp Jr. sounds a little like his dad- he’s unpolished but loves to throw down thunderous dunks (doctors also think the 6-9 high school junior will grow to over 7-feet by the time he‘s 21, which is kind of goofy). By the way, the only adverb to describe a Shawn Kemp dunk from 1990-2000 is thunderous. ‘Violent’ might work as well, actually. Though Shaq will always be remembered for tearing the entire hoop down, nobody threw down harder on a more consistent basis than Kemp. He was The Man.
As FreeDarko bemoaned the loss of the Sonics in Seattle, DLIC offered this remembrance of Kemp:
When Shawn Kemp came on the scene, we--Sports Illustrated for Kids devoted readers all of us--lost our minds. We had never seen anything like that before. Sure, Jordan was superhuman, but he was also too fucking smart. He could pass the ball and play defense and motivate his teammates. A Shawn Kemp dunk, on the other hand, took no thought to process. Again, it touched at some automatic emotional component inside of us that had been present since we were babies. Shawn Kemp dunking was the physical manifestation of that green and gold.
Here is an excellent SI feature on Kemp from ‘96 (the height of his powers), written a few months before he’d take on the 72-10 Bulls in the Finals. It talks about how, during his prime in Seattle, he used to play basketball with the local homeless people at two or three in the morning in the offseason. It also includes this gem:
Shawn's dunks and his post-dunk antics were legendary. Some of them were mythical. The tallest tale is told by a cousin, Kerry Ellison, who swears Shawn once dunked a ball so hard on a playground hoop that it touched off a miniature electrical storm in the chain-link net.
And here’s a sweet vid of Kemp’s 10 greatest dunks.
White Sox post- something slightly more timely- later today.
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Comments
Remember that line during the NBA playoffs after a LeBron dunk? "With no regard for human life!". That was Kemp evey night.
Who the hell are the "Sonics"?