The crowd erupted. The arena that would later be named Oracle, and become famous for its intensity, rocked with fervor. A Y2K adaption of a roaring Colosseum. Shaquille O’Neal’s eyes bugged behind his radio-sized Sony VX1000 camcorder. Kevin Garnett — astonished to the point of confusion — put his camcorder down instead of filming the reaction. With an ecstatic Chris Webber draped all over him, KG stared in bewilderment at the alien in purple. Ray Allen fell onto his back on the hardwood.
Vince Carter’s reverse 360-degree dunk, with a windmill wide and forceful enough to produce a breeze, ignited The Arena in Oakland. The viewing world. The culture of basketball.
It was a moment in All-Star history. In basketball history. A dunking deity was being immortalized, carved into hoop lore.
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And, while the kinetically charged arena still buzzed, Jerry Stackhouse was next.
“I had to follow that,” Stackhouse told The Athletic, the disdain still dripping from his voice this week. “It’s a whole lot of letters between Carter and Stackhouse. I don’t know how I got that draw.”
Carter dunked five times that evening in Oakland on Feb. 12, 2000, as part of the NBA’s annual dunk contest during All-Star Weekend. It was his first, and last, appearance in the event. When he was finished, he was a legend.
There had been memorable contests before and since, headlined by Michael Jordan’s incredible duel with Dominique Wilkins in Chicago in 1988, rivaled by the breathtaking show put on by Zach LaVine and Aaron Gordon in 2016. And there had been individual moments that persevered over the years: 5-foot-7 Spud Webb elevating and yamming in Dallas in 1986; Dee Brown pumping up his Reeboks and going blindfolded in Charlotte in 1991; Dwight Howard donning the Superman cape in New Orleans in 2008; Blake Griffin levitating over a Kia in L.A. in 2011.
But what Carter did during a rain-soaked weekend in the Bay looked like, felt like, the apogee of the competition. No one has put that much beauty and force into five different dunks, each its own masterpiece, before or since.
No one remembers the actual All-Star Game the next night. Well, other than then-Warriors owner Chris Cohan being booed mercilessly by the home crowd at the end of the third quarter as he “handed off” the Game to Jordan, then running the Wizards, and representing Washington, D.C., which would host the next All-Star Game.
Seven months later, playing for Team USA at the Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia, Carter capped his year of levitation by jumping over France’s 7-2 center, Frederic Weis, en route to a violent, yet somehow, also, elegant, slam in a preliminary round game. No one has had a greater run of dunking than Carter did in 2000.
“I approached the dunk contest like it was a basketball game,” Carter said last October, as he was being inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. “I took a pregame nap. I got ready for it. That’s how much respect, the want-to. I wanted to go out there and give you a show, and I put my best foot forward. And I think that’s why the people, obviously, appreciated the show.”
A quarter-century later, Carter will return to the dunk contest Saturday, this time as a commentator for TNT. But it is a very different and, frankly, diminished get-together these days.
Today’s dunk contest is a fledgling star search hoping to discover something spectacular at the back of NBA rosters and in the G League. It’s being kept alive by format changes and gimmicks. This event was formerly the glory of the NBA. A showcase of the league’s extravagant athleticism. An ode to the urban influence taking over an inclusive league. A visceral microcosm of how the best in the world captivate.
But it returns to the Bay bereft of its former glory. The absence of superstars willing to bring their cachet and calves to the event thrusts Mac McClung, the two-time defending champion who’s played exactly five career NBA games, onto the marquee. The wanting luster of the league’s once premier All-Star event adds to the nostalgia of Carter’s epic performance 25 years ago.
To that point, Carter’s ascension as an NBA superstar was well underway. Taken fifth in the 1998 draft by the Warriors, he was immediately traded to Toronto for his former University of North Carolina teammate, Antawn Jamison, who’d been taken a pick before by the Raptors. Almost immediately, the man who became known as “Air Canada” took his team and the league to new heights.
He won Rookie of the Year in 1998-99 and came to Oakland as a first-time NBA All-Star. He also accepted an invitation to dunk against a field including Stackhouse, then with the Pistons; Carter’s cousin and then-Raptors teammate Tracy McGrady; Rockets guard Steve Francis; guard Larry Hughes, who was with the 76ers that night, but would be traded to the Warriors four days later, and Hornets guard Ricky Davis.
“Knowing Vince, those three years in college and a little bit in high school, I knew the dunk contest was for him, and something that he wanted to do,” Jamison told The Athletic. That night, Jamison sat courtside in his home arena, wearing a dark brown suit worthy of a top insurance salesman.
“After practice, him and some of the guys used to practice crazy dunks,” Jamison said. “Just the dunks he did in college, in practice and stuff like that, I’ve seen so many great dunks from Vince outside of playing basketball. I knew that he would excel in that atmosphere. And it was a lockout year that year, and he’d had a pretty good start to the year.”
Few now remember that Carter went fourth in the order in the first round. Hughes, going first, tried a two-hand reverse tomahawk coming off the right wing that missed. McGrady then did the “Spud” — the dunk that Webb had made famous, throwing the ball high in the air, then grabbing it after it bounced off the floor, and reverse tomahawk dunking it. It was very well done.
Francis went third. He did his version of the Spud, taking the carom off the floor and dunking with his right hand — even though he didn’t catch the ball cleanly off the bounce. Both McGrady and Francis received scores of 45 from the five-person judges’ table: Hall of Famers Isiah Thomas, Rick Barry and George Gervin, NBA champion and TNT studio analyst Kenny “The Jet” Smith and four-time WNBA champion and two-time league MVP Cynthia Cooper.
Carter was next. And he decided, on the spot, to junk the easier first dunk he’d planned to do for the more dangerous 360.
“I tell you the truth,” Carter said. “That dunk, the first dunk, the reverse windmill. I had tried that, worked on it so many times, and could barely make that dunk in practice. But my adrenaline was so, so high, to where I said, ‘You know what? I think I can pull it off.’ And, that’s just what it was. KG was probably hyping me up from afar. Because I remember walking out on the court, all nervous, hands a little sweaty. I had just had surgery on my middle finger; if you go back and look, you see my fingers taped up.
“I see (Jason) Kidd, Antawn, all the guys I either played college ball with or against, or in the pros. The excitement in these professionals’ — superstars’ — faces, with what I was going to do. I just gave ’em a show.”
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Carter came in off the left wing, planted his right foot, spun, and whirled around in a full rotation, dunking with his right hand. After he landed, seeming to need to expend additional torque, he bounced thrice more on the pogo sticks in his legs.
“Let’s go home!” Smith said on the TNT broadcast. Everyone who was anyone in the NBA was on the court at Oracle, losing their collective damn minds.
Carter, of course, got a perfect score of 50 – five judges, 10 points apiece.
“I was mostly watching the reaction of the crowd,” Jamison said. “Not just among the crowd, but among his peers – Shaq, Kevin Garnett, those guys. I’ve seen some of these dunks before, and seen him do crazy things before on that stage. After that first dunk, you kind of knew it was over with.”
Stackhouse was, uh, next.
His first dunk was a 360 two-hand tomahawk. Stackhouse had decent elevation. He cocked it back impressively. Finished the slam with power.
And it may as well have been a layup.
“It’s like coming up to bat after Babe Ruth,” TNT’s Mike Fratello said.
Stackhouse was a Chrysler 300 tailgating a Bentley.
“That one that he pulled out, I don’t think anybody had ever seen anything like that before,” Stackhouse continued. “It was so quick, right? He was walking around, and I didn’t know what he was thinking about doing. Then, a 360 windmill. Like, wow. And I got to go behind him. I felt like I had a pretty good dunk. But I think it was almost shut down after that first one. I’m like, ‘Man, we’re not beating this dude today.’”
Few, if any, have reached the heights of grace and power Vince Carter did in the 2000 NBA Slam Dunk Contest. (Andrew D. Bernstein / NBAE via Getty Images)
Indeed, the next few minutes seemed to come in and out of focus – out when anyone else was dunking; 1080p-HD clear when it was Carter’s turn.
Carter’s second dunk came from behind the backboard – one power dribble, then a spin and another tomahawk. KG shook his head in amazement behind his camcorder. Carter got a 49 out of 50 this time.
In the third round, each contestant was required to do a dunk with a teammate. Carter, obviously, went with McGrady. Again coming off the left wing, Carter jumped just as McGrady bounced the ball in front of him – then caught the ball off the bounce, went between the legs with his left hand, and flushed it with his right. In 1994, J.R. Rider debuted the between-the-legs move at the dunk contest in Minneapolis. He called it the “East Bay Funk Dunk” — an homage to his roots.
Six years later, Carter, too, went next level — in the East Bay. Off the bounce.
And The Arena came unglued.
Carter pointed toward the sky afterward, the same way that sprinter Usain Bolt would a generation later, with his celebrated “Lightning Bolt,” the competition now complete, his status as the best practitioner of whatever sprint they’d just finished clear to all. Then, as Carter walked back to midcourt, he looked into the TNT camera and said, twice crossing his hands in front of his body:
“It’s over. It’s over.”
It was.
Thomas leapt out of his judges’ chair and mock knelt in front of Carter. Fifty, again.
Carter had secured a reverence that lasts for generations. He’d become the face of a cultural phenomenon by delivering a memory, a feeling. He delivered novelty to NBA elders, and to the new generation a signature feat to rival any. A known leaper since his Tar Heel days, Carter honored the burden of bounce. The one dubbed Half-Man/Half-Amazin’ answered the leaper’s calling though reputation was his lone reward.
The streetball phenomenon was peaking at the time. The And1 Mixtape Tour turned blacktop stars into household names of hoop. But, some eight miles from Mosswood Park — where 5-foot-8 Oakland legend Demetrius “Hook” Mitchell famously dunked over a Chevy Cavalier — Carter had reaffirmed the NBA’s supremacy in all things basketball, especially above the rim.
His fourth dunk — as if there was still some question about who the winner would be — came right down the middle of the lane. A dozen years earlier, in the same vicinity, Jordan had taken off from the foul line and seemed to float in air as he went in for the dunk. In 2000, Vinsanity dribbled down the lane, and went up for what looked like a simple dunk.
Except after he dunked it, his right arm was in the basket, almost up to his elbow. And he hung there on the rim for a second, like he was trying to decide what he’d have for dinner afterward. Yes, of course, he got another 50 and left everyone speechless. Even Michael Keaton — the original “Batman” of the ‘90s, and the fed chasing Pam Grier in “Jackie Brown” — was left with a stunned Beetlejuice expression on his face.
The fifth and final dunk was a fait accompli. Many in the crowd at The Arena in Oakland stood in anticipation; Francis and his Rockets teammate Cuttino Mobley lay on their stomachs on the court, like two guys on the beach checking out the waves and the string bikinis. Once Carter walked to the other end of the floor, everyone knew what was coming — a takeoff from the free-throw line. Like most who try the dunk Dr. J pioneered and Jordan made famous, Carter didn’t exactly launch from behind the line. Dribbling almost full-court, Carter took off with a foot well inside the paint. But, of course, he had his own twist. He dunked it with two hands, increasing the degree of difficulty. The masterpiece performance was complete. With a score of 48, Carter was officially the 2000 dunk champion.
“What I wanted for the arm in the rim was for you to be in awe, and silent,” Carter said. “And I was able to accomplish that. And that was my first time ever trying that, that night. So, I could have been, obviously, I was on one of two sides of history – aw, man, you tried that dunk and you fell off, did whatever – or, you made it. So, it was just confidence. Once I got up there, if you back, if you ever look, I’m holding on the rim, and I have my eyes closed. And I’m holding on. Looking for silence.”
There is silence at the Louvre when contemplating the Mona Lisa. Carter’s art spoke loudly, to the masses. A Basquiat, on basketball. And they responded in kind — 25 years ago, and today. It lives, as vibrant as ever.
(Top photo of Tracy McGrady and Vince Carter: Andrew D. Bernstein / NBAE via Getty Images)
