"I jumped over a lot of guys but I remember that first one that started the rest" - Ronnie Fields on his most famous dunk
Yesterday, we celebrated the 15th anniversary of Vince Carter's famous dunk OVER Fred Weiss. I thought it would only be fitting to follow-up that story with a story about the guy who Vince Carter "declined" to dunk against in high school and that' guy's famous dunk OVER Sergio McClain. That guy is Ronnie Fields, who supposedly had a 50-inch vert back in his days with Kevin Garnett at Farragut Academy and was the subject of the 2013 documentary "Bounce Back".
I used to hear stories about Ronnie's high school exploits in the early issues of Slam Magazine, who followed Ronnie at camps and also published his monthly diaries in the 'Punks' section.
Then in the late 90's, I came across a website called Ronnie Fields Sacred Temple, which led me to a site called Above The Rim, which was ran by a guy named Anthony Petosa aka Keeper of the Ronnie highlights. I got in touch with Anthony and bought a VHS tape from him that made the original And1 Mixtape on VHS look like 4k HD. But I didn't have any complaints. Even with the lines and static I had no complaints because the highlights were so rare and impressive.
When YouTube came around, I posted a mix, made up of clips from the VHS tape, called "Best Dunker Ever?" It was cool, but what always bothered me was I didn't have footage of this legendary dunk I kept hearing about. I saw a photo of it in Slam's "Best Dunkers Ever" Special Edition magazine but I needed video proof.
About 10 years after making the mix, I found out about a Kickstarter campaign for a documentary that was being made about Fields. I contributed and ended up meeting the director, Thatcher Kamin, and doing a little interview with Ronnie. If that wasn't enough to excite the 90's me, I finally got to see the infamous dunk and it's as good as I thought I would be when I first laid my eyes on the pic below.
If you haven't seen the dunk yet then watch the first video at the top. And if you haven't seen the documentary "Bounce Back" yet, I highly recommend you watch it at http://www.ronniefieldsbounceback.com.
