By MIKE ROBERTS
On Tuesday night, Gate City’s own Mac McClung competed as the top seed in the DUNKMAN World Championship in Atlanta with $500,000 on the line. Wow, that’s a nice chunk of change! So how’d he do?
Shockingly, McClung, the top seed in the championship bracket, got eliminated in the quarterfinals by No. 8 seed Dengzing Chen.
Most fans expected McClung to win, and that makes a ton of sense, seeing that he’s won three NBA dunk titles. Chen had other ideas. His dunk where he jumped over two motorcycles received a score of 9.48.
Then McClung followed that with an amazing slam over three people stacked in a car, but scored a 9.46.
A difference of 0.02. So close, but not quite good enough to knock off Chen, a former Quai 54 World Dunk Contest Champion, CBA Dunk Contest Champion, and China Dunk League Champion. Plus, he also finished as the runner-up at the FIBA World Cup Dunk Contest. He’s easily one of the most successful dunkers to ever come out of China.
Here’s a video of the full matchup between McClung and Chen:
Chen went on to lose to Cam Hazzard, a 21-year-old from Lewisville, Texas, in the final round of Tuesday’s contest. Other competitors in the eight-man final bracket included Dillan McCarthy, Jordan Southerland, Isaiah Rivera, Dylan Haugen, Cam Hazzard, and Joel Henry.
Led by Commissioner Shaquille O’Neal, DUNKMAN is the first professional league dedicated to competitive dunking. McClung won Group D and earned top marks in the field in the process leaping over a car and executing a ridiculous 720 dunk. He earned top marks during his group performance, including a high score of 9.86 for his signature “triple up” car-and-people dunk. Here is a recap of what McClung did on Tuesday.
McClung now is set to begin his international career after signing with Spain’s Bàsquet Girona, a team owned by former NBA All-Star big man Marc Gasol.
College Soccer
ETSU women’s soccer goalkeeper Addison Yelton was named the Southern Conference Defensive Player of the Week on Monday, her first SoCon weekly honor in her second season with the Bucs.
Yelton, who lives in Johnson City, posted two shutouts in the previous week: a 1-0 win over West Georgia at home on Aug. 20 and a 2-0 result at UNC Asheville this past Sunday. Yelton now has 10 career clean sheets at ETSU, tying her with Shu Ohba for the fourth-most in program history.