Sixers guard Mac McClung’s slam-dunking rise to celebrity shows the evolution of basketball

WILMINGTON — All of them came to see him, all of them. The baby boomer woman who was sitting right behind the Delaware Blue Coats’ bench here Wednesday night, whose husband was a basketball referee, and who knew, the first time she saw Mac McClung, that he’d be a hell of a player. The five sophomores and juniors from Sterling High School in South Jersey holding handmade signs that read “MCCLUNG FOR PRESIDENT” and “THE DUNK CONTEST HAPPENS IN DELAWARE.” The children who poured into Chase Fieldhouse — hand-in-hand with their parents or in giggling, chattering clusters — for a chance to catch the 2023 NBA Slam Dunk champion doing his thing … or maybe just to catch a free T-shirt once the dance team started chucking them into the stands.

Sure, maybe some of them were more jazzed about the free apparel. But a G League franchise’s ticket sales don’t increase by a factor of five, as the Blue Coats say theirs have since McClung’s remarkable Saturday night in Salt Lake City, on merchandise giveaways alone.

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In his first game since basketball’s glitterati credited him with saving the dunk contest from obsolescence and the public’s boredom with it, an exhausted McClung dragged himself through a rough night: shooting 2-for-9 from the field in 24 minutes, clanking one jump shot after another off the front of the rim, scoring just seven points in the Blue Coats’ 116-111 loss to the Motor City Cruise, trying to feel normal again and failing to come close. Not that it was reasonable to think he would match his startling and near-perfect performance last weekend.

“Maybe a little worse,” he said. “I struggled a ton, one of my worst performances in a while. But that’s life.”

Of course, nothing he did Wednesday, no matter how many points he might have scored or dunks he might have thrown down, would have approached what he had done in Utah: adding 250,000 followers to his Instagram account in less than 48 hours, scoring a one-year endorsement deal with Puma, becoming the rare kind of insta-celebrity who cuts across any number of demographics and causes people to break out of their respective pop-culture silos for a bit.

In Elevating The Game, his 1992 rumination on the connection between basketball and Black culture, the critic Nelson George noted that the sport’s two styles — the creative, high-flying “schoolyard” manner of play associated with Black players and the disciplined, indoor-oriented “classroom” approach associated with white athletes — had melded into something more beautiful and complex.

“The schoolyard style has now enriched classroom philosophies so thoroughly that the differences aren’t so easy to discern,” George wrote. “Put simply — because of schoolyard experimentation, all players now do things once thought impossible.”

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McClung is the embodiment of that socio-racial-athletic blending, even as a native of Gate City, a southern Virginia town that, according to Census data, has just 2,000 residents and is located in a county whose population is more than 97% white and less than 1% Black. His father, Marcus, who was a tight end and linebacker at Virginia Tech in the early 1990s, started having Mac do plyometric exercises — pop squats and burpees and box jumps — when the kid was in seventh grade. His legs strengthened by those workouts, Mac dunked for the first time when he was 15. “One foot, one hand, pretty boring,” he said.

Two years at Georgetown, one at Texas Tech, ricocheting from the Chicago Bulls to the Los Angeles Lakers to the Golden State Warriors, from the NBA to the G League and back and forth between a couple of continents, all since going undrafted in 2021 — when it comes to reaching basketball’s peak, he would seem the ultimate example of someone whose fingernails and palms were bloody from the climb.

But a point guard who dunked just 12 times in college and who has just two games of NBA experience doesn’t get a shot in the dunk contest unless he already has built-in buzz, and McClung has had that since high school, when his buddies started posting videos of his dunks on social media and his acrobatics went viral.

He didn’t miss a dunk Saturday, and his final attempt was a 540-degree spin-o-rama that was a reasonable facsimile of the trademark move of his favorite dunker: Vince Carter.

“When you’re around someone every day, you kind of get used to it,” Blue Coats coach Coby Karl said. “A lot of the dunk contest, to be honest, is how you get the energy on your side. Making that first dunk really kind of stole the show.

“His athleticism shows up with his speed, with his first burst. He has great balance. He is a freak athlete, effortless athlete. Even starting out at practices, he’s able to get up and go.”

Still, based on stereotypes alone, there no doubt exists a disconnect between McClung’s appearance and his abilities. He is 24 but looks younger. He is listed as 6-foot-2 but looks shorter. And he is … well … white. That fact, whether one wants to acknowledge it or not, likely played into the perception of him as an underdog, into the reaction to his victory, and into the decision to include him in the contest in the first place.

In early October, McClung was in Japan with the Warriors, who opened their preseason with two games in Tokyo against the Washington Wizards. There, he said, he got a phone call from Michael Levine, the NBA’s senior vice president of entertainment and marketing, who told him that the league wanted him in the dunk contest. Four months later, McClung signed a two-way contract with the 76ers on Feb. 14, though he insisted that the Sixers didn’t sign him just so he would technically be on an NBA roster in time for the contest. Which was on Feb. 18.

“I’ve done everything they’ve asked,” said McClung, who ahead of Wednesday had averaged more than 19 points and shot better than 57% from the field in 18 games with the Blue Coats. “That’s the reason they wanted to give me a chance.”

His involvement in the contest was greeted with skepticism, if not outright resentment, for its novelty and its possible implications. Just one white player had previously won it — Brent Barry, now the general manager of the San Antonio Spurs, in 1996 — and now here was McClung, who wasn’t even officially in the league when he was selected to participate. During a podcast interview, Kevin Durant asked, “What are we doing?” when he learned that McClung would be part of the contest, and Jesse Washington, a writer for the ESPN-owned website Andscape.com, said that McClung was chosen to compete solely because he’s white. Washington later apologized.

“I’m not going to judge anyone for their opinions,” McClung said. “I guess that does matter ‘cause it’s not usual to see white guys dunk like that. So I get it. But that’s not even a thought in my head. That’s never really been important to me. I was from a town where there were a lot of white people, but I was always playing basketball in northern Virginia or Florida. I just see energy instead of color. My parents were so good. They really just taught me to judge energy and judge kindness, not the color of your skin.”

There was no backlash or resentment for him to contend with Wednesday. Outside Chase Fieldhouse, more than an hour after the game had ended, 10 to 15 people bundled against a cold, breezy night and gathered to wait for McClung to emerge. When he did, wearing just a white T-shirt and black pants against the chill, he stopped to scribble autographs and pose for photographs, flashing a peace sign in every picture. One woman told him, “It was so fun watching you.” A Black teenaged kid in a black hoodie said, “I’m going to get him to sign my forehead, bro.” It didn’t matter that Mac McClung hadn’t dunked once in the game. For the people crowding around him in the middle of the night, a moment with a man who already had done the impossible was enough.