Dom Gonzales

Dom Gonzales, known everywhere as Dom Dunks, was twenty and already competing as a pro when he sat down for Dunk Talk’s first in-person interview, alongside Dylan and Hunter Castona. He is a 5’8″ dunker from California who has played basketball since he was five and grew up on Russell Westbrook, Michael Jordan highlights and, because he was short, Nate Robinson. For years he had no idea professional dunking existed.

His style came out of a game with his two older brothers, Dante and Dane. They named an NBA player, Dom reproduced that player’s dunk on the door hoop, then asked whether it looked right. If it did not, he went again. They eventually worked through the entire league and ran out of names, which left him nothing to do but invent his own. One All-Star weekend his oldest brother staged a halftime contest in the backyard, announced he was Michael Jordan and dunked on the seven-and-a-half-foot rim. Dom, too short to dunk at all, went out after school every day from then on.

He touched the rim for the first time after practice as a sophomore, which shocked everyone and felt completely normal to him, and got his first dunk at sixteen at about 5’6″ with no training whatsoever. That September, Isaiah Rivera messaged him out of nowhere to ask what workouts he was doing. Dom answered honestly, calf raises when he felt like it, and Isaiah offered to train him for free. For two years he never sent form videos, and his coaches assumed he was skipping the program because he kept improving anyway. Once he started asking for help the numbers moved, roughly ten inches of vertical across four years up to the 47 he peaks at.

Ask him what mattered most and he does not say the weight room. The dunk that broke him through was a double dunk behind the back that Ballislife posted, and the reaction told him his creative dunks were not normal. His position is that low-rim dunking is the most valuable thing a young dunker can do, and that jumping and dunking are separate skills a pro needs both of.

In 2021, at seventeen and too shy to talk to the pros, he tested 41 or 42 at dunk camp and lost the 8-foot contest after missing his double-dunk Eastbay three times in the final round. A year later he was back with honey dips, a scorpion, his first behind the back and a 46.5 test, and that October he made his professional debut at the Sacramento Kings arena and took second. The following July he flew to Canada for his first FIBA 3×3 contest against CJ Champion and Tyler Currie, having planned it for a month in a notebook and rehearsed on low rims until he could hit ten in a row of every dunk on his list. He went in hoping for second and won it.

Two hours of spamming under-both in Los Angeles once left his back so bad he could not sleep, walk or sit comfortably for two months. Worse was the torn VMO and partially torn quad tendon he suffered in a contest, which kept him off the court for months and which he now calls a blessing in disguise. He grew up in a pastor’s household and had spent years treating faith as a label; those months alone were when it stopped being one, and he came back and ran a Bible study at dunk camp. Days before this episode he tested 46, then felt a pop in his adductor on the very next jump. He did it once, he said, and he will do it again.