Jeremiah Walker

Jeremiah Walker is a professional dunker from London, England, and he was 20 years old when he sat down for this episode. He grew up in a soccer family, started playing at five because his uncles played, and quit at eight after deciding he was terrible at it and too small for it. A friend at primary school told him he was tall enough to try basketball and that it was fun.

He loved dunking more than basketball almost immediately, because his schools were full of low rims. Lunchtimes at primary school were spent on a netball goal barely five feet high, where everybody could dunk and everybody was trying Eastbays and behind-the-backs. His secondary school then happened to have rims at 9 feet, 9’5″, 9’10” and 10 feet. His first 10-foot dunk came at 12, a put-back, on his friend, and then he did not dunk again for two or three years, because a put-back is mostly luck when you are barely above the rim. From about 10 until he was 17 or 18 he was at a court every single day doing max jumps, which is where the technique he still uses came from and which he rates above any weight room work at that age. YouTube was his textbook, and he studied Isaiah Rivera‘s video on the penultimate step until he could copy it.

The turn professional came from an unlikely direction. By 15 turning 16 he could not walk onto a court without windmilling, and every basketball team he joined ended up using him only for dunking. At 16, at a new school, an assistant coach looked him in the face and told him he was not good at basketball and should dunk for a living. Jeremiah’s honest reaction was to ask whether that was a job you could have. The coach told him to look up Joel Henry, and he realized it was. He notes this is the opposite of what dunkers usually hear; both Dylan Haugen and co-host Travis Reynolds grew up being told to stop wasting their time.

He built his name in a city already set up for it. London street one-on-one and 3×3 outdraws professional five-on-five, and those events almost always carry a dunk contest, which is how he reached the Dunk Elite and FIBA circuits. His first was Ball Out in 2021, twenty minutes from his house, where he made the final of the basketball tournament and then did awfully in the dunk contest. The next year he entered a clothing brand’s contest with 500 pounds on the line, cleared three people on what he believes was his first windmill over somebody in competition, and won. From then on he considered himself a professional who gets paid at every event. He also decided to jump over people rather than push off them, purely because it is harder and harder scores better; five is a clean day, six is when he starts kicking somebody, and he has never once missed one in a contest.

Dunking has since flown him around the world. His first paid trip was to Saudi Arabia, fresh out of school, for a contest in the desert at NEOM. His favorite event on earth is Ghetto Games in Latvia, where he arrived at the court in a Porsche 911 with his flag out the window, handed it to a cheerleader, and walked out in front of at least 2,000 people at an outdoor court, in a country where ordinary spectators know the culture well enough to tell exactly how hard one dunk is next to another.

His signature is the reverse 360 behind the back, which he first landed in a session in March and has hit at every contest since debuting it in Vienna. He is also working toward a 360 under both and a left-handed hide and seek, a dunk he calls Travis the best in the world at. Jordan Southerland is the reason he started off one foot, and Joel Henry, who has beaten him five times without ever losing, is the reason he built a set of ten dunks he can hit no matter when. From here he wants a 50-inch vertical, wins at Ball Out and Kings of Air, a FIBA 3×3 title and a DunkMan League title. What he actually wants to be remembered for is consistency, the dunker who never turned up to a show and missed, and for people to know his personality as well as his bag.