This is episode 26 of the Dunk Talk Podcast. I’m Dylan Haugen, joined by my co-host Hunter Castona, and the guest is Jordan Southerland, the 1FootGod, the best one-foot dunker of all time. Jordan is 30, expecting his first daughter in October, and ten years into a pro career that includes the Sprite Slam Dunk Showdown, the Aaron Gordon Dunk Fest, a first-overseas win in Latvia over a motorcycle, and a 2022 summer where he went 22-1 with the single loss coming by one point to Isaiah Rivera. This is Part 1 of his story, from being named after Michael Jordan to becoming the one-foot standard everyone else is measured against.
Named after Michael Jordan, raised on the tapes
Jordan’s mom was a Bulls fan and named him after Michael Jordan (she wanted Jordan Michael; he ended up Jordan Marcus, which is its own irony since MJ’s son is Marcus Jordan). His early childhood was VHS tapes: the dunk contests, the championship runs, every Michael Jordan documentary that existed. The free-throw-line dunk is his first memory of wanting to dunk.
His dad could dunk at 5’10” and trained Jordan’s vertical from around age 8 with a system: lower the rim, set a height goal, raise it every month. Jordan was dunking on 9’ by age 9, then got stuck at that height for almost four years. His dad deliberately kept him off weights to avoid interfering with his growth. The breakthrough came at 13: a baseline one-foot two-hand dunk on 10’, in a game, at 5’6”, motivated by watching a shorter 12-year-old dunk before him. He hung on the rim and screamed. The very next play he slipped, twisted his ankle, and didn’t dunk again for a year.
He was also a legitimately good baseball player as a kid (all-star outfielder, two championships, robbed six home runs), playing it because Michael Jordan did. He quit around 11 or 12 after taking nine hit-by-pitches to the same unfortunate area in a ten-game span.
Cut from high school basketball three years in a row
Jordan never played a minute of high school basketball. He made second cuts every year. His junior year was the worst version: he led the second-cut team to a win over the starting five in the tryout scrimmage, his friends on varsity were lobbying for him, and the coach called him into his office and offered him team manager. The coach’s logic was that Jordan hadn’t played organized ball in two years, even though Jordan had been playing AAU in Chicago and Georgia and showed him footage.
His advice to young dunkers off the back of that story is blunt: don’t let coaches define your ceiling. Ask Isaiah. Ask Kilganon. Ask him. He made it further in basketball than anyone in his graduating class who actually made those teams.
Coach Friday and the track detour
The pivot came from his gym teacher, Coach Friday, a former NFL player with a heavy country accent who saw Jordan hit a baby windmill in gym class junior year and refused to let it go. Jordan went out for track. Junior year he wasn’t serious. Senior year he tried high jump for the first time and cleared 6 feet on his first attempt without knowing that wasn’t normal. The previous coach had never given him a shot at the event, again on a hunch.
Coach Friday passed away, and Jordan has his name tattooed on his leg. He credits him as the person who unlocked everything that followed, because high jump training rebuilt his body in a way basketball never did. Jordan had grown from 5’9” to 6’0” in under a year and the growth spurt left gaps in his knee cartilage that gave him shin splints and chronic knee pain through his entire adolescence. The stretching, landing mechanics, and different loading patterns from high jump are what let his knees finally catch up in his twenties.
Senior year was also the year of the first windmill and the first Eastbay. The Eastbay story is great: straight cuff, no dribble, full-speed half-court approach, forced over the front of the rim like an old Russell Westbrook dunk, ugliest Eastbay of his life, and one of the three or four most hyped moments he’s ever had on a court.
Rudy Clements, the church run, and ballet
Two unusual mentors shaped Jordan’s style. The first was Rudy Clements, a former Sprite contest dunker Jordan met at a church basketball run (you couldn’t play unless you attended the service). Rudy was 35 or 36, still dunking, and after watching Jordan match his two-hand Eastbay Reverse, he invited him to an outdoor session and bet Jordan would unlock five dunks. Jordan unlocked the Eastbay two-hands, behind-the-back, scoop, 360s, and the look-away windmill that became part of his signature. The flat, flared-leg, eyes-off-the-rim style people associate with the 1FootGod traces directly to Rudy.
The second was his college basketball coach, who made him take ballet to learn how to land. The ballet training is where his spinning control comes from, which eventually produced the one-foot 360 Windmill and the 540. The Shawn Kemp logo dunk idea grew out of the same period of asking what else his legs could do in the air.
The Sprite Slam Dunk Showdown: 10 years a pro
Jordan’s first pro contest was the Sprite Slam Dunk Showdown at the Indiana State Fair, August 14, 2014, at exactly 20 years old. He signed up through a website link, drove 8 hours, broke his phone on the trip, bought a new one with his hotel money, and slept in his car. The first dunker he saw when he walked in was Justin Darlington, one of his idols. The judge was Darryl Dawkins. Jordan took second; Darlington took third. He keeps the state fair ticket framed to this day, and this past August marked ten years as a professional dunker.
His second contest field was Worm, Young Hollywood, Reemix, and Guy Dupuy at New York All-Star Weekend. That was the era: every contest was five or six of the best dunkers alive, with no easy fields. Jordan thinks the FIBA circuit that Donovan Hawkins and Finn Addy are coming up through is the closest modern equivalent, and he’s glad it exists.
First win: Aaron Gordon Dunk Fest, 2016
Jordan’s first contest win came in 2016 at the Aaron Gordon Dunk Fest against a field that included Chris Staples, Michael Purdie, and Kenny Dobbs. Two months earlier he had lost City Slam (the ESPN contest, his first big call-up) on a behind-the-back out of the hand he couldn’t convert, a dunk that cost him several contests in a row. At Aaron Gordon he swapped it for an Underboth out of the hand and won the whole thing in front of Aaron Gordon. Two years from his first pro contest to beating everybody. That was the moment he knew he could be one of the best rather than just a professional.
The first overseas win was Latvia, and it’s his favorite adaptation story. Kristaps and Smoove took half his planned dunks in the early rounds (Kristaps opened with a Tamale, Smoove hit the Game Over Windmill and a scoop), so Jordan improvised the dunk he’d never made: behind-the-back out of the hand, over a person on a motorcycle. First make ever, in contest, for the win.
22-1: the 2022 summer and the Isaiah rivalry
Jordan’s 2022 summer was 22 or 23 contests with one loss. The loss was to Isaiah Rivera at Dunk Battle by a single point, and Jordan partially blames himself: he thought he’d made his first dunk (a scoop over Oliver Twist) when he’d actually missed, and he paced his remaining dunks on bad information. Since contests reopened in 2021, he counts four or five total losses out of roughly 100 contests.
He talks about Isaiah as his anime arch-rival, and the record backs it up: the two of them went back and forth across five contests in one summer with no one winning twice in a row. His theory is that every great dunker needs a nemesis. Kilganon had Lipek on the FIBA circuit. Guy Dupuy had T-Dub. The rivalries are what force the new dunks out.
The consistency doctrine
The most useful training segment of the episode is Jordan’s explanation of how he turned contest-winning into a repeatable system:
- Master your dunks before you collect new ones. When he started winning consistently, his sessions changed from new-dunk hunting to making Underboth five times in a row, J Rich two-hands five times in a row, behind-the-back five times in a row. The dunk has to be available on demand, not on a good day.
- Practice contest dunks while exhausted. He’d run a normal 30-40 minute session first, then practice his contest dunks dead tired. If it goes down with no legs, it goes down with adrenaline and a crowd.
- Donovan is the modern case study. Jordan points at Donovan’s year of quiet grinding as exactly the path: master the bag, then come back and win everything. There’s a Ballislife clip of Donovan hitting Underboth at 17. The version you see now is the same dunk repped into total ownership.
His one regret is the same one nearly every guest gives me: he didn’t low-rim through his early pro years. He low-rimmed as a kid to learn to dunk and then abandoned it until late in his career. The new-dunk ideas were always on paper, but the visualization reps weren’t there.
Christ Airs, the 540, and what’s next
At 30, Jordan is in a creative resurgence. Dom Gonzales randomly sent him a Christ Air dunk clip on a 9’ rim, and within two weeks Jordan had landed four Christ Air variations (left, right, Eastbay, and Christ Air Scorpion). The Christ Air is his favorite skateboarding trick from the Tony Hawk games, which is exactly the kind of cross-pollination that produces his dunks. His public goal list, on the record so nobody steals the credit: Christ Air Underboth, Christ Air double Honey Dip with a 360, the Christ Air Tamale circuit, and a fakie behind-the-back Christ Air Scorpion.
He also took a clear anti-props position. The China contest everyone watched was double-up after double-up, and the dunk that won it was Kilganon’s 540 with no props. Donovan just won Venice Ball with no props. Jordan jumps over cars in shows when asked, but in contests he wants the dunk itself to carry the score. It’s the same scoring conversation we had with Donovan in episode 25, from the guy who’s been living it for a decade.
Where to find Jordan
Jordan is “1FootGod” on Instagram and YouTube, and the YouTube channel has been heating up with full session uploads including the Christ Air series. Go subscribe. This was Part 1 of his story. Next episode is the Part 2 panel on how dunking can grow as a sport with CJ Champion, Billy Doran, Donovan Hawkins, and Justin Blanchard. Comment with any dunker you want me and Hunter to interview next.