[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTnC0RBXwws&feature=player_embedded]
If you look really closely, Paul Sturgess did put a tiny bit of air between his size 20 shoes and the floor before dunking the basketball in a recent Harlem Globetrotters game. Not that he needed to.
Sturgess, with a jersey that reads “Tiny,” is the world’s tallest professional basketball player, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. The 7’8″, 325-pound British-born player doesn’t even require a positive vertical leap to dunk a ball in the 10-foot-high hoop. And we aren’t sure how high he even can jump, since we don’t really need to know.
(MORE: World’s Tallest Man May Have Stopped Growing)
Originally from Loughborough, England, Sturgess played collegiately at Mountain State University in West Virginia. He has taken his show to the Harlem Globetrotters, a touring entertainment team known for such antics.
His recent rim-grabbing YouTube video has turned him into a Globetrotters star. The video shows him dunking the ball somewhat leisurely and then shaking the rim while nearly flat-footed before staring down the faux opponent and marching back on defense.
Sturgess says he came by his height naturally—his father is 6’8″ and his mother is 5’5″ — but he didn’t leave soccer and start playing basketball until he was 14 years old and a paltry 5’6″. We don’t want to know what that last growth spurt was like.