Shaquille O’Neal wants to find the best dunker in the world.<\/p>\n
O’Neal \u2014 who had roughly 4,000 dunks in his NBA career, including playoffs \u2014 announced Monday night that he’s the founder and inaugural commissioner of Dunkman, which he’s touting as the first professional league for dunking.<\/p>\n
It follows a Dunkman television series, which aired last year. The league, O’Neal said, will look to build off the popularity of that six-episode series.<\/p>\n
In a partnership with TNT Sports, O’Neal’s new league will have five live events \u2014 four group stage competitions, followed by a title event \u2014 featuring 24 dunkers from around the world. At stake: the title of world champion, along with $500,000.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese athletes are innovators and Dunkman is going to give them a global stage, real stakes, and a chance to build careers doing what they love,” O’Neal said. “We are transforming dunking from a one-night contest to the fastest growing professional sport off two feet.\u201d<\/p>\n
The league’s events will air across a variety of platforms, including TNT, TBS, truTV and HBO Max, along with some social channels.<\/p>\n
The league said it will use \u201can Olympic-level scoring system that sets a modern standard for professional dunking,\u201d featuring a panel of expert judges.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shaquille O’Neal wants to find the best dunker in the world. O’Neal \u2014 who had roughly 4,000 dunks…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":590651,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,590,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-590650","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nba","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=590650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590650\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/590651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=590650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=590650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=590650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}