I’m Travis Reynolds, a professional dunker from North Carolina. On episode 73 of the Dunk Talk Podcast we sat down with Jeremiah Walker, a twenty-year-old out of London who’s getting flown around the world just to dunk. The full episode is at the top of this page, and the show’s write-up is on the Dunk Talk episode article. His story is one of my favorites we’ve covered, and part of why is how much of it I recognized.
A London soccer kid who found dunking
Jeremiah grew up in London playing soccer from about five to eight years old. A friend told him he should try basketball because of his height, so he did, and pretty quickly he realized he loved dunking more than the game itself. That’s a feeling a lot of us know: the sport is fine, but the jumping is the thing.
The coach who told him to just dunk
Here’s the moment that made me stop him mid-story. At sixteen, an assistant coach told Jeremiah straight up that he wasn’t good at basketball and should just dunk professionally. He went and researched Joel Henry, and instead of being crushed by that, he took it as permission and went all-in on dunking. That flipped me, because most of us got the exact opposite message. The coaches in my world treated dunking like a distraction from “real” basketball. Jeremiah got pointed at it on purpose, and he ran.
From a rough first contest to getting paid
His first contest, a Ball Out event back in 2021, did not go well. The turn came in 2022 when he cleared three people on a windmill at a clothing-brand contest and walked away with a five-hundred-pound prize. After that he made a decision a lot of dunkers take years to make: he’d only do paid events from then on. From there it snowballed.
The bag
Jeremiah is a jump-over-people specialist. His record for clean jumps over humans is five, starting from a guy around 6’2″, which is absurd. His signature is a reverse 180 behind-the-back that he calls a “360,” and he has a cuff 360 windmill, a fake Eastbay, and a cartwheel dunk in the bag too. Right now he’s chasing a 360 underboth and a left-hand hide-and-seek. He learned a lot of his mechanics, like the penultimate step, straight off Isaiah Rivera’s YouTube, and grew up watching Connor Barth, Jordan Southerland, Guy Dupuy, and DaBoyJustFly.
Getting flown around the world
The part the title promises is real. His first paid event was NEOM out in the Saudi desert, and his favorite so far is Ghetto Games in Latvia. The way he describes it is basically the dream: fly somewhere, dunk for thirty minutes, then get to explore a country you’d never have seen otherwise. At twenty, that’s his job.
Where he’s headed
His goals are stacked: a fifty-inch vertical, wins at Ball Out Dunk Elite, Kings of Air, and Quai 54, a FIBA gold if the format comes back, and a DunkMan League championship. But the one that stuck with me was how he wants to be remembered, as consistent, the guy who showed up and didn’t miss. That lines up with something we keep hammering on the show: the dunkers who post their real, full sessions are the ones who back it up in person. Cam Hazzard is the obvious proof of that, and Jeremiah is building the same kind of reputation. You can follow him at @jumplikejay10.