Taurian Fontenette

Taurian Fontenette, known as Air Up There, is a 6'2" streetball dunker from Hitchcock, Texas, born in 1983. Because AND1 claimed naming rights to Air Up There, he has also competed as Mr. 720, Birdman, The Human Pogo Stick and Way Up There.

He played at three colleges in five years. He went to UTEP in 2000 on a scholarship, then serious injuries in his sophomore season cost him it. He landed at Richland Junior College from 2001 to 2004, where he was named freshman of the year and first team all-defense, and finished at Paul Quinn College in Dallas in 2004 and 2005. None of that is the reason anyone knows his name.

In 2006, during an AND1 Mixtape Tour game in Houston, he got out alone on a fast break and spun twice in the air before finishing. It was the first 720 ever landed, and it happened in a live game rather than a contest, off a single fast break with one attempt available. SportsCenter ran it, the clip spread across the early internet, and it is still the dunk his name is attached to nearly twenty years later.

His actual signature is quieter and arguably harder. The axle-rider, a 360 between-the-legs, he says he was doing in high school before anyone else, and the thing that separates him is that he throws it in live games and on breakaways rather than saving it for a contest with unlimited attempts. Landing a 360 between-the-legs in traffic, once, with no reset, is a different skill from landing it in a gym.

He toured with the AND1 Mixtape Tour and the Ball4Real Tour through the era when streetball was on national television, and won the Sprite Slam Dunk Contest in 2010. In 2009 he signed with the Dallas Generals of the American Basketball Association, though the franchise folded in January 2010.