Chris Staples is a 6'3" professional dunker from Saginaw, Michigan with a 46" vertical. He goes up off two feet from a right-left plant, his signature is the reverse 360 Eastbay, and he holds two Guinness World Records for dunking, one of them for the most blindfolded dunks in a minute.
He was one of five children and came up through AAU as a defensive player, by his own description a kid who stole the ball and passed it to somebody else, which was the only reason his coach kept him on the floor. The athleticism was inherited. His mother ran track, his father was All-State in baseball, his father's twin brother was a high jumper, and his cousin Lamar Woodley played linebacker in the NFL for the Steelers, Raiders and Cardinals.
His first dunk did not come until he was 17, on a fast break, which is late. Within the same year he was doing 360s and windmills. Then he lost his senior season, not to injury but to an ACT prep class that clashed with tryouts, after which the coach would not let him join the team. He went to indoor track instead and made All-State, and every week he made the paper he taped the clipping to the basketball coach's door. He still says the career has partly been about proving that point.
He never played college basketball. He quit his job and went to Spain with a coach who promised to build his career, spent five months there, and found out the whole thing was a scam. The man running it told him he was only in Europe because of him and was nothing without him. Staples came home, subleased his house and slept on his own couch, deliberately, so that he would not get comfortable.
He applied to the Harlem Globetrotters more or less on a whim, sending video footage. They invited him to try out and offered him a roster spot. He assumed it was another scam and refused to quit his job until the day the team flew out on tour. It became real at his first game, looking at 10,000 people in the stands. He joined in 2012 and has performed in more than 50 countries since, which is a different discipline from contest dunking: the dunk has to land on schedule, in an arena you flew into that morning, most nights of the year.
In 2013 he was invited to an NBA All-Star Weekend dunk contest. Somebody filmed it, the clip went viral, and the contest invitations started arriving on their own.
The strangest turn came through commercial work in Los Angeles. A director named Tim Chey emailed looking for basketball players for a film called Slamma Jamma, and Staples went in assuming he was auditioning as an extra. He was cast in the lead, as Michael Diggs, a former player who trains for a national dunk contest after being released from prison for a crime he did not commit. The script ran about a hundred pages and he had never acted before. The Globetrotters told him he could not do both, so he quit the team. The film opened in more than 500 theatres in 2017.
He is also a FIBA 3x3 dunk champion, appeared on The Bachelorette, and now works as a content creator and actor in Los Angeles while still competing and still filming with Dunkademics. What he says he actually wants is to build a route for people who never reached college or the NBA but still want a career in basketball.
