Kevin Kemp

Kevin Kemp, known as Golden Child, is a 6’1” two-foot dunker who came up inside Team Flight Brothers during the years the crew defined what a touring dunker looked like. SLAM listed him on the TFB roster in its 2009 Flight Club feature, alongside the names that made the group.

He finished second at the Sprite Slam Dunk Showdown in Portland in 2009, losing in the final on a miss, at a time when the Showdown was the largest amateur dunk competition in the country and the main route to being seen. The year before, in 2008, he competed at Quai 54 in Paris.

He was also in the LA Live dunk contest tied to ESPN’s SportsNation, in a field with Werm, T-Dub, Justin Darlington and James White. Kemp took the opening dunk.

Team Flight Brothers billed him at a 50 inch vertical, and independent coverage from that era put him in the top group of jumpers on the squad alongside Jus Fly and Kareem Ward. The 50 inch figure has never been attached to a measured test, so it belongs to the era it comes from: a period when a dunker’s vertical was whatever the crew put in the video title.

Around 2008 and 2009 he was living in Florida with Guy Dupuy and other TFB dunkers, in the arrangement the crew ran at the time, where the roster lived together between tours. That is most of what the record holds on him, and it is the record of a dunker whose peak years came before the sport kept its own results.