Terry Cournoyea, known as T-Dub, is a 5'9" dunker from St. Paul, Minnesota, and his footage is a large part of the reason professional dunking became a job rather than a hobby.
He was a high school basketball player and high jumper who had built a reputation around Minnesota for what he was doing to rims. Chuck Millan, who had started Team Flight Brothers in 2004 after touring Taiwan with Kadour Ziani's Slam Nation, tracked him down and flew him to Florida for a video shoot. The clip that came out of that session ran ninety seconds. YouTube put it on the front page.
What followed changed the economics of the sport. In Millan's own account, boys and girls clubs started calling, bookings began arriving, and Team Flight Brothers turned from an idea into something that paid. The video, titled 5-9 Best Dunker in the World, passed two million views and was nominated by YouTube for its Best Sports Video of 2007. It contained a two-handed 540 and a 360 between the legs, at a point when almost nobody outside the touring circuit had seen either.
His influence on the vocabulary of the sport is still being felt. Jordan Kilganon, asked about the Scorpion, has been explicit that the dunk was not his invention and has pointed to T-Dub and others as the originators, describing his own contribution as refinement. The Scorpion is now one of the most recognisable dunks in the world and carries Kilganon's name in most people's minds, which makes the attribution worth stating plainly.
He competes under the Dubble Up banner, and at 5'9" his catalogue is built on balance and body control rather than raw clearance, which is what made the early footage so difficult for other dunkers to copy. Billy Doran, who has filmed nearly every serious dunker of the last fifteen years, names T-Dub as his personal favourite of all time for exactly that reason.