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Message: [QUOTE="Carnac, post: 3436423, member: 5798"] Thompson (NBA: ‎1975–1984) was dubbed "The Skywalker". When the conversation got around to players with outrageous leaping ability during that era, the first name mentioned was the 6-4 Thompson. The basketball legend nicknamed “Skywalker” for his otherworldly leaping ability will celebrate 31 years of sobriety in December. The man who Michael Jordan idolized. Thompson helped us realize what was possible on the basketball court. He is credited with popularizing the alley oop. As a rookie with the Nuggets, he went toe to toe with Julius Erving in the first-ever Slam Dunk Contest. He once scored 73 points in an NBA game. Shortly thereafter, he signed a then-record $4 million contract. [ATTACH type="full" alt="1581568533388.png"]50858[/ATTACH] [B]His 42-inch vertical leap[/B] landed him in the Guinness Book of World Records as a freshman at North Carolina State. That year, he also was on the finishing end of an alley oop for the first time, which like Post-it notes and penicillin was a happy accident. During practice, Thompson was getting overplayed by his defender. He cut toward the basket, wrangled a lob pass from point guard Monte Towe and dropped it in the orange cylinder mid-flight. “Coach (Norman) Sloan stopped practice,” Thompson said. “He said, ‘Hey, I like that. Maybe we can put that in our offense.’ Smart coach he was.” Dunking was banned in college at the time, so Thompson wasn’t able to punctuate those lob passes as authoritatively as he would’ve liked. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach