These days, it’s easy enough to get footage of hyped basketball prospects from an early age. There are whole YouTube channels based on the premise that people want to see young kids dominate AAU and high school games. Even middle school games, or younger. It’s really ridiculous, but at the same time it’s totally awesome. It wasn’t always like this. In the old days, you were lucky if you got much of anything from a player before they hit college. This wasn’t much of a problem, since no one wanted to see that stuff anyway. Times were different, and the AAU hype culture was not fully formed.
Which leads us to today’s topic: that video from 1996 of a 14-year-old Tyson Chandler dunking all over some midget white kid, then slamming him down to the ground with his ass after hanging on the rim for a bit. What a gem. How did this thing find its way onto the Internet in the first place? I feel like I’m watching a treasured historic relic.
Chandler was pretty skinny back then. I’d put his weight at about 100 pounds at that point in his career. So, not much different than his Chicago days. You can’t teach height, though, and he was one of the more hyped prospects of his era. I bet tons of people called him a bust earlier in his NBA career, but he has now definitely carved out a niche as a superb role-player, and he somehow keeps putting up good games (like tonight’s 22 on 9 of 9 from the field) for the Suns despite being ancient as heck.