Cam Hazzard Talks About His Journey as an Athlete

Were you born with just this incredible athleticism? Did you develop it? When did you start dunking? Talk to me about all that. Yeah, so I hit my first dunk at 15 years old and I was obsessed as soon as I hit it because I was always a shorter kid in my team. I was the shooting guard but for some reason I just wanted to dunk. Like that just seemed like the most exciting part of basketball so I kept trying over and over and over again and at 15 I finally got my first like squeak like snuck it in at a local park and I had the video and I was watching it back to like I just kept watching on repeat and it took about six months from there to hit my first windmill and right after I hit that that was a huge milestone for me. I actually tore both of my hamstrings at the same time so this is my sophomore year of high school and that knocked me out for an entire year and I thought I was done because like every other kid I had a dream that I would go play D1 basketball some big school because every kid's delusional and that they thought that so that's what I thought and I came back and I was I lost all of my athleticism it felt like I was slow but I hit a growth spurt so there was at least some kind of benefit there but as soon as I came back I knew that college wasn't an option for me for basketball and I was like well let me just enjoy the game then I'm just going to enjoy basketball and do what I love and what came out of that was dunking that's what I love so I would go throughout my like rest of my junior year my senior year just going for crazy dunks and warm-ups and my coaches would get mad at me they're like Kim like stay in the paint just like do a drop step hook shot or something and I was like I'm just going like I was doing 360 windmills and warm-ups now go sit on the bench for the whole game that was me so that was my introduction to dunking and then I only started posting about two years ago at this point and that was just to store some of my favorite clips and then some of it started to gain traction I had guys like Isaiah Rivera see it other big names that I looked up to and that's what motivated me to keep going was by seeing like guys I watched growing up reach out to me and tell me to keep going so that that's how I got involved the dunking community they're all super supportive and they're all great guys to be honest that that's so cool now you know you've already now won the $35,000 there's that $500,000 grand prize sitting out there Kim yeah if you were to win the the entire you know thing and then you walk away with over $500,000 total what do you buy is something kind of splurge on for yourself yeah well I'm a finance bro at heart and so most of it's going in investments I've already like thought of what I would invest in but I of course I would like have to spend a little bit to celebrate and all that and I'm also a coffee nerd I love coffee so I've already made a deal with myself if I win I'll buy a really nice espresso machine and then the rest I'll just store away and reinvest back in my brand but I'll be smart with the money but that's one thing I will get that's funny and uh yeah last night for some reason I was like watching people make coffee on YouTube so I know that's like that's my whole piece that's all right that's my whole piece yeah that's very relaxing you know it is maybe a little bit of a caffeine addiction but you're right yeah I love that um you know you mentioned Mac and being this slam dunk uh you know three times slam dunk NBA slam dunk contest winner you know a lot of people think the NBA dunk contest is broken Kim um is there something that the league the NBA can learn from you know what you and Shaq and all the guys are doing um with dunk man and that could be kind of applied to the NBA's contest I think that a lot of people have this idea that professional basketball players are always going to be the highest jumpers and which for them for the most part for an average athlete they're obviously going to jump higher but whenever you consider all the different things that they're training for like shooting and then they're running for hours in a game that kind of like hurts their vertical so they don't jump as high and they're not as good at dunking as a professional dunker like me or some of the other guys so that's where some people get it wrong is because basketball players have to train for all those other things um so people have these really high expectations for those players in the NBA and all that but some of the dunks they do I'm actually impressed by that a basketball player can do that but I think the biggest takeaway that they can get is that fans want to see people hitting dunks within if not the first attempt then the second attempt and for it to be fast paced because sometimes NBA players will be going for some crazy dunks or something and they'll do sometimes four maybe even five attempts and that kind of slows it down and what dunk man has done is made it that you have to hit dunk within two attempts and hopefully one attempt and because of that the the contest is moving really fast and that fast pace is what keeps the viewer hooked and keeps them engaged and it gets the environment's really exciting and all that stuff so I think if the NBA were to limit the amount of attempts that they could take or you know just speed up in one way or another I think it would be a lot more entertaining for sure yeah yeah I think that's a great answer because it just kills the momentum when you've got like yeah right when you miss a dunk like four times yeah yeah it doesn't he's like grinds to a screeching halt what you know I'm sure you've got some some special stuff planned for the next upcoming days here Cam do you I mean do you know what you're gonna do are you gonna you kind of you play it you know kind of do it on the fly how does that work and what can we expect when we watch yeah so I have planned out my what I'm gonna do ideally so an ideal situation where everything plans out as I expect it to then I have a full plan that I'm gonna go through but I also am gonna write down a list on a physical note card with like 20 different dunks that I know I can hit first try at any given time and plan out different scenarios that I think might happen just so I'm like because I'm very analytical so like I just try to think through what could happen if this happened I'll do this whatever so I I'm gonna write it down and then kind of react to the situation but if everything folds out like I imagine it's going to then I'm yeah I have some crazy dunks and like Shaq says he wants to see something that's never been done before and I'm I'm just so excited to compete because I have things that have never been done before in a contest and I even have two dunks that I created and so it's gonna shock a lot of people if I get to hit them so yeah that's that's what you can expect from me wow I can't wait this is gonna be awesome it's already been awesome I've enjoyed it so much I think the fans have cam thank you man so much is there anything else I didn't ask about that you want to mention I mean just stay tuned 500k is on the line and this isn't a one-time dunk contest this is a league so just keep up I know dunk man has some crazy things in store for the future and like come on we'll be back next summer competing no matter what happens this season so I'm excited for it to keep going