A week or so after Julio Jones—arguably the best wide receiver in the world right now, and certainly the most important skill player stepping onto the field in Sunday's Super Bowl—committed to play football for the University of Alabama, he found himself in a high school basketball playoff game.
His Foley High School Lions were in Mobile to face the LeFlore High School Rattlers. In addition to being the greatest football player to come out of Foley since Ken Stabler, and a state champion in track, Jones was also a high-flying rebounder and shot-blocker in high school. His gifts were already well known on the Gulf Coast of Alabama: size, speed, strength, vision, a sort of preternatural calm that made even his most insane athletic feats appear as if they were happening in slow motion.
But Foley was a football school, and they were overmatched on the basketball court by LeFlore—in particular, by the Rattlers' center, a highly recruited junior named DeMarcus Cousins. Jones, however, was not overmatched. There remains some question as to whether Cousins was standing under the basket when the dunk happened, or even whether he was on the floor at all. I heard varying accounts. But witnesses agree that in the first half of the game, Jones plucked a rebound out of the sky and tore down a vicious dunk that brought the opposing LeFlore fans out of their seats for an extended applause.
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