During the 2000 Summer Olympics, Vince Carter delivered one of the most iconic moments in basketball history, as he literally leapt over France's 7'2 center Frederic Weiss and threw down a thunderous dunk.
The image of Carter launching over Weiss will never be forgotten but, according to Kevin Garnett, the posterizing dunk didn't quite fulfill Team USA's $1,000,000 dollar bounty. That price tag was hanging over Yao Ming's head.
In a recent interview with Alex Wong of Yahoo Sports, KG revealed that all of Team USA really had a seven-figure bet as to who would be the first to dunk on Team China's 7'6 big man.
“Everything just paused. First of all, people didn’t know, we had a bounty out on Yao Ming. The whole USA team had a bet. We had a million dollar bet on who was going to be the first person to dunk on Yao Ming. None of us did. We all tried to dunk on Yao, but he would block it or we would miss.
“So, the first thing I thought of when I saw Vince dunk over Frederic was oh (expletive), you won the million dollars. But then I realized it obviously wasn’t Yao. I pushed Vince, and if you look at the clip, he almost punches me in the face by accident. But my first thought was, oh (expletive), you won, you got the million.”
(Photo by Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images)