Three years into his pursuit of a bachelor's degree in industrial design, Jordan Kilganon approached his mother with an impractical idea.

He intended to drop out of college and try to support himself dunking for a living.

Dunking had been an obsession for Kilganon since before he was tall enough to even touch the rim. Whereas most basketball players in his hometown of Sudbury, Ontario, looked up to NBA stars, Kilganon would watch grainy YouTube videos of streetball players performing jaw-dropping dunks and then imitate them on an 8-foot rim in his driveway.

Kilganon's fixation only increased when he finally dunked on a regulation rim for the first time at age 16. For the next five years, he spent up to three or four hours per day inventing creative new dunks or mastering ones he had watched others do, often remaining at the gym until his forearms were bruised and swollen and his fingertips were cracked and raw.

"Eventually my legs would be so sore that I'd try to get out of bed and I'd just collapse," Kilganon said. "I'd have to hold onto the walls to make it to the kitchen. People would always ask me, 'Why are you doing this?' In my head, I was like, 'You don't understand. I'm going to be the best in the world at this.' "

Watching her son expend so much energy on dunking never triggered any alarm bells for Jeanne Sauve even as Kilganon began receiving modest pay to appear in dunk videos or compete in contests. The high school teacher viewed dunking as a creative outlet for her son, a side job that might someday bring in a few thousand dollars here and there as he finished his degree and launched a stable career.

When Kilganon informed his mother in 2013 that he intended to pursue dunking full time, Sauve repeatedly pleaded with him to spend the next seven months finishing his degree before chasing an improbable dream. Sauve switched to more hardline tactics once Kilganon wouldn't budge, threatening to kick him out of the house and take back the car and laptop she purchased for him unless he returned to college.

"It was devastating at the time," Sauve said. "We had invested an awful lot of money into his education and we were pretty upset he wouldn't finish his last year. At the time we thought it was the wrong decision. How could he possibly make a living at dunking?"

Making a living at dunking is indeed very difficult, but Kilganon, 23, at least has the good fortune to live in an era in which basketball fans remain fascinated by the dunk. We celebrate dunks that defy gravity or conventional wisdom. We marvel at dunks that shatter a backboard or a man's spirit. We watch in awe as dunkers clear every sort of prop imaginable, from couches, to cars, to celebrities.

The lineage of great dunkers has spanned nearly a half century now. It started with Darryl Dawkins smashing backboards and Dr. J rocking the baby. Then came Michael Jordan's iconic free-throw-line dunk and Dominique Wilkins' trademark windmill. More recently, Vince Carter, Blake Griffin and Russell Westbrook have each left mouths agape and social media abuzz with their dazzling combinations of explosiveness and power.

There's such passion for dunking worldwide that it has spawned an industry of its own. Dunkers of all sizes, nationalities and athletic backgrounds train year-round in hopes of securing sponsors or earning invitations to participate in lucrative contests or exhibitions.

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Five-foot-five former high school basketball player Porter Maberry worked in a Michigan warehouse when he started dabbling in dunking four years ago. Only a few months later, he quit his job to focus solely on dunking after one of his videos went viral and landed him a cameo in a Samsung commercial.

Six-foot-two Dmitry Krivenko first gained attention for his high-flying dunks and deft ballhandling on the show "Ukraine's Got Talent." Now a guy who learned to dunk watching And1 Mixtapes is crisscrossing the globe competing for prize money in contests or performing in streetball games.

One of the most common ways for aspiring dunkers to break into the business is being spotted by the founders of a dunking team. Being affiliated with an established team is often a ticket to greater exposure and more consistent work, whether it's performing at halftime at a college or NBA game or as entertainment at a festival or party.

Team Flight Brothers founder Chuck Millan scours college basketball rosters, low-level dunk contests and social media in search of dunking's next big thing. The ideal prospect is someone athletically gifted enough to hit big dunks yet not so accomplished in basketball that his contract offers from pro teams price him out of the market.

"I need to find someone who jumps high, someone who has a 45- or 46-inch vertical at the least," Millan said. "Consistency is key as well. If we're in front of 20,000 people and we're being paid fairly well, we can't miss dunks. Missed dunks just aren't allowed. I won't deal with it."

The most high-profile member of Team Flight Brothers is Guy Dupuy, an accomplished French-born dunker who in many ways is an outlier in his industry.

He's a 29-year-old in a sport where many participants' legs or knees give out in their late 20s. He's a former high-level European professional player in a sport where many of his peers never played basketball beyond high school. And he's making a very comfortable living in a sport where most other athletes live paycheck to paycheck or have a second job to help bring in additional revenue.

Dupuy is in such high demand that for years he was on a plane as many as six days per week. He insists he banks anywhere from $150,000 to $300,000 per year from photo and rap video shoots, international tours and dunk contest winnings.

Contests have to award the winner a minimum of $5,000 for Dupuy to consider participating and he'll still request a four-figure appearance fee on top of that. A few of the contests Dupuy enters overseas pay out as much as $30,000. He's also participating in "Dunk King," a four-episode TNT reality series that will air in May and will follow 32 elite dunkers vying for a $100,000 prize.

"There are a lot of dunkers who call themselves professionals, but there are only two or three that really make a living the way I do," Dupuy said. "You can't call someone a professional when they're just surviving. Anyone can dunk and live with their parents. You don't have any rent to pay, you don't have an electricity bill and you don't have to pay car insurance. It's easy to do that. A lot of these guys live with their parents or they don't support themselves with dunking. They have a regular job. There's nothing wrong with that, but you're not a professional dunker if you can't live off it consistently."

Indeed, the paychecks Dupuy takes home dwarf those of other dunkers. Up-and-coming guys often enter contests that pay only a few hundred dollars and film free videos for prominent YouTube channels in return for the exposure.

Among the dunkers trying to gain stature in the sport is Jonathan Clark, a former standout high jumper and triple jumper at UCLA who halted his pursuit of a career in track field when he fell short of making the U.S. Olympic team in 2012. Clark chose to fill the void by pursuing dunking even though his only previous experience with organized basketball was twice getting cut from his high school team.

Having a background in high jump and triple jump is a huge advantage for Clark because he has extensive knowledge of how to train effectively and intelligently. The 27-year-old also draws inspiration inventing new dunks from studying movements in other sports such as skateboarding, gymnastics, martial arts and ballet.

Dunking has become a passion for Clark, but he wisely is also substitute teaching and pursuing a graduate degree. Much of the $10,000 to $20,000 Clark hopes to make from dunking this year will go toward plane tickets for his wife so they can explore Europe together this summer while he's there for contest season.

"At the end of the day, I want to go to a dunk contest, I want to try something new and I want to put a smile on the crowd's face," Clark said. "There are guys who show up to a contest and they need to win to pay rent for the next two months. Since I'm married and my wife and I want to start a family, that is a position I wouldn't feel comfortable in."

Jordan Kilganon was once one of those dunkers Clark was referencing, a college dropout with mounting debt and no safety net. There were times when stacks of unpaid bills forced Kilganon to consider bowing to his mom's wishes and returning to school, but the bouncy-legged Canadian named after that other Air Jordan could never shake the feeling he was born to dunk.

"When I think of myself, I feel like I am dunking and dunking is me," Kilganon said. "That's who I am. That's what I watch, breathe, eat."

The first step in Kilganon's transformation into a world-class dunker was a change in his training routine. Kilganon has always had a voracious work ethic, but being more disciplined and less reckless has enabled him to increase his standing vertical jump to 43 inches while also minimizing the damage on his body. Instead of dunking each day until his legs are numb, his forearms are bruised and his fingertips are split open, he'll scale back to a couple sessions a week and spend other days strength training or doing hand-eye coordination drills, speed work and plyometrics.

In addition to his specialized training regimen, the other advantage Kilganon has over competitors with similar athletic gifts is his life-long knack for creativity. Whether it was sketching basketball shoe designs in all his binders and notebooks as a kid or majoring in industrial design in college, inventiveness comes naturally to Kilganon and it serves him well in dunking.

Sometimes Kilganon will stuff a wad of grocery bags in the top of a PVC pipe, stand it up like it's a person holding a ball and try a series of movements over it in his living room to see what they inspire. Other times a fresh idea will pop into his head and he'll do it over and over again on an 8-foot rim to get the technique down before attempting it on a regulation hoop.

"When I'm almost asleep and I think of a new dunk, I'm like, 'Oh man, now I have to get up and write this down,' " Kilganon said. "There have been times when I'll get out of bed at 4 in the morning to go to the court and try out an idea."

One of Kilganon's first new ideas to draw attention was a February 2014 reverse dunk in which he got elbow deep in the rim with both arms. That clip has more than 600,000 views on YouTube. Eight months later, he released video of an acrobatic never-before-seen slam called the scorpion dunk. That clip has more than 3.2 million views on YouTube. Last year, he was the first to ever do a between-the-legs, behind-the-back dunk. That clip has more than 150,000 views on YouTube.

Kilganon is best known as the inventor of the lost-and-found dunk, one in which he rises toward the hoop, spins his body counterclockwise and uses his right hand to flip the ball behind his back. Then, as his body completes its rotation and he's facing the basket again, he reaches for the ball with his right hand and slams it through the rim as his friends watching in the gym scream in amazement.

That dunk took Kilganon three sessions to hit and is considered by many of his peers to be one of the most creative dunks of all time. More than 5 million people have watched the video on YouTube.

"It's by far my favorite, for sure," Kilganon said. "It's such a cool dunk and you really need to think outside the box to come up with something like that."

The popularity of the scorpion dunk, the lost-and-found dunk and Kilganon's other creations have dramatically increased his stature in the sport.

About 200,000 people follow him on Instagram, more than twice as many as any other professional dunker. Such a large following has enabled him to command a more lucrative appearance fee when he competes in contests and to be more selective about which events he chooses.

View photos Kilganon (right) with the late Darryl Dawkins, one of basketball's most legendary dunkers. (Photo courtesy Kilganon family) More

Kilganon hopes to devote less time this spring to competing in contests and more time to training to try to hit another never-before-seen dunk. He won't reveal any details, but several of his peers suspect he may be working on pulling off the first-ever double between-the-legs dunk.

Whether Kilganon can already lay claim to the title of world's best dunker is a subject of spirited debate. On one hand, other dunkers willingly concede nobody is more creative than he is. On the other hand, they also note he is sometimes vulnerable in a dunk contest because his signature dunks like the lost-and-found are so difficult that they aren't ones he can hit consistently.

"A lot of these guys get in the gym for four hours until they make the dunk, but when they get out there and actually get paid to do it, they can't," Dupuy said without mentioning Kilganon by name. "When you hire me for my services, you're getting the best. Whatever you see me do on the Internet, that's what I'm giving you."

The debate over the title of world's best dunker rages on, but the debate over whether Kilganon made the right decision leaving college without graduating? That's closed. Even his mom concedes that.

Kilganon is making enough money to comfortably support himself. He is being paid to travel the world doing something he loves. And with his jump training program, "Bounce Kit," providing an extra revenue source, he is beginning to prepare for the day when his legs start to give out and he can no longer dunk at a world-class level.

"Mothers always worry, but I'm not too concerned because he's such a smart, resourceful kid," Sauve said. "I don't know what the future will bring, but I'm sure it will be good because he's the type of person that is positive, disciplined and motivated."