Lamar Jackson has always been a world-class athlete, and at Louisville he had the basketball team in awe.
Cleveland Cavaliers star Donovan Mitchell recently recalled having a dunk contest with Jackson in college, and Mitchell couldn't believe what he saw.
"We were having dunk contests my freshman year in the gym. Me, Lamar, some of the guys on the [basketball] team and the football team, and he was out here windmilling, throwing it off the wall, like crazy," Mitchell said on "7PM in Brooklyn" with Carmelo Anthony and "The Kid Mero."
Jackson remembers the contests, too, and even he was surprising himself.
"I used to know how to dunk. I used to be alright," Jackson said. "I'm not going to say I was Donovan Mitchell with the dunks, I wasn't winning [dunk] contests or anything like that. Freshman year, I saw him throwing alley-[oops] to himself. I'm just going off momentum. I'm just hyped just seeing it.
"[It was] my first time meeting him and the basketball players. I just threw one off the wall, and I caught it. I was just pumped, I was like, 'Okay, I have a little bounce and stuff like that.'"
While Jackson wasn't a dunker like Mitchell, who is an NBA Slam Dunk Contest champion, he still had enough in him to hype up the basketball team.
Jackson also came to Louisville in the same class as WNBA standout shooting guard Asia Durr, who was the second-overall pick of the New York Liberty in 2019 and most recently played for the Atlanta Dream.
"Louisville had been had a name, but we just made our place in Louisville, so it's dope," Jackson said. "It was dope for him to tell that story, too."
