Dean Jarvis hadn’t touched a basketball in 35 years.
He last played as a high school sophomore, where he averaged an impressive 24 points over his first ten games. But that season would come to a screeching halt, along with Jarvis’s dream of leading his team to a state championship, when he was diagnosed with bone cancer. Four years later, after the steel rod placed in his leg snapped, he and his doctors made the decision to amputate.
As Jarvis began navigating the challenges of his changed physique, he struggled to reimagine his identity. Who are we if we can no longer do the things we felt destined to do, which brought joy and meaning into our lives? Where will we find purpose?
Jarvis has found many answers to those questions over the last 35 years, most notably by creating two national long-drive competitions for disabled golfers. Now the search has brought him back to the game that defined his life before limb loss. He’s standing in his backyard before a basketball hoop with an almost unfathomable goal: sinking hundreds of consecutive banking free throws to set a new world record.
Jarvis got the idea from a YouTube video about the Korean Basketball League, where banking free throws are commonplace. He wondered if he could learn to shoot as well as the top players in the league, while using the activity to improve his core and leg strength. In high school, Jarvis averaged 76 percent from the free throw line, equaling the league average in the NBA. Knowing that most players still routinely miss that uncontested shot, he wondered if some invisible force was limiting their performance.
Jarvis is well versed in pushing beyond limitations. “When I was initially diagnosed with cancer,” he recalls, “the doctors told me I had a 10 percent chance to live until I was 21 and a 1 percent chance to make it to 60.” At 56 years old, he has blown far past the first boundary and will soon eclipse the second.
There’s more to Jarvis’s pursuit of perfection than consecutive makes. There’s also the ongoing battle with his inner critic. “When I was younger, I was extremely critical of myself,” he explains. “My expectations were almost unrealistic. I thought I had to be number one at everything, but being number one was no longer realistic [after limb loss]. Everyone has their own race to run. I have to focus on what interests me most and set a goal. If there’s no goal, I’m just drifting with no direction in my life.”
Last year Jarvis bought a basketball, built a hoop with a return chute, and went to work. He set out to design the perfect shot using information from free-throw experts Larry Silverberg, Bob Fisher, James Pauley, and Rick Barry. Silverberg, a mechanical engineer at North Carolina State University, and his colleague Chau Tran used computer simulations to determine the optimal trajectory for a free throw: a launch angle of 52 degrees with three revolutions of backspin per second. Jarvis implemented those concepts and found that by bringing the ball to the middle of his body, using a symmetrical grip, and spinning the ball with his fingers while whipping the wrists, he could produce nine revolutions of backspin per second—a feat Silverberg didn’t think possible.
It isn’t the first time Jarvis has defied the odds. In 2021, he completed a 16-mile swim in 18 hours at a fitness center in Knoxville, Tennessee. His only regret: a self-imposed limitation. He logged his fastest lap time in the last two hours and still had plenty of gas left in the tank. Jarvis wishes he had given himself a chance to go longer.
He’s going longer than anyone thought possible in his consecutive free-throw quest. After making a remarkable 545 straight overhand free throws last year, Jarvis set his sights on the world record for consecutive underhand banking free throws. At press time, his best streak was 471 makes in a row. Can he get to 500 and break the record? Follow his pursuit on YouTube @BankingGrannyShot.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Late-breaking news: He did it! On February 28, 2025, Jarvis made 516 consecutive underhanded free throws, breaking a record that stood for 90 years. The previous recordholder was Harold “Bunny” Levitt, a 5’4″ Converse shoe salesman from Chicago.
