SeeJoeDunk.com

Joe needs your help. Joe needs you to vote for him. Not once, not twice... but as many times as possible.

Tell your friends. Tell your family. Tell everybody you know. Let's get Joe some prime time exposure, and show the NBA what a real BEast looks like...

The Charleston Daily Mail Wrote:Bucks' Alexander making a name in NBA, if not big stats
By Mike Casazza
Daily Mail sports writer
January 9, 2009

Happy New Year everyone! I know people usually make New Year resolutions so I thought I'd make some this year. The first resolution I'm going to make is to win the 2009 Slam Dunk contest. To do that I need your vote. Make sure to vote as often as you can for me. You can vote once an hour so that means 24 votes a day. My second resolution is to practice my dunks for the contest. I actually started this a little early with the help of my teammates. Check out some of my innovative training techniques.
-- From the Web site seejoedunk.com

And so begins Joe Alexander's movement to make his mark in the NBA.

The Milwaukee Bucks' first-round draft choice from West Virginia University is at the center of a team campaign to first get voted into the dunk contest Feb. 14 during All-Star Weekend in Phoenix, and then to win the thing.

"Honestly, if I get in, I feel like I'm going to win it," he said, exuding all the quiet confidence he did in averaging 23.9 points in the final nine games of his junior season with the Mountaineers.

The No. 8 pick in June's draft, Alexander has played in 27 of the team's 37 games and averages just 4.1 points and 1.9 rebounds in 11.7 minutes. Yet, when the NBA picked three rookies to vie for the fourth spot in the dunk contest, the Bucks won the right to promote Alexander against Oklahoma City's Russell Westbrook and Portland's Rudy Fernandez.

"I'm not surprised," Alexander said in a phone interview this week. "Everyone was touting me as the most athletic player in the draft, so it's only natural they'd want to throw me in the dunk contest. I think by now everyone's seen what I can do."

One of the great unknowns involved with drafting Alexander was in marketing a player who was relatively unknown before erupting late last season for WVU. There was intrigue with his background and upbringing abroad, the fact he speaks fluent Mandarin and his obvious blend of athletic and leaping ability.

Yet Alexander's personality can be a task to tap into because he's so intelligent and sarcastic and deadpans almost everything, which can sometimes overshadow the fact he's really funny and entertaining.

A series of witty promotional videos produced by the Bucks have done the trick and the Website www.seejoedunk.com presents its candidate in the perfect manner.

"Whenever I'm dealing with the media, I know I'm not necessarily dealing with the media. I'm also dealing with the fans," he said. "I try not to be serious all the time and sometimes people miss that if they don't know me because I do have a kind of awkward sense of humor. Sometimes people don't understand I'm joking around or don't notice I'm not being serious."

"The guys with the Bucks who wrote the stuff wrote it for me knowing I didn't want to do some mainstream, corny, stupid, commercial stuff. They put together some really creative stuff I think fits my personality and sense of humor."

The campaign began with a mock press conference in which Alexander announced his candidacy and took questions from reporters, who were actually Alexander in disguise. In English and Mandarin, he vowed to not only win, but to amaze people.

"I wasn't lying about that," he said. "I do actually have dunks no one has ever seen before. Every one of my dunks won't be brand new, but I will be doing new things people haven't seen."

In one video, a teammate joins Alexander at a table and dips an Oreo cookie into a cup of milk. Unimpressed, Alexander takes an Oreo and slams it into the cup.

In another, a teammate at a fax machine is about to throw away a piece of paper. As he balls it up, Alexander swoops in, steals the paper and dunks it over the wall of a nearby cubicle.

To solidify his obsession with dunking, he's seen in another video taking an inkblot test and reciting the name of various dunks he sees -- East Bay Funk Dunk, Rootie Tootie Fresh and Fruity Dunk, Super Mega Slamalicious Dunk.

Any or all of those could be in his fully developed and rehearsed repertoire.

"My game plan is not to turn it into a circus," he said. "I never liked seeing people use props or anything weird. My goal is to only do things that are actually possible in a game. People can say what they want about how the contest has been tweaked through the years and how the rules affect this and that and how certain people get gypped, but when it comes down to it, it's about the best dunks and I think I have those."

He's had only rare opportunities to showcase them in a game this season, although he's hardly disappointed and dismisses any suggestion he left school too soon.

He's alone in Milwaukee with occasional visits from friends and family, but prefers it that way.

"It reminds me a lot of prep school (at Hargrave Military Academy), which is how this all began," he said. "I was just this kid at the bottom of the totem pole who went to a basketball camp and worked his way up."

He's made no major purchases with his multimillion-dollar salary and figures his most extravagant acquisitions have been to fit in with the NBA's strict dress code.

"I can't wear my WVU sweats anymore, which I'm kind of bummed out about," he said.

He deals with solitude by following the Mountaineers, but misses his former coaches and teammates. A brief relief comes tonight as Alexander welcomes them inside the Bradley Center as the Bucks play host to the New Jersey Nets.

"I just hope I get to play because it'd be a shame if they came to the game and didn't get to see me," he said. "But more than that, hopefully some of those guys see that the NBA is a possibility when they see me."

"I'm someone they played with, someone they know and they can see that it's real. Them coming to an NBA game and seeing me on the court, they'll know it's not some fantasy or fairy tale and they can really do this themselves if they want it bad enough."

No ordinary Joes

The Big East Conference has 50 players in the NBA, including former West Virginia star Joe Alexander. A look at the schools that produced those 50:

Players Schools

13 Connecticut

6 Syracuse

5 DePaul

4 Villanova

3 Georgetown, Marquette, Notre Dame

2 Cincinnati, Providence, Pitt, USF

1 Louisville, Rutgers, St. John's, Seton Hall, West Virginia

Contact sportswriter Mike Casazza at mikec@dailymail.com or (304) 319-1142.