It doesn’t seem like an exaggeration to call Michael Jordan to any item that is the largest in its category. Perhaps the legendary American basketball player, one of the best players in history – if not the best – is not very amused. Especially when a Minnesota farmer has seen fit to baptize one of his pumpkins like michael jordan.
However, the truth is that the Michael Jordan pumpkin has a well-deserved honor: be the largest pumpkin ever harvested or, at the very least, the largest pumpkin harvested for which there are records.
The creator in question is the farmer Travis Giengerwho submitted this huge pumpkin to the contest Half Moon Bay pumpkin weigh-off, an annual contest in the United States—where else—in which the largest pumpkins in the country and where Gienger is an old acquaintance, since to date he had won the award in three editions and in two of them he broke the world record.
What Gienger didn’t count on was breaking the record for the heaviest pumpkin in the world, something he has achieved with this Michael Jordan that on the scale he has offered no less than 1,247 kilos —or 2,749 pounds, which is the most standardized weight measurement in the United States— and which by just over 21 kilos has surpassed the previous record.
The reason for the name, as Gienger himself recognized sfgatea Californian news portal that reported on the contest, is evidence: “The pumpkin at first looked like a basketball and since it’s 2023, I thought I’d honor Jordan [que portaba el dorsal 23] with the pumpkin”.
We do not know if Michael Jordan—the one with flesh and blood, not the one with orange and pumpkin seeds—knows the news, but Gienger must certainly be delighted with a success that, in addition, brings him no less than 30,000 dollars for having won the first prize in this contest that is now in its fifty-first edition and is held annually between two venues, one in California and the other in the state of Illinois.
Successes aside, the truth is that growing these monstrous pumpkins is not easy. In the same medium, Geinger assured that has invested $12,000 in care and fertilizers for ‘Michael Jordan’, of which he did not know its weight until the lifting of the pumpkin in the contest itself was made official.
Images and video | Half Moon Bay pumpkin weigh-off
In DAP | This is the Giant Pumpkin Fair in Sidamon, the town of Lérida where specimens weighing up to 1,500 kilos are gathered.