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Hakeem Olajuwon once ate more than 100 chicken nuggets

The best Rockets player ever also had some other skills that you may not have known about.

By Darren Yuvan
Brad Barket/Getty Images

There was a cool tidbit on the greatest Rocket of all-time in Dime Magazine of Uproxx this past weekend. Apparently, Hakeem Olajuwon once ate more than 100 chicken nuggets as part of a commercial shoot he did for McDonald's early in his career.

According to Dime:

"Olajuwon was filming a McDonald's commercial, wherein the premise required him to slam dunk Chicken McNuggets into this mouth. For unknown reasons, it took a while to get the commercial exactly right, leading to a taping that took five hours and over 100 takes. Most people would dunk the McNugget into their mouth and then spit it out. Not Olajuwon, who ate every single McNugget he popped into his mouth. "

Apparently, the producers, cognizant of a professional athlete's dietary and nutritional demands, offered to replace the nuggets with something a little less appetizing, but The Dream refused, saying, "I like these things. Let's keep them coming."

While the 100 nuggets is impressive, keep in mind this was over a five-hour period, so there's a long way to go before Olajuwon could compete with the real competitive eaters. The current nugget record is 80 in five minutes, by Sonja "The Black Widow" Thomas, while Matt Stonie and model (yes, model!) Nela Zisser both once ate 120 nuggets in 14 and 16 minutes, respectively.

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