Let me start this off by making one thing clear: I am a millennial.
As a millennial, I’m very confident in saying this. There’s a specific bag that we all love to dive deeply into. That bag is filled with never-ending nostalgia.
There is nothing we love more than the good old days. when, well, life was simply easier. We didn’t have bills to pay or jobs to worry about. The news didn’t always seem bad and social media wasn’t a thing yet. The dopamine hit we get yesteryear pops up is truly undefeated.
Anything that can take us back to that time? We are pouncing on it. Immediately. Our lives are basically that one Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme.
There’s going to be a whole lot of that pointing come July 21 when SlamBall makes its return.
If you’re under the age of 25 years old, you’re probably asking “What is SlamBall?” right now. Don’t worry. I’ve got you covered. It’s the pseudo-sport turned real sport that captured the imaginations of pre-pubescent teens (like myself!) everywhere back in the early 2000s.
It’s so fascinating. It’s quite literally a mix between football, basketball and hockey. There are trampolines involved. There’s also a cage.
Here’s what that looked like.
A WEEK FROM TODAY, @SLAMBALL RETURNS pic.twitter.com/ADqrrq4qRH
— CTRL the Narrative (@ctrlnarrative) July 14, 2023
Yup. It’s completely ridiculous and over the top. And, yet, we all loved it so much. We still do. That’s why so many people have been clamoring for its return for years.
Now it’s actually coming back. SlamBall will be making its return on ESPN later this week on July 21.
For The Win sat down with SlamBall Founder Mason Gordon to talk about the return, what makes this time different than the last and why the time is right for the sport to blossom as a league on its own.
What follows is that conversation. Enjoy!
Thanks for speaking with us, Mason. How are you?
Great. I’m living the dream. SlamBall is something that I started in a warehouse on a court made out of spare parts 20 years ago and we’re just a few weeks away from relaunch on ESPN. I’m still kind of pinching myself. Relaunch day is not just going to be a sporting event — it’s a cultural event.
How'd you land on the concept of SlamBall back in the early 2000s?
I was really inspired by the UFC. The UFC blew my mind as a kid. The concept that they could take all these pugilistic styles and mix them together into something new and fresh and fun. I was a team sports guy. So I wanted to know if you could take the best elements of basketball, the best elements of football and hockey and mix them all together.
But the secret sauce was that I played video games. I played NBA Jam and NFL Blitz. Those were two over-the-top sports. Bodies would go flying all around and bodies would hit each other super hard because it was a video game.
So I wanted to know if I could create an environment that had all of those elements and that video game aesthetic. And that’s where the idea of the SlamBall court came from.
You've said in other interviews that you think the market is ripe for SlamBall. Why is this the right time?
The alternative sports market is red hot because young people are looking for sports to call their own. I think that’s really clear. People aren’t watching two-and-a-half and three-hour games anymore. They want something more bite-sized. SlamBall games are TV half-hours. Younger people are just watching highlights and are missing that feeling of what’s going to happen next.
SlamBall is a social contract that “I know something amazing is going to happen,” so you stick with it. And you’re willing to watch a television half hour for it. Our format is really clever and it pulls you through a two-hour block of television giving you a story with a beginning, middle and an end. We think we may have bulls-eyed the timing here.
Looking back, SlamBall did feel a bit ahead of its time back in the day in its bite-sized nature. Did you think about that back then?
Oh, when I rolled this out, you would’ve hated me. You would’ve hated 25-year-old me.
I thought “Oh, this is going to be great and it’s going to take over the world,” and all of that stuff. We definitely made a gigantic impact. We inspired a ton of development and pioneered a bunch of stuff as far as cameras and coverage.
But at the time, we were definitely a bit ahead of where the culture was. But I think that’s why people love it so much. We’re not running into people today who don’t just like SlamBall, we’re running into people with a deep, abiding love for SlamBall. It trips me out. But it’s the best.
What’s the biggest difference between starting today and when you started back in the early 2000s?
It’s the level of sophistication and the level of strategy. People think SlamBall went away, but for me, it never went away. I went all around the world with it. We’ve taken it around Asia, we’ve done arena tours in China and in Europe.
Training camp in China #Slamball #throwback #training pic.twitter.com/n0KjAjMJ4i
— SlamBall (@SlamBall) August 8, 2016
So what’s changed is the sophistication of the strategies. But, also, the technical level of the athletes. We’ve got the best athletes that we’ve ever had in the SlamBall program. These athletes are tremendous and there’s probably more variety going on than in the early days of SlamBall where guys were just banging into the stopper. Now you’ve got a more strategic mix.
Do you all have any plans to connect with the NBA or NFL in any of these? In terms of the talent pipeline?
I think it’s separate. The UFC built a vertical adjacent to boxing. In boxing the demographics were getting older and older. So they created something that was in the Venn diagram of the fight game, but was separate and distinct.
We think we’re adjacent to basketball and football without being a derivative product of either one. If the sports landscape is real estate, then it’s location, location, location. We’re positioned adjacent in between basketball and football season in a perfect position to pull from both fanbases when basketball and football aren’t on offer.
You don’t have to squint hard to look and see what the market opportunities for scale are.
I’m curious where you think this can go 5, 10 years from now. What do you think SlamBall will look like then? Do you even have a vision for it?
Well, we’re laser-focused on this relaunch right now. That’s because, a few years ago, the hashtag #BringBackSlamBall movement started completely on its own. I didn’t post anything. Jayson Tatum posted. Overtime Elite. Barstool Sports. ESPN. These were the people driving the movement.
Lol this Lowkey fire https://t.co/esZBQUyIXn
— Jayson Tatum (@jaytatum0) April 29, 2021
We’re giving the people want they want. People engaged with SlamBall back then as a real sport, which it was, and a real league, which it was not. It was a television show. And we’d get all the teams together and play the games. Three months later we’d release them. That’s no way to build a real sport.
All this time later to be able to do this exactly how we viewed this from the start? That’s an incredible arc of perseverance.
