Closing Shot: Bounceback Season

Mason Gordon had a napkin and a dream.

“I was kind of haunted by this recurring dream of two athletes coming up in the frame and colliding in midair and then falling out of frame with their arms and legs akimbo,” he said. “It would always wake me up. The only way I could get it out of my head was to do it in real life.”

It was 1999 and Gordon, who would “drive around for hours so I could sneak in a couple more dunks” when he played pickup, was a fledgling producer hired by Mike Tollin, a director and executive producer of numerous sports-themed projects who has since directed the feature film “Radio” and served as executive producer of “The Last Dance.”

“His primary attribute was that he was a great basketball player and added value to my backyard 4-on-4 games,” said Tollin.    

One day, Gordon presented Tollin with an idea he’d sketched out on a napkin called SmashBall: essentially, basketball played with trampolines near the rim to allow for explosive dunks but married with the physicality of football. That idea would come to life as SlamBall, and became a brief TV phenomenon in the U.S. in the early 2000s.

SlamBall lasted for two years, 2002 and ’03, on SpikeTV and had a brief resurgence in the U.S. later that decade. It had been largely left to the pop culture dustbin of that decade, along with “TRL” and Nokia cellphones.

But in reality, the sport never fully went away. There was a season in China as recently as 2015, and Gordon always had hopes that it could be revived in the U.S. The pandemic delayed those plans, but it also helped spark renewed interest in the sport when a series of clips from the league went viral in a world suddenly starving for sports highlights. The hashtag #bringbackslamball started trending, ultimately driving over 200 million views on social media.

Gordon and Tollin bounced the idea off contacts in the capital markets and were met with immediate enthusiasm. In under 100 days, they were fully subscribed, closing an $11 million Series A round led by Roger Ehrenberg’s IA Sports Ventures and Eberg Capital. Among the sport’s investors are David Blitzer, Michael Rubin and Gary Vaynerchuck, former LAFC president Tom Penn and six-time NBA All-Star Blake Griffin.

Gordon announced the return of the league in August 2022. Last month, ESPN landed an exclusive two-year broadcast partnership, with the league’s official debut coming Friday at 7 p.m. ET and the playoffs and championship game next month. All games will be held at Cox Pavilion in Las Vegas. Gordon wouldn’t comment on sponsorship, but said the league is following a traditional model of filling categories.

Unlike in its inaugural form, SlamBall games will air live, a key step in transforming the product from its AOL-era past into a social-media-era success.

“People always accepted SlamBall as a real sport, which it was, and a real league, which it wasn’t,” said Gordon, who serves as the league’s CEO. “It was a TV show. The idea that we would now be able to give people SlamBall the package they expected it to be, which is a real sport and a real league, is a gigantic opportunity for us.”

SlamBall’s 30-minute games will create untold highlights and, perhaps, unlimited opportunity.

“Live sports is the last remaining water cooler,” said Tollin. “We like to say our seven seconds is better than yours. This really is a dream come true.”