In addition to Gordon, one constant is Mike Tollin, the longtime producer (with projects including The Last Dance, One Tree Hill, Varsity Blues, and, yes, Coach Carter) who helped actually get this thing on the air in the first place. “He’s a real deal, top of the food chain storyteller and producer,” Gordon, who worked for Tollin’s production company in the late-90s, gushed. “I brought him the idea, stood on his couch, and said [arms flailing wildly above his head] ‘The whole league’s going to be played up here. Everyone’s going to jump like Vince Carter! Can you see it, Mike?’”
He saw it, alright, and the two joined forces to create something that really resonated with a large audience. The original version was a hand-in-glove fit for Spike TV, both because of the network’s dudes-first ethos and the public’s hesitancy to view spring-loaded basketball as a real sport. Actually, SlamBall debuted so long ago that Spike TV was still called The National Network. “Deep into the cable stack, man,” Gordon marveled.
Those early days were set in a warehouse in East Los Angeles, one of the only spaces large and vacant enough to house an idea as big as SlamBall. Of course, it also looked insane, and the locals took notice, wandering in off the street to watch scrimmages, and eventually creating bootleg merch. The first SlamBall television deal was signed in that very warehouse, before they had even finalized the rules.
The origins of SlamBall seem somewhat romantic now, but there was a real struggle to make it work. Gordon, who designed and built the court, had no background at all in either construction or engineering. There was a ton of trial and error—figuring out the right materials to make the court work, calculating how big the trampolines should be, and in one extreme example, making sure that nobody else would fall through the rickety floor. Still, the safety record is much cleaner than you might think. The injuries that they have encountered, Gordon said, are more in line with basketball than the traumatic ones that have soured so many people on football and hockey. There’s nothing he can do about the copycats trying to create Jackass-style SlamBall at home, though he’s certainly aware that it’s happening. To my surprise, none of those stories he’s heard have included compound fractures or trips to the emergency room. Perhaps they’re just leaving that part out.
“I have heard so many stories about people pulling their trampoline next to the basketball hoop,” Gordon said. “But it never correlated [to injuries], or at least I never heard about it. The sea change was really the development of these trampoline family fun centers. You have multiple generations that have now grown up on trampolines, and more importantly, parents who are comfortable with their kids on trampolines. You go to an eight-year-old’s birthday party and everyone is jumping around on trampolines. There’s been a mainstream-ification of that.”
Matthew Roberson
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