We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

Carmelo Anthony officially retired from the NBA in May 2023, after racking up 28,289 points, making six All-NBA teams and winning three Olympic Gold medals. While he spent his last few seasons barnstorming around the League, he’ll be remembered for his tenures with the Nuggets and Knicks, where he headlined some great teams that were eventually dispatched by greater competition. But I think as time goes on, we will remember Melo for more than just basketball.

Melo was in the same 2003 NBA Draft class as LeBron James, which would put most players in danger of being overshadowed. But he shined his own light and carved his own path, which took serious work on and off the court. On the morning of the 2003 Draft, I sat down to breakfast with Carmelo, right there in the lobby of the Westin Hotel in Times Square where the NBA housed the players. His agents wanted us to meet in advance of Melo taking over the SLAM Rookie Diary, which I would help him write each month. We shared an awkward meal together, Melo just weeks removed from winning the NCAA Tournament with Syracuse, and just hours away from the biggest moment of his life. I mostly just tried to stay out of his way that day. 

But we were in constant contact throughout his rookie year—shout out tmail, IYKYK—and it was remarkable to see Melo gain confidence and start to grow into himself. He matured, became a father, had his own line of Jordans, and was starting to dabble in documentary production. At the time, you’ll remember, there was no real blueprint for an athlete looking to diversify their off-court interests. Michael Jordan was still building out Jordan Brand and yet to purchase the Hornets, and Carmelo and LeBron were feeling out similar lines of inquiry regarding what their business futures might look like. 

In the summer of 2008, we reached out to Carmelo because it was time to put him on the cover of SLAM, his fourth cover since the 2003 Draft. Melo was entering his sixth season, having averaged 24.4 ppg over those first five campaigns (all winning seasons), including two All-Star appearances. Still, it was tough for the Nuggets to break through—things were so stacked that the 2007-08 Nuggets won 50 games and still finished eighth in the Western Conference. 

Down to give us time for a cover shoot, Melo wanted to pitch us an idea: He wanted to be on the cover seated in a director’s chair. Nope, I quickly responded. Because if there was one thing the great Dennis Page taught all of us at SLAM, it was how to make a dope magazine cover. It was hard enough to do something compelling in that rectangular shape, and having someone sitting down really limited your options from a design standpoint. But Melo had legitimately thought it out. His life was changing. He felt like he was in control. He wanted to use one story to tell another story, and how better than by using a photo with him in a director’s chair? 

A compromise was reached. We would get a director’s chair and take pictures with Carmelo in it, but for the cover image, we’d use whatever worked best. As it turned out, the director’s chair worked best, turning into one of the more memorable SLAM covers of all time. 

We talked that day about his growth, and Melo noted, “It took me a while to figure out that I had everything in my own hands. It was hard to fathom that I went from a row house project building to a penthouse. It’s still hard to fathom that.”

Melo’s basketball story may have come to a graceful end, but he’s clearly not finished. He guest-edited SLAM’s Social Justice issue in 2020, addressing head-on many of the social issues in America then and now. The last few years, he’s done everything from owning a soccer team to acting on TV and in movies to launching a podcast to being profiled in Ad Week. And it don’t stop. 

People often ask me who my favorite NBA players are, and the truth is, I don’t have favorite players so much as I have favorite people. While Carmelo Anthony will go down as a Hall of Fame basketball player, maybe the better story is how he’s also grown into a Hall of Fame person. 

Photo via Getty Images.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Carmelo Anthony appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

The post SLAM Presents: 30 Players Who Defined SLAM’s 30 Years appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

It’s kind of crazy to look back and realize that Darius Miles and Quentin Richardson played just two seasons together. The Clippers drafted them 15 picks apart in 2000—Darius third, Q 18th—and split them up in the summer of 2002 when Darius was dealt (along with Harold Jamison) to the Cleveland Cavaliers for Andre Miller and Bryant Stith. In those two seasons, the Clippers won 70 combined games and did not make the playoffs. Miles started 27 games, Richardson 28. From a basketball standpoint, it was barely a ripple—the anticipated Clippers revival (or perhaps vival, wasn’t no “re” about it) never really transpired, at least not until the rise of Lob City. But you can’t just measure impact by Ws and Ls or points or any of that.

As they tell it, Darius and Q were on their way to being AND1 guys when Michael Jordan himself made sure they joined Jordan Brand. Jump, men. They got all sorts of rare retro PEs, head-tapped their way into the public consciousness back when Melo was still hoopin’ at Towson Catholic, landed a well-deserved KICKS cover. They were an unlikely pairing who meshed in unlikely ways; Miles a willowy 6-9 rim runner who ate up the court with huge strides, Richardson a solid 6-6 with a seemingly bottomless post-up bag and three-point range.

It’s kind of crazy to look back and realize that Darius Miles and Quentin Richardson played just two seasons together. The Clippers drafted them 15 picks apart in 2000—Darius third, Q 18th—and split them up in the summer of 2002 when Darius was dealt (along with Harold Jamison) to the Cleveland Cavaliers for Andre Miller and Bryant Stith. In those two seasons, the Clippers won 70 combined games and did not make the playoffs. Miles started 27 games, Richardson 28. From a basketball standpoint, it was barely a ripple—the anticipated Clippers revival (or perhaps vival, wasn’t no “re” about it) never really transpired, at least not until the rise of Lob City. But you can’t just measure impact by Ws and Ls or points or any of that.

Miles was the one with the superstar vibe, the one who ended up on the “Roc L.A. Familia” SLAM cover alongside Lamar Odom and Elton Brand, all wearing each other’s jerseys. Elton was far from alone in rocking an oversized Miles 21 jersey, wasn’t even the only one to wear it backward. Miles had Iverson’s vibe and Pippen’s game, a long, lanky stat-sheet filler who on his best nights looked like he could very well fulfill the promise that led to Sports Illustrated putting him on their cover with Kevin Garnett peeking out from behind.

Want a wild stat? The Clippers weren’t very good, only had four nationally televised games in Darius’ and Q’s two seasons—one in their first season, three in their second—but the Clippers went 4-0 in those games, including a win over the Shaq and Kobe two-time defending champion Lakers in January 2002. In their final national TV game, against the Mavs a week later, they both played 30-plus minutes off the bench, both scored 15 points, both filled every box-score box—hit a three, had at least one rebound, assist, steal and block.

Their Clippers promise went mostly unfulfilled—which perhaps should not have come as a surprise given a young team in the Donald Sterling days. A rose might grow from concrete, but it is not a common occurrence. As for expectations, those are ours, something separate from the careers that actually play out. So after the summer of 2002, Darius and Q wound up journeymen on their own journeys: Darius with injury-plagued years in Cleveland, Portland and Memphis; Q breaking the Suns single-season three-point record in Phoenix before playing in New York (twice), Miami and Orlando. Darius played his last game at 27, Q at 33; both of their final seasons mere epilogues.

But their stories didn’t end, their journeys weren’t over. And a full decade-plus after their final games, they’d reunite—on a podcast this time—as the Knuckleheads, both giving flowers to former teammates and opponents as well as receiving their own. They’re both active on social media, often in SLAM’s IG comments showing love to both active and retired hoopers. Maybe Darius and Q were never All-Stars and never won championships, but they found one another, they bent basketball culture in their direction, and honestly? That’s more than enough. 

Photo via Getty Images.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Darius Miles and Quentin Richardson appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

Paige Bueckers’ name is synonymous with greatness. 

Gatorade Player of the Year, AP Player of the Year, USBWA Player of the Year, Naismith Trophy winner, Wooden Award winner, Best Female College Athlete ESPY Award winner—the list could fill this entire page. 

Her name is one that the world has become well accustomed to hearing, from her ninth grade phenom days all the way through to the Madness of March. 

SLAM has been a part of Bueckers’ journey since the summer before her senior year, when SLAM high school videographers and photographers would pull up to her AAU tournaments and be amazed by what they were witnessing. It continued in the fall of her senior year, when the Minnesota phenom got her first feature in our iconic pages.

Not long after that, we got to see who Paige was not only as a hooper but as a person, through WSLAM’s first season of “All Eyes On Us”—a digital video series that follows a high school team through a full season—where Bueckers and the Hopkins Royals were on a mission to bring home the program’s first-ever national title. Through that series, the world got to see what our staff saw every time we sat to speak with her for an interview: a superstar. 

She was a hooper with no fear of going for tough buckets who had ruthless handles that dropped defenders almost every game and a passing style so smooth that her coaches compared her to Magic Johnson.

But also, a person with an aura so special that she lifted up everyone around her, both on and off the court. We were with her when she copped a pair of Jordan XI Breds (a “must have” for sneakerheads, as she put it), and we were there when she jokingly messed with her teammates on the bus to away games.

Then the pandemic shut the world down just as Paige and her teammates were in the locker room preparing for their state championship game, and we witnessed the heartbreak of a potential historic season cut short. In the “All Eyes On Us” season 1 finale, Bueckers was raw and emotional about what that season meant to her and her teammates. 

As Paige made history in Minnesota that season, she made history for SLAM, too, becoming the first high school girl to be featured on our cover (SLAM 226). It feels like I was in that gym just yesterday, watching the future superstar step onto the set wearing “Pinnacle” Air Jordan VIs. That day, everyone knew they were in the presence of greatness.

Her freshman year at UConn put the world on notice once again, when she won just about every award possible in NCAA women’s hoops, all while trying to recruit her best friend and the top prospect in the class of 2021, Azzi Fudd. Once Azzi locked in her commitment, we linked up with the backcourt duo and shot another historic cover, for SLAM 235, the “New World Issue,” a themed issue about the way the hoops world was changing in real time.

While Bueckers has cemented herself in history with all she’s achieved at the NCAA level, her story is just beginning. Paige is a competitor at heart, and in what could be her final season in Storrs, she has her sights set on bringing home a national championship. Bueckers will be eligible for the WNBA draft this spring, and whether she decides to go this year or use her last year of college eligibility, she’ll sooner or later become the future of the W. 

Paige has meant so much to SLAM because of what we’ve built together over the years. From iconic covers to months of capturing her final season in high school, Paige is a legend in the SLAM halls—and I mean that quite literally. Her cover photo takes up a full wall inside SLAM HQ. She was the start of SLAM’s expansion into girls grassroots basketball, and we’ve gotten to witness her journey from the start. Whether this year or next, Paige will hear her name called at the WNBA Draft, and as she walks across that stage, you better believe we’ll already be cooking up an exciting way to document the next chapter of her journey. 

Photo by Johnnie Izquierdo.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Paige Bueckers  appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

An argument could be made that 2019 was an important peak in high school basketball. Hear us out for a bit. While 2017 and 2018 saw LaMelo Ball and Zion Williamson bring new levels of eyeballs into the high school hoops space, it led to newfound momentum and interest in 2019. And although this new group of kids may have not garnered the same type of attention that LaMelo and Zion did individually, as a whole—collectively—they were rock stars, too. More specifically: Jalen Green, Josh Christopher and Sharife Cooper. 

They checked all the boxes on and off the court—each one had the perfect combo of skills and flair that drew large crowds in person and made for some very fun highlight mixes online. And then, off the court, they also happened to be the cool kids of their class: swaggy and fashion-forward, they knew how to utilize social media (and build an audience) impeccably and were top-tier pros when it came to on-camera interviews.

Jalen, out of Fresno, CA, was a top-three prospect in the class. His speed, explosiveness and hangtime made him an automatic fan favorite. Then you had Josh, also from Cali, but residing in Los Angeles. His family was no stranger to the sport, with his brother Patrick having logged some minutes in the NBA with the Utah Jazz, as well as in Summer League, the G League (D-League at the time) and overseas.  

And then there was Sharife. While Jalen and Josh were shooting guards, Sharife was a pure point guard. And although he was smaller in stature, his confidence and swagger were on the very same level as theirs, or anyone else’s, for that matter. He hooped out of Atlanta and shared the court at McEachern HS with now-Cavs forward Isaac Okoro. Like Josh, he also came from a family of athletes; his sister, Te’a, hooped collegiately before joining the L.A. Sparks in the WNBA.  

All roads led to a mid-August weekend in NYC, when all three arrived in the Big Apple to partake in the SLAM Summer Classic Vol. 2—where the shoot for the iconic trio’s cover came to life. It’s one of those things where you look back and notice that all aspects of the aesthetics were spot on: the seamless backdrop color, their uniform colorways, their poses, their sneakers, their facial expressions. The most impressive part is that it took little art direction from our end to get them to execute the cover shot or any other flicks. We just put them in front of the camera and let them do their thing.

That’s what makes this trio so unique: it was all effortless. They understood media—both social media and traditional media. They understood branding. Despite their young ages, they had an impressive understanding of the game, on and off the court. And the hoops community took notice. This part isn’t subjective. It’s quantifiable. If you look at the view counts and engagement for video posts focused on this trio back in 2019, the numbers are as high as anyone we’ve ever covered.  

Speaking of coverage, another reason Jalen, Josh and Sharife hold such a strong presence in SLAM’s heart is that their rise came at a time when we were making a big push in the high school media space. Yes, SLAM had always covered HS hoops in some capacity—check our digital archive for LeBron’s HS shoots, our print HS Diary column, our beloved PUNKS section, and early in-depth coverage of the Ball brothers and Zion Williamson, among many others. But there hadn’t been a dedicated HS team internally focused on the space until then. By 2019, we had shooters attending HS games across the country on a nightly basis and dedicated social pages across Twitter, Instagram and YouTube that exclusively served HS hoops, and no one in the industry was churning out “Day in the Life” episodes with the top recruits in the country as consistently as we were. So, while we certainly helped raise the profiles of the trio at the time with our coverage, they also helped raise our profile in the HS space by allowing us in and trusting us to tell their stories.

And if we needed another reason to have Jalen, Josh and Sharife up in our rafters, they were also members of the inaugural SLAM Summer Classic Vol. 1 in 2018, and all three returned the following year for Vol. 2—a game and postgame celebration that our audience still talks about to this day. You don’t believe us when we say they were rock stars? Just check out the video online of kids running through the streets of New York City following the players’ bus after the game. For many blocks. 

Today, all three are still pushing hard on their NBA dreams—Jalen is playing a major role with the Houston Rockets (where he coincidently hooped with Josh for two seasons), while Josh and Sharife are still solidifying their places in the L. 

One thing is for certain, though: All three are legends in SLAM’s history.

All portraits by Jon Lopez.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Josh Christopher, Sharife Cooper and Jalen Green appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

The process for “discovering” a high school basketball player changed a lot in the social media era.

To set some context: it used to be way different. In the ’80s, ’90s, even early ’00s, you’d read about an up-and-coming player in a newspaper or a magazine, then catch glimpses of them on television if somehow possible (though likely not until they hit the college ranks). You mostly saw very little—a small article here or there with a short text description and a photo; in some extreme examples, some decent footage on a sports highlight television show; and in some super-extreme examples, a magazine cover, the ultimate stamp.

Then came the internet, then Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all that. Pretty soon everyone had a camera in their hands 24/7, which meant that when a high school basketball player did something amazing, it immediately hit the internet, and if it was really amazing, it immediately went viral.

In 2017, Zion Williamson went viral damn near every other day. He was a junior forward out of South Carolina with a combo of flight—he could soar up to eye-level with the rim and just sort of hang out there for a few seconds—and power—he was built like a linebacker and dunked with such ferocity it shook the gym and caused a frenzy amongst the kids in the stands—that made every one of his dunk clips, which flew around social media at light speed, a must-watch.

At the time, the world had started to move with such tempo that on Zion’s game nights, those highlights were viral by the time he woke up the next morning. So where did that put SLAM, a publication with a history of “introducing” players like Zion to the world?

It was a question I thought about a lot at the time. I had become Editor-in-Chief the year before, a role I earned in part because of my ability to help SLAM compete in the hyperspeed media universe. And though the answer would continue to change (and still changes often to this day), at the time it was simple: we’re going to put him on the cover and we’re going to tell his story properly, show people the real Zion. 

SLAM 210 was Zion’s first magazine cover shoot. By the time the cover dropped, everyone knew his name (from Instagram), but this was the first time the audience actually heard from him directly. We had an interview with a “longform” video (like, three minutes) and a slew of beautiful, crispy photographs, which I half-joked at the time were the first look anyone got of Zion’s face outside of blurry camera phone footage.

That content was the result of a day spent with Zion and his family in Spartanburg, SC, where they’re from. There’s a mural in the middle of the city that says “THERE’S ONLY ONE SPARTANBURG,” and Zion’s stepfather bolted a basketball hoop to the middle of the mural for our photos. The images of Zion would become iconic in a different way than, say, a 2001 magazine cover would’ve, but in their own new-age way. Months later, when every college fan base was photoshopping Zion in their favorite team’s jersey, they meme’d our cover photo almost exclusively. Two years later, when Zion was drafted and signed with Jordan Brand, the company bought the rights and used that same photo—funny because of the many adidas logos they had to scrub and replace to make that work. The photo looked great, though, and was still the best visual representation of Z more than two years after the initial shoot.

We continued to cover Zion extensively following that shoot. His season at Duke was a blast, and we shot a great cover with him for SLAM 222—The Future Issue—right before he was drafted in 2019 to the New Orleans Pelicans. He teamed up with SLAM favorite Lonzo Ball, so we shot another cover, a group shot that also included Brandon Ingram and Jrue Holiday. Fast forward to summer 2020, post-Covid explosion but pre-Bubble, we rented an Airbnb-turned studio, masked up and shot a cool cover with Z to hype up the forthcoming return of the NBA. A few years later, in early 2023, we celebrated the then-surging Pelicans with a Pen & Pixel-style cover featuring Zion, Ingram and CJ McCollum. And then last summer he got another front page, posing on KICKS 26 alongside fellow Jordan Brand endorsees Jayson Tatum and Luka Doncic.

As I’m typing this, Zion Williamson is just 23 years old, and though it seems like he’s been around the scene forever, his career is really still in its early chapters. He didn’t rocket to immediate NBA dominance, but some of the chatter about him not performing is just nonsense; he’s a two-time All-Star who’s averaged over 25 points and 6 boards per game while maintaining a 60 percent (!) field goal percentage. It’s already been incredibly impressive, and again—he’s 23! 

There’s an anecdote in my cover story from 2017 that explains what it was like to watch Zion work out in an empty gym, how it felt like each dunk literally shook the room, the sound of the ball smashing through the hoop reverberating off the walls. That intense, seemingly out-of-nowhere, shake-the-room energy—if a sound could be a mission statement, in that moment, Zion produced SLAM’s. Bold, powerful, striking…for us, it was a North Star in the form of a sound wave. We chase that feeling with our content—our covers, our videos, our photos, our stories—every day, and that shoot crystallized it for me. Plus, it helped me figure out what SLAM’s place in the lightning-fast media landscape should be. It looks different than it used to, but we still stand head and shoulders above the competition because of our elite storytelling and the credibility that a SLAM co-sign provides. 

So yeah—we’re Team Zion. Forever. 

Portrait by Zach Wolfe. Photo via Getty Images.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Zion Williamson appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

The entirety of 2017 belonged to the Ball family. No one came anywhere close in the basketball universe when it came to media coverage and fanfare. And similarly, no media company came anywhere close to the access and trust with the family that SLAM received, and the result was a whole lot of incredible content.   

When the fam decided they wanted to take an unconventional route and challenge the status quo, it was SLAM they called to exclusively break each of their historic announcements—from launching their own signature sneakers to a first-of-its-kind semi-pro league. And while those happened in 2017 and 2018, it was technically in 2016 when SLAM and the Ball family first embarked on the wild ride. 

In the spring of 2016, right after Chino Hills High School (led by senior Lonzo Ball, junior LiAngelo Ball and freshman LaMelo Ball) went undefeated with a 35-0 record and was ranked No. 1 in the country, we took a cross-country trip to sunny California to produce the family’s first major magazine shoot. We did some stills at the school in their high school uniforms and then some stills at their home in…Big Baller Brand merch. This was almost a full year before BBB would become a hot topic of discussion. A little sprinkle of foreshadowing.  

A few months later, we reconnected for a fun YouTube video titled “Christmas Day with the Ball Family.” It was the reality show before the reality show, essentially, and helped demonstrate the fun but competitive personalities of not only the brothers but also their parents, Tina and LaVar. It’s amassed close to 13.5 million views on YouTube alone, making it SLAM’s most watched original content video of all time; and, FWIW, it has significantly more views than any standalone original piece from many of our competitors. 

And then came spring of 2017, when Lonzo, the most talked-about prospect in that year’s NBA draft, announced with SLAM exclusively that he was going to keep it in the family, turning down a traditional sneaker endorsement deal to launch his own signature sneaker with BBB. The momentous announcement went viral, of course, easily the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter that day, and the first of many announcements that SLAM helped break with the family. 

A couple of months later, just 48 hours after the 2017 NBA Draft, we did our first cover shoot with the brothers at their home: Zo wearing his new Lakers uniform, Gelo donning the UCLA colors and Melo with the Chino Hills threads. LaVar guest-wrote the cover story. WATTBA.

And then, two months later, we returned to Chino Hills to shoot another announcement. This time, LaMelo was becoming the first HS player ever to launch his own signature sneaker at just 16 years old. The video and photos (including Melo’s famous Lamborghini) from the shoot are forever etched in hoops history.

The following year, LaVar decided to launch his own professional league for HS players, the Junior Basketball Association, a historic endeavor that paid HS kids to hoop around the US and embark on a tour throughout Europe. LaMelo and LiAngelo both joined, and just like the other Ball family announcements that SLAM broke, it did numbers, as every sports talk show joined in on the conversation. In collaboration with the family, we also announced LaMelo’s decision to return to HS in the US later that year, when he joined SPIRE Academy in Ohio. 

All those exclusive videos and announcements aside, we’ve shot multiple other covers as well—LaMelo has given us time for two solo covers in the past four years. And we’ve also done some cool merch collabs with LaMelo’s LaFrancé brand over the past year.  

SLAM’s unique relationship with the Ball family has grown and evolved continuously, just like the family members’ individual careers. In many ways, our journey together seems like a fitting pairing. We both value family, loyalty and the fearlessness to do things in your own unique way.  

An argument could be made that many of those historic announcements helped pave the way for today’s HS landscape, which gives power to student-athletes like never before. For one, the family deciding to launch their own brand and profit off their name, image and likeness (NIL)—even though it risked LaMelo’s (and Lonzo’s) eligibility to play in college—helped drive the conversation around kids being allowed to make money without losing college eligibility. Today, thanks to new NIL policies, high school kids are allowed to do the same things that cost LaMelo the opportunity to play college ball. Similarly, LaVar’s JBA league drove conversation around the need for HS kids to have  alternative options to the traditional high school basketball experience, and lo and behold, there are now numerous leagues that offer to pay high school players.

The Ball family’s revolutionary journey has led to plenty of conversation and even planted seeds for new opportunities that weren’t there for HS kids at the time. SLAM is just glad to have played a small part in all of it. 

Portrait by Atiba Jefferson.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: The Ball Brothers appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

When A’ja Wilson appeared alongside then-Las Vegas Aces teammate Liz Cambage on the cover of SLAM 223, they became the third and fourth women to ever do so. That was back in July 2019. Wilson was in her second year in the W after being selected as the No. 1 pick in 2018, and had already added WNBA Rookie of the Year and All-Rookie First Team honors to her professional basketball résumé. But A’ja had yet to emerge into her full MVP form. The Gamecocks had yet to name the statue in her honor. The WNBA had yet to make her the face of the League. 

As for us, well, not to brag or anything, but we always knew that the Columbia, SC, native was it. Way back in 2014, Ryan Jones interviewed her over the phone for a piece that ran in PUNKS (our high school section, now called The Come Up). At the time, Wilson hadn’t yet graduated from Heathwood Hall Episcopal School, and she admitted in her interview that she was “nervous” leading up to the USA Basketball U18 national team tryouts. The interview, which is featured in the SLAM Digital Archive (go subscribe via slamgoods.com!) is a must-read for any and all basketball fans because it shows, in its truest form, the story of a star before even she knew she’d become one. 

“I can say definitely the two things that stick out from the interview are just her poise and her confidence,” Jones told me. “You’ve interviewed enough of the HS kids so you know how it is—some of them really come off like the kids they still are, but a relative few have this maturity that gets your attention. A’ja definitely had that. And the confidence, too—she wasn’t cocky, but just very self-assured. Especially now as a parent of teens myself, I’m always so impressed when anyone has that sort of confidence at 17 or 18.”

Wilson’s decision to attend South Carolina was then a bold move for a top recruit, but Dawn Staley’s program, in A’ja’s own words, was “on the rise,” and Wilson, like her teammates, had the goal of winning a national championship. She’d do that and a lot more during her college career. First, SEC Freshman of the Year. She’d become an NCAA champion and the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player in 2017, plus the consensus National Player of the Year and the Lisa Leslie Award winner the season after. Oh, and she was a First Team All-American and the SEC Player of the Year from 2016-18, and the conference’s Defensive Player of the Year in 2016 and 2018. That’s all before she made it to the League and graced the cover of SLAM not once, but on three different occasions—including the WNBA champs issue two years in a row—and last year’s third issue of WSLAM. 

When I sat down with Wilson and her Aces teammates at the WSLAM 3 cover shoot, she exuded poise. She was unapologetically herself both in front of the camera and off it. It’s that confidence that’s driven her to take over the League and become a two-time MVP and two-time champion. 

Our 2023 Champs cover of Wilson rocking black Air Force 1s and standing so valiantly is the epitome of what makes women’s basketball so exciting and so damn fun. She’s the face of the League, of WSLAM, of where the game is heading in the years to come. And just as we’ve shown her love over the years, she’s shown it right back, from attending our 2023 WNBA All-Star party which celebrated the WSLAM 3 cover release to consistently reposting our content. Relationships like these are bigger than magazine covers and interviews, but we’re so grateful that we get to do what we do with stars like her. 

“Watching her in the [almost] decade since [the PUNKS interview], she’s definitely one of those players I look back on with a little bit of pride, not that I predicted HOF-caliber greatness, but just that from talking to her at that age, I expected her to be really, really good,” Jones says. “It’s been very cool to see her basically be the whole package, as far as one of the handful of players with both the game and personality to basically carry the W into the next generation.” 

Photo via Getty Images.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: A’ja Wilson appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

On June 12, 2015, we found ourselves walking the streets of downtown St. Louis with 17-year-old Jayson Tatum. At the time, though he was a five-star recruit who would soon commit to Duke, we were able to freely roam the streets without Jayson being bombarded by fans. Today, we wouldn’t be able to redo that shoot so seamlessly. But that day perfectly encapsulates the long-ranging relationship that SLAM has built with many of today’s NBA superstars.

The shoot was longer than our usual high school shoot: Jayson was about to become our HS Diarist for the following academic year, meaning he’d have his own column in the magazine for the following 12 months, which meant we’d have to capture plenty of images in different outfits so that we’d have enough options for all of the coming issues.

Jayson was accompanied by his entire family that day: his mother Brandy, his father Justin, his grandmother, his high school girlfriend and other relatives. We walked around taking photos in different parts of downtown St. Louis in the beaming summer sun. Although he had a cool, calm and collected demeanor, you could tell he already knew he was a star in the making. Going into the shoot, we asked him to bring whatever streetwear outfits he thought best reflected his personality. He showed up with a custom St. Louis Cardinals jersey that had his name stitched on the back, which he rocked for a photo in front of the iconic Gateway Arch. The second outfit he brought? A full gray suit, with a white dress shirt and a patterned pink/red/orange/white tie. He really meant business from Day 1.  

Through his diary entries in the issues that followed, we got a glimpse of his competitive side. He wrote about looking forward to playing against his dad during the season (Tatum attended Chaminade and his dad was the head coach of their rival school, Christian Brothers), and kept track of their head-to-head record. We also learned the impact that his mother had on his life, and even some of the school projects he enjoyed working on the most, along with any extracurricular activities. 

Toward the end of his senior year, Tatum was part of our annual HS All-American team shoot, where he posed alongside De’Aaron Fox, Malik Monk, Harry Giles III and Josh Jackson in a conference room at a hotel in Midtown Manhattan. The SLAM All-American uniforms that year were sponsored by Jordan Brand and the shoot itself happened during Jordan Brand Classic week in NYC. Today, Tatum and Jordan have a very fruitful partnership. A full circle journey, indeed.

In the aftermath of his high school days, SLAM and Tatum have continued working together. In 2018, he appeared on his first solo SLAM cover, wearing a band-aid on his face in a nod to fellow St. Louis legend Nelly (the title of his HS feature—the spread where he’s wearing the aforementioned custom Cardinals jersey—was “Ride Wit Me,” a reference to Nelly’s hit single). In late 2022, he posed for his second solo cover. He’s also been a part of a couple of group covers. In 2023, he appeared on his first KICKS cover alongside fellow Jordan Brand athletes Zion Williamson and Luka Doncic. 

Point being, nine years later, Tatum and SLAM continue to collaborate on some top-tier shoots. He has not only played a major role in SLAM’s story and growth over the past decade—he’s also done the same for the game of basketball. Today, he’s one of the NBA’s biggest stars. A lethal scorer with a smooth flow to his game, he’s already been to four Conference Finals and got within two games of winning an NBA title in 2022. Off the court, he’s emerged as one of the most marketable figures in the game—you can always find him on TV, starring in commercials for Subway, Ruffles and Gatorade, among others. And, of course, he has his own signature sneaker with Jordan Brand—another TV spot to add to the list. He’s also become a model figure for fatherhood in the League—Jayson and his son, Deuce, are an elite duo in the hearts of all hoop fans and are frequently spotted together on the court and in the locker room after games. (And, for obvious reasons, we love when Deuce rocks his dad’s SLAM cover tee, which has happened a few times.)

Needless to say, as the headline of his high school story fittingly said, we’ve been riding wit’ JT for almost a decade, and we look forward to seeing all the destinations that lie ahead. 

Portrait by Chris Razoyk. Photo via Getty Images.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Jayson Tatum appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

Freshman year at Davidson had just concluded. Stephen Curry was still Dell’s son. Now, Dell is Stephen’s dad. But it took a minute for people to make the change. Right after his first year as a Wildcat, Stephen did a photo shoot and interview for SLAM 109. It was the issue that came out in July 2007. With just a little hint of a mustache, the young Curry looked up at our camera. His gray Davidson sweatsuit was loose on his 6-1 frame. 

“It’s a good honor to have Dell Curry as my dad and to have his name, but I’m trying to make a name for myself,” Stephen told SLAM. 

What was good with the basketballs that he effortlessly rifled into the hoop from long distance? Were they actually crystal balls? Were they seeing stones into the future? Because he did it. He made a name for himself.

Now the world knows Stephen Curry as the greatest shooter ever and one of the most iconic players in League history. We here at SLAM know him as the star of 11 covers. We know him as the participant in countless interviews with us. We know him as the voice printed in our stories and speaking in our videos. We know him as a generous partner, as somebody who has given us his time, even though he doesn’t have a ton of it to give. 

He spends most of that time breaking and then setting the record for most career three-pointers ever made. For real, though: That record gets broken and then re-set in every game he plays. Then he spends some of it winning championships. Then he spends some of it giving back to the community. Then he spends some of it as one of the very few people with their own sneaker company. And then, thankfully, he spends some of it with us. 

A good example of his time being spent with us is the cover of SLAM 219. Numero 30 was already three championships deep when he invited 150 children from around Oakland to join him on that cover. Other highlights from that day in 2018 include the fact that he debuted the Curry 6 with us, that he also wanted E-40, Andre Ward and the legendary Al Attles to be part of the shoot, and that he wore a pair of shorts reminiscent of the “We Believe” Warriors. It was a perfect day. Those kids got a memory they’ll never forget. Longtime SLAM photographer Atiba Jefferson got an image we’ll never forget. 

Throughout these last 16-plus years, we like to think we understand him. The world knows him fairly well, but we know a few different parts of him a little bit better. 

We know him to be a deeply passionate fan of good basketball; of setting screens, talking on defense and giving out high fives. We know him to be a scarily intense competitor. We know him to be romantic about the game. We know him to be a storyteller—his footwear has evolved into the equivalent of his life’s work. Different colorways continue to let him share what he finds meaningful without ever saying a word.

And when he does say words, he says things like this that further his romantic ideals about the game: 

“There is room in my mind and spirit for more imagination,” Curry told us in KICKS 25. “More self-expression, more moments where people see a different side of you because every year is so different. The challenges are different. It requires more of you, and that brings out the different reactions, different forms of self-expression and presence on the court. But the mystery of what that is and the unknown is what makes it so dope and so much fun. I have no idea what that’s gonna look like, but I’m going to keep living it. 

“You know, what happened this year and our journey to win a championship, all the accolades that I got, the night, night stuff, all that stuff I had no idea was going to be happening, but I fell in love with the journey and all that stuff takes care of itself. So now the challenge is to maintain that energy, maintain that perspective, go back to the drawing board and try to continue to be the best version of yourself. Because you’re never, ever complete.” 

Featured image via Getty. Portrait by Atiba Jefferson.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Stephen Curry appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

John Wall has graced the cover of SLAM as a high schooler, as a college player and as a pro. Oh, and he has a KICKS cover, too. Trying to think of someone else who can say that? There ain’t one. This issue is dedicated to the most influential SLAM guys ever. All-time players, fan favorites, real hoopers. But only John Wall can claim that. (Bragging rights for that fun fact may come on a bit of a technicality, since legends like LeBron and Kobe never played college ball, but still!)

An athletic freak able to finish with power or finesse with either hand, Wall has always been a blur—faster while dribbling a basketball than 90 percent of other players in a full sprint without one. In the prime of his career, Wall’s athleticism made him an All-NBA player, but his relentless confidence and never-back-down demeanor made him a fan favorite. At points, he called himself the best two-way point guard in the League and the best shot-blocking PG in history. At a time when Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson were still going strong, John declared himself and Bradley Beal the best backcourt in the NBA, too.

Part of what’s made Wall such a magnetic force in basketball culture since he was a teenager is that he wears his heart on his sleeve. Like when he jumped on the scorer’s table after beating the Celtics in a legendary Eastern Conference Semis Game 6, celebrating with the Wizards’ faithful. Or when he broke down crying in a postgame interview after the tragic passing of 6-year-old cancer patient Miyah, with whom he’d developed a strong bond. Or when he returned to DC years later in a Clippers uniform and proudly screamed out, “This is my city!” to the arena he called home for five All-Star seasons. Wall has always been unapologetically himself, from the very beginning.

And yet, the eventual No. 1 pick in the 2010 Draft was virtually unheard of outside of North Carolina when he started high school. But after killing local competition at Reebok camps everywhere from Chicago to Philly, we highlighted his play at the ’08 Elite 24 Game in SLAM 122.

And it must be mentioned: John Wall has the GOAT high school mixtape. With over 10 million views and counting, it is four minutes of utterly breathtaking basketball—no-look dimes, ankle-shattering fastbreak spin moves, ferocious finishes at the rim with both hands. No disrespect to the HS mixtapes of Brandon Jennings, Aquille Carr, Seventh Woods or Austin Rivers, but John’s is still the best ever. [Ed. Note: This is Abe’s opinion. We don’t have time to debate this here.] In the year 2176, people will still have his mixtape bookmarked. The top comment on YouTube jokes, “Imagine having to guard John Wall after a long day of pre-calc and AP gov,” but that’s really how it was for the Class of 2009.

We dubbed John a future star on the cover of SLAM 128, alongside Lance Stephenson. Soon after, JW linked up with DeMarcus Cousins, Eric Bledsoe and the rest of John Calipari’s first No. 1 recruiting class at Kentucky. As a freshman, he won SEC Player of the Year, was a consensus first-team All-American and was front-and-center on his second SLAM cover, appearing next to his teammates and Coach Cal on the May 2010 ish that immortalized that iconic squad.

It got so crazy at UK that John had to take golf carts to class to avoid mobs of fans. Kids across the country were imitating his signature dance, flexing and twisting at the wrist. Believe it or not, “Do the John Wall” by Troop 41 has even more YouTube views than Wall’s legendary mixtape.

Fitting that John had his own theme song, since his passion for music has always permeated his style. Hell, it influenced us—go back over his cover lines and feature stories in the pages of SLAM over the years, and you’ll see not-so-subtle odes to the likes of DeJ Loaf, Shy Glizzy, Lil Durk and Fetty Wap. That love has always been reciprocated by the artists, too. Put it this way: John Wall is probably your favorite rapper’s favorite NBA player.

Which is why it was no surprise to us when John hit the Dougie during intros of his home NBA debut, immediately capturing the imagination of a new generation of basketball fans—and pissing off old hacks like Colin Cowherd. (The same guy who once scrunched up his face to try to shit on guys like Wall, Russ and Melo by telling a national radio audience: “SLAM Magazine will put on the guy that scores, and has style, and has got some juice to his game.” Word. And?)

Wall’s first solo SLAM cover dropped during his rookie year with the Wiz, followed by another in 2015 and then KICKS 18, shot by the legendary Atiba Jefferson. John’s SLAM covers have chronicled his rise from unknown kid to HS mixtape legend to college star to perennial All-Star with his own signature shoe. And he’s taken us along for the ride every step of the way, the #WallWay. 

Featured image via Getty Images. Portrait by Atiba Jefferson.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: John Wall appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

Most players in the “SLAM 30” would, honestly, be in most basketball outlets’ rankings of the most relevant 30 players of the last three decades. Brandon Jennings, however, is a special case. Thanks to a truly symbiotic relationship made possible by Brandon’s love of SLAM, the people he surrounded himself with and our admitted bias to players who fuck with us as hard as we fuck with them, BJ is like “our” All-Star.

The relationship started regularly enough—not that it didn’t mean the world to a young Brandon. He got what we used to call a “little Punk” story in our high school section, shot in his Compton (CA) Dominguez uniform and interviewed by Ryan Jones. Just a sophomore at the time, Jennings remembers it fondly. “That was my first look in SLAM,” he says on a recent Zoom. “In the Dominguez locker room. I was so fucking excited! Like, Everybody is gonna see me. I’m known now. The SLAM thing was always the biggest thing in sports and basketball magazines. When you did the cover shoot with Sebastian [Telfair] and LeBron James and I was a kid in the 7th grade…I had to be like them. SLAM was always that stamp of approval.” 

Jennings’ path got more unique from there—as a player and a SLAM subject—as he transferred to Oak Hill Academy in VA for his last two years of high school. Not a shocking move, but to travel all the way from L.A. and go for two years was rather brave. BJ made a couple appearances in SLAM/related pubs while he was a Warrior. In August ’07, while in NYC for the second annual Elite 24 game (in which, he proudly reminds me, he set a record that was never broken for assists in the game with 23), he posed for the cover of our special PUNKS magazine alongside fellow top guards Jrue Holiday, Tyreke Evans and Lance Stephenson. Half a year later, back in the Big Apple for the Jordan Brand Classic, we shot Jennings at Grand Central Terminal for our High School All-American First Team. He’s got fond memories of both shoots but does share the one gripe he has with us in our long history. “I’m not gonna front—I was mad I didn’t get the diary that year,” Jennings says of the storied column that was penned by Evans that season.

Jennings’ path took two massively unexpected turns after high school. For one, the University of Arizona commit chose not to wait out any debates surrounding his academic eligibility and turned pro—in Italy! For another, he did so in Under Armours, becoming the first signing the famous “football” brand ever made in hoops. UA’s foray into basketball was largely led by Kris Stone, a former SLAM Advertising Manager who had a flair for marketing, a belief in Brandon and a loyalty to the Basketball Bible. We became, in many ways, the perfect place for UA to hype its move—with Jennings at the forefront. And since we’re always suckers for good access to a dope baller with personality—we were down. After a couple more small appearances in our pages, Jennings’ next SLAM hit was big time: the European adventurer was on the cover of SLAM 128 next to a more conventional Continental prospect—Spanish wunderkind Ricky Rubio. 

Future Shock, indeed.

“That was so unreal for me,” Jennings recalls today. “The decision I’d made. Ricky being who he was. I was a little nervous. The first time I met him was at that shoot, the night before we played against each other in Barcelona. I met his mom, too, rest in peace. Ricky and I just shared a little chit-chat that day. We knew we were about to do some big shit.”

Jennings’ time in the L came sooner than Rubio’s. A little while after that cover, he was in the 2009 Draft, going 10th overall to the Milwaukee Bucks. And soon after that, in just his seventh NBA game, Jennings dropped 55 points. On the Golden State Warriors and their rookie PG, Stephen Curry. What were we supposed to do? Put him on his first solo cover, of course. Behold SLAM 135, an Adam Fleischer-Atiba Jefferson production that featured Jennings bursting off the front page in a fire red Bucks uni. “That meant that I made it,” Jennings says. “I was that kid running to the store to get that magazine. Now I’m on the cover. That was a full-circle moment.”

Jennings played all 82 as a rook and copped a solo KICKS cover the next summer. He’d go on to play 555 games in the League, bouncing from Milwaukee to a few different spots before finishing his career as a Buck in ’18. It was an appropriate ending, because it connected Jennings to the Giannis Era in Milwaukee and greatly extended the lifespan of his #BucksInSix quote.

And even though he stopped playing, Jennings has stayed fresh and relevant. Most notably, he’s the founder of streetwear brand Tuff Crowd. And in another full-circle moment, the brand recently collabed with Under Armour and its current signature hooper, none other than Curry. 

You’ll never guess where you can read more about it…

Photo by Atiba Jefferson. Featured image via Getty Images.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Brandon Jennings appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

“Are you serious? Like, for real?” 

Derrick Rose can’t believe what he’s hearing. It’s a Thursday morning in Memphis, and even though the Grizzlies don’t have an official practice on the books today, DRose is at the team’s facility to lift weights, run drills and get some shots up—things a guy in his 16th NBA season has learned how to do to keep his game sharp.

That Rose is even in Memphis at all these days is something of a miracle, a testament to how the world is reciprocal and a chance for Rose’s career to wind down in the same arena where he stamped his spot on the national scene. After playing high school ball in Chicago, where he made his name as another in a long line of celebrated ballers from Simeon Academy, Rose left the Windy City in favor of the Bluff City, joining John Calipari at the University of Memphis. After a 26-0 start, the Tigers made it to the NCAA Tournament with a 33-1 record, eventually losing to Kansas in the championship game. 

After one year in Memphis, Rose went back home, the first overall pick of the Chicago Bulls. He won a Rookie of the Year award, made an All-Star team and became one of the pillars of adidas basketball. In a League of Goliaths, Rose was David, fearlessly attacking giants and slaying each possession as if it was his last. Rose played with breathtaking abandon, and his furious styles earned him legions of fans.

And then, before just his third NBA season, Rose appeared on the cover of SLAM for a third time and called his shot: He wanted to be the NBA’s MVP. Right away. So, he spoke his truth into existence in the pages of SLAM 143. 

“That was really me gauging the talent in the League at the time and feeling like I could compete against that,” Rose says today. “So why not go for it? I wanted to go for it, and I was also thinking about getting a championship, so I said that as a way to hype myself up.”

Whatever the method, it worked. Rose won an MVP at age 22, the youngest player in NBA history to win the nod. And then, not long after, during a first-round playoff game in 2012, Derrick Rose tore his ACL, knocking him out for an entire season. He returned in 2013 and posted four consecutive seasons averaging double-digits, but it was a different Derrick Rose, and not just on the court. Rose used his forced time away from the game to “figure out who I really am as a person…Back in the day, when I first got [to Memphis], I wasn’t able to articulate myself like this. So with me expressing myself like this, someone who has been an introvert, I pat myself on the back, because I had to work to get to where I’m at.”

The changes weren’t only internal. Looking back at some of those old SLAM covers, Derrick Rose is almost unrecognizable today. The eyes are still there—that laser-sharp stare—but the old Rose had short hair and a handful of tattoos. These days, Derrick Rose’s braids brush the tops of his shoulders, tattoos run all the way up to his chin, his neat goatee has blossomed into a full beard. He’s quick with a grin and willing to drop knowledge wherever he can—when the Grizzlies struggled defensively earlier this season, it was Rose who called out their need to improve communication. He may no longer be able to stop on a dime and soar over defenses, but his accumulated institutional knowledge makes him invaluable to NBA teams in need of leadership and experience, like the Grizzlies.

Rose says playing such a pivotal part of SLAM’s history means a lot: “When you think about the AI cover, that was the most iconic one that I can remember—the hair out, everything. For me, it’s an honor to actually be on the cover, and know there are people who still rock that cover, who still have those covers framed.”

And the disbelief? That came from being told that his old covers are among the most popular t-shirts that SLAM has ever produced. 

“Are you serious?” Rose repeats. When confirmed, Rose smiles wide. 

“That’s love, right there.” 

Feature via Getty Image. Portrait by Atiba Jefferson.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Derrick Rose appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

I knew right away. Even as the words were escaping Kevin Durant’s mouth. It was the spring of 2007, and the 18-year-old Durant was in the mix to be the first pick in the upcoming NBA Draft. He was tall and lanky, and in one year at the University of Texas had flashed his developing scoring chops, averaging 25.8 ppg. The other candidate for the first pick was Greg Oden, who had led a stacked Ohio State team to the NCAA title game and looked to be the next big man in a long line of next big men. 

For SLAM 110, we had the idea of putting Durant and Oden on the cover together, like one of those old boxing posters, a play on the choice NBA teams had to make. Kevin and his mom showed up to the photo studio just outside Washington, DC, and they were game for our concept, although I remember them wanting to be sure we didn’t frame it as KD and Oden not liking one another; they were rivals, sure, but it was a friendly rivalry between two kids who’d played against each other on the AAU circuit for years. 

For the cover story, I decided to separately ask Oden and Durant the same set of questions, as if I were an NBA team conducting pre-draft interviews, and then put their answers side-by-side, as a way to compare and contrast their personalities and mindsets. We’d report, you’d decide. I interviewed Oden over the phone while he was traveling around for pre-draft workouts, and he was perfectly fine to talk with, answering everything politely and thoughtfully, saying all the right things you would want to hear from a potential No. 1 draft pick. 

The question that cracked the code, at least for me, was when I asked them each why they should be the first overall pick. Oden talked about working hard, being a good person, fitting in and making whatever sacrifices were needed for his team to win. His answer was perfectly fine.

But when I asked Kevin Durant why he should be the first overall pick, he said, “I think I have a winning mentality. Even though I’m young, I can bring leadership to an organization. I’m just cold-blooded. I really don’t care. Whoever’s in front of me, I’m going to do my best to destroy them. Younger people might back down sometimes, but I think I’m a tough player and I won’t back down from anything—I accept challenges. I know it’s going to be hard, but everything you have to face is hard. I’ll be young, and I’m sure people will write me off and say I’m too small or not ready, but I’ve been going through that my whole life.”

That was when I was certain. What else could you want from a kid about to make the leap to the toughest professional sports league available to him? I’ll take all the confidence you can muster. And in retrospect, looking back at all the accolades Durant has compiled, from an MVP to two rings to a few Olympic Gold medals, we all should have known what was on the horizon. 

The rest is his story. The Blazers took Oden first overall, while Durant went to the SuperSonics (who quickly became the Thunder). Kevin Durant fulfilled the promises of so many. During a time in the ’00s when basketball was creeping toward becoming positionless, Durant pressed fast-forward on that evolution and made a series of suggestions into a reality, scoring easily from all three levels, adding defense, ballhandling, turning players like Wemby and Chet into archetypes instead of unicorns.

Durant made his journey with SLAM alongside, from the photos of him in high school as an impossibly skinny kid to the championship covers. When KD launched his own podcast, he devoted an entire episode to SLAM. “SLAM was so important to us because it was all basketball,” he said. 

Today, at 35 years old, KD is currently fourth in the NBA at 30.8 ppg and has settled into life in the desert, teaming with Devin Booker and Bradley Beal to form what should be a formidable squad in Phoenix. Durant also recently slid into the NBA’s all-time top 10 in points scored, and he doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon.

From beginnings that were somewhat uncertain, Kevin Durant has more than made good on the promise he showed almost two decades ago when he first appeared in SLAM.

It was written. 

Photo via Getty Images. Portrait by Rachael Golden.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Kevin Durant appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

It was very, very simple. Just a pump fake and one dribble to her right. That’s all she needed to win Game 3 of the 2015 WNBA Finals. A pump fake and one dribble to her right gave her all the space required to drill a buzzer-beating three from the top of the key. And that highlight is probably the best way to capture Maya Moore’s greatness. She was always efficient. She was always steady. She was always the closer.  

In 2018, we used Moore’s SLAM 217 cover (and the cover shoot content) to help catapult our women’s basketball coverage. Coming off that shoot starring the prolific winner (four WNBA championships, two Olympic Golds and two NCAA championships), we launched WSLAM, which has now grown to become the best coverage of women’s hoops on every level. 

And what a player to start with. Moore won throughout her entire career. Whether by the eye test or by looking at the stats, her dominance is obvious. This would be a good time to mention how she averaged 18 points, 6 rebounds and 3 assists in her eight seasons with the Minnesota Lynx. It’d be appropriate to mention how she won the EuroLeague twice. And here, right here, feels like the correct place to mention how she also won the Liga Femenina de Baloncesto title, the WCBA championship three times and the world championship twice. 

We’re not calling her the GOAT. No, no. No, no, no. We’re just saying we understand those who do bestow that title upon her. Because…damn. That’s a lot of winning. Also, can’t forget the MVP trophy, the five different All-WNBA First Team selections, the WNBA Rookie of the Year award and the Finals MVP nod. Or the game-winners. Or the many on-court highlights that defied logic and all the history of previous WNBA players. We had never seen somebody on the floor like Maya Moore. 

Even off the court, Moore was singular, as she remains to this day. For somebody so utterly dominant and competitive when the bright lights are on, she has consistently been a gentle soul away from the flashbulbs and the cameras. Flip to page 41 of SLAM 217 for evidence. 

“My identity is not being the best basketball player,” Moore told us at the time. “Or even being Black. I mean, I’m a Black woman, and I own that. I try just to do as much as I can to live an authentic life and point people to truth. And being authentic means admitting when I don’t know. And admitting that I could’ve been better. And admitting I want to be better if I can.”

That hunger to be better is a little familiar. It sounds like somebody else who, like Moore, wore 23 on their jersey.

Moore was quickly grabbed up by Jordan Brand after she left UConn. It’s an important part of her story, and it contributed to her being on this list. Having the honor of being the first woman signed to Jordan is a quality illustrator of her greatness. The high standard that Michael set was met by Maya. 

Being associated with the Jumpman, as well as everything else she did on the court, combines for a nearly unquantifiable impact. We have to wait a few more years for young players across the country to get drafted to the W, get asked about who inspired them and hear them all speak about how much Maya Moore means to them. But it’ll happen.

Though Moore’s on-court career ended on August 21, 2018, her impact didn’t. She retired from basketball with a mission. She wanted to help a man named Jonathan Irons get released from prison. With Moore’s assistance, Irons’ wrongful conviction was overturned. Moore and her family advocated for previously concealed evidence in his nonfatal shooting case to be brought before the Missouri courts in 2020. He had spent over 20 years behind bars as an innocent man, and Moore gave up basketball to help him get his life back. Then, in the plot twist of our time, Moore and Irons got married soon after he was released. It’s one hell of a love story. 

So in the end, Moore, one of the greatest ever, hung up her Jordans to live her authentic life.

That SLAM 217 cover story opens  with a wry smile on Moore’s face. On some you-know-how-good-I-am-at-everything kind of energy. Both competitive and gentle. 

Photo via Getty.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Maya Moore appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

I called Chris Paul the “Forrest Gump of the post-2005 NBA” in a 2020 cover story about him. I think that’s pretty self-explanatory but figured I should spend some time here to explain that, because it sets the table for the reason CP3 is on this list.

Let’s quickly run through what earned him that distinction. In 2005, he’s drafted by New Orleans, but due to destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina, he spends most of his first two NBA seasons playing home games in Oklahoma City. In NOLA, he becomes homies with Lil Wayne, becomes an All-Star, becomes arguably the best PG in the League, becomes a playoff contender. Then he’s traded to the Lakers, un-traded by David Stern (I can’t emphasize enough how big a deal this was on 2011 NBA Twitter), then traded to the Clippers, becoming the heart of Lob City (another massive part of early 2010s NBA Twitter) and a perpetual postseason contender. He becomes president of the NBA Players Association, signs a long-term contract, and then the Donald Sterling racist audio incident happens, and he’s in the middle of that saga. Eventually he’s traded to Houston, then OKC. Then Covid happens, and Chris is in the middle of setting up the Bubble, lowkey a huge national public health story. Then, while in the Bubble, the Jacob Blake shooting takes place, and Chris—literally on national TV before a Thunder-Rockets game is about to tip—is a part of the group that holds the players off the court, and later as PA president, is the head of the group that figured out how to infuse social justice messaging and action into the NBA’s infrastructure. He leads the Thunder on an impressive run in the Bubble, then later joins the Suns, where he leads the team to the Finals, and is on the team when there’s another racist owner situation with Robert Sarver, who later sells the franchise.

A couple years pass and then CP3 joins the Warriors, where he’s currently attempting to help push the Steph-Klay-Dray group toward another ring. Along the way he played an iconic commercial character (Cliff Paul), amassed 22,000+ points and 11,000+ assists, made 12 All-Star teams and the NBA’s 75th Anniversary team and dropped 13 signature sneakers with Jordan Brand. And he was on the banana boat, because of course he was. The guy is everywhere.

“Forrest Gump of the post-2005 NBA”—undeniably accurate. But that’s not alone enough to make it to this list, because this is the “30 Players Who Defined SLAM’s 30 Years,” and if there wasn’t a direct SLAM connection, Chris would just be a guy who was around the NBA universe for a while, paying us no mind. But CP3 paid us plenty mind. He was first featured in SLAM in April 2003 as a high schooler with a one-page PUNKS article in the back of the mag; his brother CJ once told me that his family had that page framed in their house.

He was on his first SLAM cover in 2006, his second in 2008, his third in 2009, his fourth in 2011, his fifth in 2012 (alongside Blake Griffin), and his sixth in 2020. In his prime, he had a fun, uptempo point guard game that a magazine like SLAM was practically created to celebrate, and in his veteran years, he’s been a methodical game manager who almost exclusively plays on teams we cover deep into the playoffs. He was always relevant in the sneaker world—the aforementioned 13 sigs—and he was early in the tunnel fit game, becoming an @LeagueFits regular during our fashion account’s salad days. (The three hoodies he wore in his most recent cover shoot were produced in collaboration with SLAM and LeagueFits and sold on slamgoods.com, with the profits going to charity.)

A player who’s seemingly everywhere, finding his way into every crevice of basketball culture and NBA happenings for almost two decades, and a publication that covers every crevice of basketball culture and NBA happenings for exactly three decades. It makes perfect sense that the two would have a great, symbiotic relationship.

So, of course Chris was going to be on this list. The guy is everywhere. 

Photo via Getty Images. Portrait by Kyle Hood.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Chris Paul appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

This was early 2002, a cold winter day in snow-covered Trenton, NJ, in an arena then named for a bank and since renamed for an insurance company, as these things are. Among the more than 8,000 people packed into the building were hundreds of media members; among them was a now-famous NBA reporter, best known for his hashtag social media bombs, then working as a columnist at a midsized newspaper where, a few years earlier, we (briefly) had been colleagues. Like the rest of the media pack, we were there to watch a high school basketball game, but really, we were there to watch one particular high school basketball player.

Chatting pregame near our baseline seats, two or three rows back from the court, he said something about that player that at the time I disagreed with, and that I’ve also never forgotten: “This kid’s like the perfect SLAM magazine guy.”

I disagreed because, well, we already had a few perfect guys. We had Michael Jordan, not far away from his final retirement but still the foundation without which this magazine could not exist. We had Kobe Bryant, a soon-to-be three-time defending NBA champion and Jordan’s polarizing heir apparent. And we had Allen Iverson, the purest representation of an ongoing cultural moment that this magazine has documented like no one else. But…this kid? Generationally special, no doubt. It just seemed a bit early to think of him on quite that level.

Six months later, around the time we gave LeBron James his third full-length feature—not including the year of high school diaries he’d penned for us—and his second cover, all (still) before he’d stepped onto an NBA court, I no longer disagreed.

We did not, for the record, see all this coming. Not all of it, anyway. Not the 21 seasons and 21 All-Star nods, not the four championships and four MVPs, sure as hell not the all-time NBA scoring record. But we were very confident he’d be very good, which is why we gave him feature-length coverage before pretty much anyone outside his hometown had heard of him. And the 27 covers and two special issues in the two decades since would seem to confirm that yes, LeBron James—a fixture in these pages for 23 of our 30 years of existence—is probably the single most iconic player of the SLAM era.

He’ll always be remembered most for his NBA superlatives, the unprecedented statistical output and, of course, those rings. That’s the lead on his Wikipedia page and the inscription on his Hall of Fame plaque. But the story—his story, and the nexus of his story with ours—is so much more than that. LeBron’s story was a movie (not to mention a couple of books) before he ever got to Draft night. That’s the story we told before anyone else, the one that left us uniquely suited to tell the rest. Maybe the only thing more incredible than how it started is that somehow, it still shows no signs of coming to an end.

We’ve told this one before, but for the sake of setting the scene, it bears repeating. Spring 2001, near the end of his sophomore year, we took a flight from New York City to Akron, OH, to spend a day with LeBron James. When we arrived at St. Vincent-St. Mary High School, there was a small sign out front bearing the words “WELCOME SLAM MAGAZINE.” Within a year or so, it would be replaced with a sign on the door announcing that media were barred from campus.

But that was later. Back in ’01, the folks at St. V were excited that someone from a national magazine was coming to their tiny high school to write a story about one of their own. They knew LeBron was good, of course—by that point he was a two-time state champ and pretty clearly the best player in Ohio. But SLAM showing up was different. This meant LeBron wasn’t just good. He was about to be famous, too.

LeBron made his mag debut with that feature-length profile that summer, followed immediately by a year-long run as our Basketball Diary writer—the first non-senior to hold that spot. (They might not put that on the HOF plaque, but for both of us, it was history of a sort.) From the beginning, LeBron was telling his story in our pages.

It took a while, but eventually the rest of our sports media peers started catching up. The Sports Illustrated cover came late in his junior year, back when SI was elite and its cover choices could drive the narrative. Steady coverage on SportsCenter, then the place to catch the most important sports news and highlights, followed soon after. By the end of his junior year, Bron’s story was national.

By the middle of his senior year, when St. V was playing a national schedule and LeBron’s highlights were going pre-Twitter viral, it was an unprecedented circus. Ohio’s high school governing body didn’t know how to handle it, investigating the 18-year-old senior—who would be worth more than $100 million by his next birthday—for driving a Hummer gifted to him by his mother, then suspending him for taking a couple of throwback jerseys from a local shop. His first game back from that suspension—initially meant to cost him the remainder of his senior year before a legal challenge shortened it to two games—came on that cold night in Trenton. He scored 52 in a rout, capping the silliest week of the most ridiculous season in his legendary high school career with the loudest possible statement.

Months later—fresh off a second SLAM cover, on which he rocked our logo on a headband (his idea, we didn’t ask)—he was Nike’s $90 million man and the No. 1 pick in the 2003 Draft. Like we said, it was a movie before he ever set foot in the League, an action-packed drama in which the leading man over-came humble beginnings, surmounted every obstacle, and won in the end. And somehow, it was only the start.

It’s gotten difficult at this point to talk about LeBron’s NBA career without focusing on the numbers. The various totals and career averages are almost overwhelming. We’re talking about a dude who put up nearly identical averages—around 30 points, 8 rebounds and 7 assists per—at age 37 as he did at 23. We’re talking about a dude who set the all-time NBA scoring record last year, and who’s on pace to blow by 40K by season’s end. He’s 39 now, and even as he’s shown some signs of time finally catching up, he’s still putting up 25, 7 and 7 a night—numbers just shy of the average output for his entire career.

But if you’ve been there as long as we have, the numbers, staggering as they are, remain secondary to the story. He put together arguably the greatest—and undeniably the most high-profile—high school career of all time. He came into the League with unequaled hype, and based on his individual play, lived up to it almost immediately. Championships proved more elusive in the NBA than they had in high school (where he won three), and the fact that he couldn’t carry otherwise mediocre rosters to a title during his first seven seasons in Cleveland led to a narrative that LeBron lacked a killer instinct. It was here that he paled when compared to Mike and Kobe, until he kicked off the Super Team era; with Dwyane Wade as his runningmate and a supporting cast more in line with the groups Mike and Kobe ran with, he finally copped his first two rings.

Eventually he came home(ish) to Cleveland, and with Kyrie and Kev took out the 73-win Dubs for ring number three. Then, perhaps inevitably, it was on to L.A., a more logical home base for both his growing media and business empire and his growing family. This time, Anthony Davis played the elite sidekick as LeBron claimed a fourth chip.

But again, the story—the how of everything he’s done, even more than the what—is what compels us. How he reinvented the idea of player empowerment, determining the steps in his career path in a way no star ever had. How he built on the Jordan and Shaq endorsement model to become not just the face of but a stakeholder in businesses ranging from European soccer to fashion to Hollywood, where he’s a powerhouse behind the scenes and a half-decent actor on them.

And most importantly: how this son of a single mother, a kid who never knew his dad, has embraced his role of husband and father, actively supporting his own family in a way that balances their public life with an entirely authentic devotion.

So here is LeBron, pushing 40, the game’s elder statesman, an icon across sports and culture, an actual self-made billionaire, a man whose influence on the game—both on and off the court—might not be fully measured for years to come. He may or may not be your GOAT, but that hardly matters. He’s never been perfect, but he’s been the perfect guy for this magazine and everything we love about the game. 

Photo via Getty Images. Portrait by Atiba Jefferson.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: LeBron James appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

Context matters. Context is essential. Context is why a guy who never averaged double digits in 10 NBA seasons belongs in this issue every bit as much as the current and future Hall of Famers he’s surrounded by.

Context starts in Coney Island, Brooklyn, NYC. Once an iconic destination in 20th century American culture, more recently an emblem of what happens when cities shunt poor people into crowded neighborhoods and starve them of resources. The sort of place about which a fellow Brooklynite wrote a famous rhyme about crack rock and jump shots. Maybe more than any single neighborhood in America, a place where a jump shot—or more correctly, a handle and court vision and unrivaled point god swagger—was, for a very select few, the way out.

Sebastian Telfair was one of the few, an inheritor of an immense Coney Island legacy who had to earn the right to claim it.

The legacy was Stephon Marbury’s, a dude whose high school career was crazy enough to inspire a Spike Lee joint and made him the obvious choice to originate this magazine’s Basketball Diary. He, his city, his borough and his neighborhood were all foundational to what SLAM was and became. And, well, Steph and Bassy are cousins. Steph blazed the trail Bassy had to follow, set the bar he had to clear. A blueprint (pun intended, as you’ll see), yes, but the opposite of a handout.

So Bassy followed, younger and smaller and less of a sure thing, and yet undeniable just the same. Visibility and pressure boosted by the lineage, and he embraced all of it. What did we say about handles and court vision and point god swagger? From the first day he suited up for Lincoln High, it was hard to imagine a high school basketball player being more confident, tougher or more fun to watch.

Then came another guy to connect and compare him to, this one a year older, and from somewhere well beyond the five boroughs. In 2001, LeBron James and Sebastian Telfair were co-MVPs in the ABCD Camp underclass all-star game. (If you were in the building, you remember Bassy being the best player on the court.) By the summer of ’02, Bron and Bassy were arguably the best players in their respective classes, and certainly the most talked-about. After that summer, they were linked—for better and worse—for good.

A sneaker industry veteran later referred to it as the weekend that “changed everything” in the grassroots hoops game. With the help of interested parties at one of those footwear giants, LeBron and his people flew into New York on a Friday afternoon in ’02 to link with Bassy and his crew. They went straight from the airport to IS8, a tiny public school gym in Queens that hosted legendary city league games, for the first of two runs against some of New York’s best talent. In between, on Saturday afternoon, they reconvened at the Hunter College gym in Manhattan for a photo shoot. The result was the first SLAM cover for both, and still one of our most memorable front pages in 30 years of doing this.

Bassy had two more years of high school after that, a period in which he won back-to-back NYC public school city titles, a state championship, and the New York state Mr. Basketball award. He also held down our Basketball Diary as a junior, just like Starbury and LeBron before him, further cementing his SLAM legacy. Fellow Brooklynite Jay-Z, then at the height of his hip-hop reign, was spotted courtside at his games, a moment captured in Through the Fire; the film remains an irreplaceable document of a talented hoop dreamer in an unforgettable basketball moment, a time when a 5-10 high schooler could get lottery money and a sneaker deal before the three-point shot and the positionless revolution remade the game. Fans overfilled high school gyms to watch him play, including the woman in Through the Fire who famously declared, “I named my cat Bassy!”

He was the subject of a book, too, not to mention a couple more SLAM covers, a 2004 lottery pick whose NBA career never became quite what he hoped. A year or two of college might’ve helped, and comparisons to his cousin and his guy from Akron did him no favors, nor did landing on rosters that were ill-equipped to compete for titles or to support a young player who had shown that, with the right team around him on and off the court, he could win and handle the spotlight while doing it. He played for eight teams in 10 seasons before he called it a career in 2015. And don’t get it twisted: not just anyone can spend a full decade in the NBA.

What’s his legacy? One of the greatest, most influential high school players in NYC history. The first true point guard drafted straight out of high school. Coney Island royalty. Movie star. And a player our own story simply wouldn’t be the same without. 

Photo via Getty Images.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Sebastian Telfair appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

Where does he fit on your list? Top 50 ever? Top-five shooting guard? Shoot, a lot of people have him third after the anointed two of MJ and Kobe. Dwyane Wade’s exact placement in the pantheon doesn’t even matter. He’s an all-timer, and no one will ever argue that.

And this same dude, a little more than two decades ago, had to call a press conference to announce if he was turning pro or returning to college. For his senior season. In an era when high schoolers were going in the lottery regularly. And the press conference’s outcome was hardly a given. Media in attendance, to say nothing of Marquette University’s fan base, really didn’t know what Wade was going to announce about his plans. Why do I have such vivid memories of a relatively small moment in a Wade career that was filled with much bigger ones? I was there. I pretty much shadowed Dwyane that whole day, much of it with our man Atiba Jefferson by my side taking photos.

How was this future legend not already in the League like many of his peers? He was the type of late bloomer the game rarely creates these days. Wade was lightly recruited out of Richards High School in Illinois, a suburban school just southwest of Chicago, in part because he was trending toward being academically ineligible as a freshman. He chose Marquette because then-MU coach Tom Crean made Wade his number-one target and promised him he’d take Wade even if he had to sit out a season—which he did. 

As such, Wade did not really become a “national” name at all until he was a sophomore in college. That’s also the year he made his very first appearance in SLAM, a slim “In Your Face” in Issue 62 in which we spelled his first name “Dwayne” [absolutely pathetic, if not as bad as the biter hoops magazine making that mistake on its cover years later.—(Previous) Ed.]. That issue featured high schoolers LeBron James (a recurring theme) and Sebastian Telfair on the cover. Unless this is the first time you’ve read SLAM, you know that the GOATs rarely make it past 16 or at least high school before gracing our pages.

The feature I wrote off the day I spent with Dwyane in Milwaukee (he did indeed declare for the ’03 Draft) ran in SLAM 71. The story—graced with beautiful black and white photographs by Atiba—began immediately after Ryan’s classic story on LeBron, who was making his first solo appearance on our cover. A bit of foreshadowing, all this. LeBron did and has outshined Dwyane, sure. But the closeness of the pages is also analogous to how much closer their careers would prove to be than anyone imagined. Bron was The Chosen One. Dwyane was the unknown. But from that day and story onward, the floodgates were open. 

On the court, Wade was a success from the jump, finishing third in the ’04 ROY voting after averaging 16.2 ppg (Bron won, naturally). By year three, dude was averaging 27.2 per and was an NBA champion—and runaway Finals MVP at that. By 2010, a ring-less LeBron felt compelled to leave Cleveland for South Beach to team up with Wade and their ’03 Draft classmate, Chris Bosh, to chase titles. And it worked. LeBron got his first two. Dwyane ended the partnership with three to his name.

That’s how many rings Wade would end up with, but the accomplishments and accolades flowed well through the 2010s. The 6-4 2-guard ended his 16-year NBA career with per-game averages of 22 points, 4.7 rebounds and 5.4 assists, with 13 All-Star appearances and 12 All-League honors to his name. Save for brief stretches in Chicago and Cleveland, the uber-tough Wade spent his career in Miami, embodying #HeatCulture and cementing himself as the greatest player in that franchise’s short but storied history.

Off the court, Wade followed a groundbreaking footwear path that started with Converse, detoured as he became the face of Jordan Brand and ended with a literally game-changing deal with Li-Ning. He married Hollywood superstar Gabrielle Union. He’s become a vocal champion of trans rights in the wake of his daughter’s gender transition. And he made up for his late start with SLAM, appearing countless times in our pages, from McDavid ads (!) to champs issues to a handful of classic solo covers—SLAM 127, “Tropic Thunder” being my personal favorite.

In ’22, Wade received an honorary degree from Marquette and gave the commencement address to that year’s graduating class. Last August, he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. 

But in so many ways, the journey from little-known amateur to globally renowned professional began on that April day in 2003 when he announced he was leaving Marquette. 

And Teebz and I were there. 

Portrait by Atiba Jefferson. Photo via Getty Images.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Dwyane Wade appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

The coolest play in the coolest sport in the world is the slam dunk. We love it so much we named our magazine after it, and we’re hardly alone in our obsession/fascination. And as neat as they can be in contrived dunk contests or glorified exhibition games that may also go by the names “streetball” and “All-Star Games,” the greatest dunks of all happen in games. And NBA games are the highest form of the game in the world. And now, for everyone from the front to the back to hear loud and clear: VINCE CARTER IS THE GREATEST IN-GAME DUNKER IN HISTORY.

The run he went on during his truncated Rookie of the Year campaign in 1999 through the Sydney Olympics in 2000 [Doug Collins: “He jumped OVER HIS HEAD”] and maybe another season or two in Toronto had never been seen before. “Fine,” you say. “Dunkers have evolved. Elgin to Doc to MJ to Vince. Of course someone at the turn of the millennium was iller than a dude from the ’70s.” Yeah, well, no one has done it like that since either. And it’s been more than two decades! Go through the SLAM archives and read the SLAMadamonths from back then. They were almost all Vince, and only Russ could make the monotony seem fresh. Or if YouTube’s more your thing, here’s a PSA that will be old news to longtime SLAM and SLAMonline readers but new to many of you: check out “Matt Adam’s Infamous Vince Carter Mixtape” below and sit back.

Nine-plus minutes of joy, and irrefutable proof of the in-game dunker assertion I made earlier.

If Figs and SPT told me to write 250 or so words about VC’s inclusion on this exclusive list, I’d call it a day and feel my work is done. That’s how memorable and impactful Vince Carter’s run as the GOAT dunker was.

Alas, they need more words, and he actually impacted the game three other big-time ways. 

The first is that he saved the NBA in Canada. When Carter got traded to the Raptors on Draft night in 1998, they stunk and their colleagues in Vancouver were even worse—and on the fast track to moving to Memphis. Carter’s arrival on NBA courts, fresh off a terrible lockout and the retirement of Michael Jordan, was a boon to the entire League, sure, but it had actual resonance in Canada. “The most exciting player in the NBA plays in Toronto,” was not a sentence anyone—let alone Canucks—ever expected to utter. He the North, indeed. Not to keep giving you video-watching assignments, but there’s literally a documentary about this: The Carter Effect. Stream and learn.

Another incredible fact about Carter that deserves major props is that he played the third-most games in NBA history. More than Stockton and Malone. More than KG. More than LeBron (at least when you read this). The only players who’ve played more games than Vince Carter are Robert Parish and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who are ineligible for this list because they didn’t play in the SLAM era (the Chief did barely, but you get the point). So at 1,541, Vince Carter is the games-played leader in SLAM history. Further inexorable proof of his relevance and also a stat that you never would have fathomed in those early days when he was literally jumping over defenders. Because as you’d imagine, that style of play came with injury risk, and for much of his career, VC was labeled injury-prone. But he got better at avoiding contact, got better at shooting from distance and morphed into a locker-room favorite who could provide some pop off the bench until he was 43 years young. 

Last but not least, VC deserves eternal props for his impact on the sneaker game. He played in fly Nikes and Jordans at UNC before becoming the rare NBAer to rock Pumas as an NBA rookie. By his second year in the L, he was having issues with Puma and had a stretch of de facto free agency. This led to him wearing the AND1 Tai Chis for the 2000 Dunk Contest. No shade to those shoes, which are classics, but it says here that Vince’s iconic wearing of them is the reason the shoes have lived on to this day. VC circled back to Nike for the balance of his career and rocked pure heat. To quote the famous campaign and one of the more genius SLAMadamonths in Russ’ oeuvre: “Boing.” 

Photo via Getty Images.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Vince Carter appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

Watch this game long enough and the awareness sneaks up on you. You start to understand how the spotlight narrows in hindsight, how the space for competing narratives is diminished by time. Turns out there’s only so much mental space available to recall the players who define eras. The result, as far as our NBA memories go, is that even some of the game’s greatest and most breathtaking careers can be nudged out of the light of immediate recall. We haven’t forgotten them, exactly. We just need to be reminded.

So here’s your reminder about Tracy Lamar McGrady Jr.

Seven-time All-Star, two-time scoring champ, 2017 Hall of Famer. A preps-to-pros pioneer whose career crossed eras: came into the League a year behind Kobe, made his first All-Star Game three years before LeBron arrived, dropped buckets on Jordan in Washington, KD in Seattle and CP3 in OKC. His peak, when it came in the early-mid 2000s, was crazy, a five-year run with the Magic and Rockets in which he averaged 27.6 points, 6.8 rebounds and 5.3 assists per. In that extended moment, T-Mac was just about the last guy any NBA defender wanted to see with the ball in his hands.

The peak being 20 years ago now, the aforementioned narrowing of the spotlight hasn’t done McGrady any favors. The MVP winners in those years were guys named Iverson, Duncan, Garnett and Nash, a list that (obviously) doesn’t even include at-or-near-prime Shaq, Kobe and LeBron. The NBA’s top tier was crowded as hell in the first few years of the new millennium. Just know this: Tracy McGrady belonged in the same breath as all of them.

The legend began one summer week in New Jersey in 1996, when a long, skinny Florida kid with no national rep landed at the proving ground of adidas ABCD Camp. By the time that highlight- filled camp week was over, McGrady was the most buzzed-about player in the ’97 class. The college coaches who hadn’t heard of him a week earlier soon learned they needn’t have bothered learning his name. His decision—choose a college by signing day or sign with adidas for $12 million and head to the Draft—ended up being an easy one.

The appeal was still mostly potential when Toronto made McGrady the ninth pick of the ’97 Draft, where he joined the Raptors—and, a year later, was joined by his far-removed cousin and fellow Floridian Vince Carter. A lanky 6-8 bundle of unpolished talent, McGrady was slow to make an impact and quickly overshadowed by his high-flying distant relative. But by the end of his third season, when McGrady emerged to the tune of 15.4 ppg and started giving optimistic Toronto fans visions of a new-millennium Mike and Scottie, he decided he had no interest in sidekick status. T-Mac was ready to be a star.

A free-agent move back to his home state gave him the chance. It’s hard to believe in retrospect that he spent just four seasons in Orlando, where he averaged better than 28 ppg—including League highs of 32.1 ppg in ’02-03 and 28 ppg in ’03-04—got the first of three solo SLAM covers, and made that star-spangled No. 1 jersey iconic. The numbers were undeniable and the highlights ridiculous—he practically made the off-the-backboard self-alley-oop a signature move—but, lacking an elite supporting cast, his individual achievements never led to postseason success.

He tried to find it in Houston, where he landed after a trade in the summer of 2004 and teamed with Yao Ming, giving him the All-Star big man he’d lacked his entire career. But injuries curtailed the partnership, and McGrady’s numbers diminished throughout his five full seasons with the Rockets. After brief stints with the Knicks, Pistons, Hawks and Spurs, and a season in China, he retired in 2013.

Today, Tracy McGrady’s legacy and impact are clear. An icon of the preps-to-pros era. A lethal scorer and one of the toughest finishers in NBA history. Owner of an adidas signature line (and two KICKS covers to go with it) that combined innovative design and on-court performance as well as any in his era. Post-playing gigs with ESPN and Showtime, plus the founding of the trailblazing Ones Basketball League. And yes, that 2017 HOF enshrinement, an honor that some observers, blinded by ringzzz culture, questioned the inevitability of. They shouldn’t have. The résumé is beyond question, the numbers etched in stone and the highlights burned into the memories of anyone lucky enough to be watching. 

Photo via Getty Images. Featured image by Keith Major.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Tracy McGrady appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

Twenty-five years ago, we at SLAM didn’t really comprehend the significance of putting Chamique Holdsclaw on the cover of SLAM 29 wearing an authentic Knicks game uniform. To say otherwise would be untrue. However, the importance of her embodying the early SLAM manifesto, in terms of us publishing a basketball magazine from a grassy knoll, taking pot shots at conventional wisdom, is nearly unparalleled.

Holdsclaw was an exceptional college ballplayer and a gym rat from Queens, NY, and, when we weren’t debating such weighty topics such as ugliest player or douchiest head coach, we, as media provocateurs (which is French for jabronis), wondered aloud whether the NBA was ready for her, rather than the other way around.

We weren’t just questioning whether Holdsclaw could hold her own, but whether the NBA (and society at large, for that matter) could accept a female player in the League. Period. And so the cover line, “Is the NBA Ready for Chamique Holdsclaw?” was both a literal and an existential question. And, for the most part, it was also rhetorical: we already knew the answer and it was “Not yet.” (It would be another 20 years before a second female player, Maya Moore, would own SLAM’s cover, which was still ahead of its time.)

Despite Holdsclaw’s supreme athletic ability and work ethic, we also knew that players like Tracy McGrady and Vince Carter would likely be able (and willing) to drop double nickels on her nightly if given the opportunity. The NBA players who we spoke with as they came through New York confirmed as much, privately. Indeed, any opportunity to try out for an NBA team would come with a bull’s-eye.

But, someone had to be first, what if it were her? Holdsclaw was entering her senior year of college, and had, among many positive qualities, one transcendent characteristic: a preternatural calm demeanor that hid a burning competitiveness. She could shoot and rebound and was unaccustomed to failure. A relentless two-way player, she won four consecutive state high school titles and three consecutive national championships with the Lady Vols. Her college coach, the legendary Pat Summitt, called her a “Jordan-type player and person,” which was all we needed to hear.

She was drafted first by Washington in the 1999 WNBA Draft and would play a decade in the W, averaging 17-8-3 over the course of her pro career. Later, Holdsclaw would describe the Knicks cover as “a statement piece: Women’s basketball had arrived.” The thing is, SLAM wasn’t joining the chorus, we were actually leading it. And it wasn’t actually a chorus, back then, it was really just a handful of us sitting in a windowless room at the decrepit-ish SLAM offices.  

We were fortunate that social media was non-existent back then, otherwise Holdsclaw would’ve been drawn into an ugly back-and-forth between the sexes about her worthiness, which was something she didn’t ask for or deserve. And what we considered to be a legitimate attempt to frame a larger point about the progress (or lack thereof) of gender equality in sports would have been ridiculed or seen as a cynical move. In those days, anger was communicated to us through handwritten, honest-to-goodness hate mail from readers. Surrounding Holdsclaw, negative response was largely muted, which as far as I was concerned, was a slam dunk. Until it wasn’t.

A week after the issue dropped, my phone rang and a dispassionate female voice on the other end said simply, “Hold for Coach Summitt.”

Gulp.

Ten seconds later, Coach’s familiar drawl was stinging my ears. “Are YOU the FUCKING BLOCKHEAD that almost ruined my player’s ELIGIBILITY!?” She was in zero mood for me. Apparently, as Coach then scream-splained to me, had Holdsclaw accepted the uniform after the shoot—which she did not—she would be in violation of NCAA rules and would lose her eligibility. I could so see us doing that by accident.

I then acknowledged that yes, in fact, I was the decision-maker on the Chamique Holdsclaw story and tried to explain my thought process. I even employed the phrase “chip away at the male patriarchy” in an effort to butter her up/get her to stop shouting at me. She listened for a few seconds and then abruptly hung up on me.

Part of me thinks she was satisfied with my answer and actually saw progress. SLAM had gone 28-for-28 with men on the cover until we decided to change the game with someone that she herself had coached up.

But more than likely, Coach Summitt just didn’t feel like spending any more time than absolutely necessary talking to a fucking blockhead. 

Photo via Getty Images.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Chamique Holdsclaw appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

Michael Redd was a 2004 NBA All-Star, a member of the 2008 USA Olympic basketball team…and, during the summer of ’08, a teammate—and de facto tile teacher—of Kobe Bryant. 

“Our relationship doesn’t get publicized,” shares Redd, once the subject of a memorable SLAM story by Scoop Jackson, “but it doesn’t have to. We know what we had behind the scenes.”

It’s 2008, and thousands of the best athletes from all over the world are staying in the Olympic village in Beijing. Fifteen of the most famous athletes, though, are staying at the Intercontinental, on their own. It’s there that Redd remembers schooling Bryant in dominoes—forging a friendship that would still feel fresh in his mind 15 years later. 

“It wasn’t about the dominoes,” says Redd. He remembers sitting and playing on a Team USA plane with Kobe, Tayshaun Prince and Chris Bosh—and a photo exists to prove it. “He was trying to ingratiate himself with us, with his teammates. He was masterful at using his mind like that.” 

***

Intentionality.

If there are two words the public associates with Bryant, it’s MAMBA MENTALITY. If there’s one—one word from those who know him—it’s INTENTIONALITY. 

Bryant was, famously, intentional in his approach to the big picture. His prep for practice and games was detailed down to the minute, down to the movement. He was the same way with his sneakers, pushing Nike to develop new silhouettes, to incorporate lighter materials, to deliver a better performance product. 

It shouldn’t surprise people to hear, then, that Bryant was detail-oriented about less visible minutiae, too. Yeah, he pretended to care about playing dominoes to win over teammates. And, yeah, he was exactingly meticulous in his 20-plus year relationship with SLAM.

It began a few covers in, with Bryant admitting in the early aughts that he read Trash Talk. He didn’t just peep them, though; Bryant used any and all negativity as fuel. 

“It mattered to him,” recalls Ryan Jones, a former SLAM Ed., “that SLAM heads didn’t have an accurate idea of what made him tick. On some level, that motivated him.” 

Fast forward to 2006. A lot has happened in the Bryantverse in the decade since he’s been drafted, even in the few years since his Trash Talk admission. Now, he appears on the cover of SLAM clutching a snake—symbolizing his Black Mamba moniker—to his face. 

“Who else would have done that?” laughs Jones.

Another few years, another cover. Bryant is no longer looking for love. Now, he’s mindful about all the details. The shoot is set to take place in Hawaii, but Bryant and his team want SLAM to fly in his personal barber from L.A. After some back-and-forth, the sides compromise: a local Hawaiian barber of renown is booked to be on set for Bryant. Only thing is, when Bryant shows up, he’s already rocking a fresh cut. The resulting cover—American flag draped over his freshy—is iconic. 

Twenty10. At this point, Bryant doesn’t show up for cover shoots. He wants to pitch ideas, to own the creative process. A hint at his post-basketball life. 

“He demanded Martin Schoeller,” says Ben Osborne, the then-Ed. at SLAM. Schoeller, famous for his up-close celebrity portraits, would shoot Bryant for SLAM 136. “There’s never been anyone like Bryant about that. Not even close.”

Fast forward again. 2019. Bryant’s last cover before…you know. SLAM is amenable to having their first retired player not named MJ on the cover. They want him in a suit, to represent the business, man, he’s become, but he wants to be captured as a coach, to have his girls’ team with him. Emails are exchanged, and when the day arrives, Bryant walks in wearing a Mamba sweatsuit and carrying a big ol’ bag of basketballs.

***

Mamba Mentality. 

A hoops writer at a different magazine once defined the depths of Michael Jordan’s transcendence by pointing out that the best people in any given industry were labeled “the Michael Jordan” of that sector. 

There’s no denying that the author made a great point. Just like there’s no denying that Mamba Mentality, Bryant’s self-titled ethos, is the Michael Jordan of motivational phrases.  

Bryant, in the only autobiographical book he ever published, defined Mamba Mentality as, more or less, an acute and laser-like focus on excellence. Since his death it has taken on new meaning.

“I had…an epiphany the other night,” someone messaged me recently. “Mamba Mentality has evolved into more than just a mindset or approach. It has become an ideology.” 

***

In the years after his death, Bryant has been enshrined as one of the most important ambassadors of the women’s game. In the weeks leading up to his death, he led a small camp for elite women at his gym. In his final SLAM cover, he insisted on having his youth team—his girls’ youth team—on the cover with him. In his afterlife, he made the orange WNBA logo hoodie a bestseller. 

First, he changed the men’s game. Then, he changed the Mentality. Finally, with his final moments on hardwood, he helped give women a small boost. 

Yeah, Kobe Bryant is the Michael Jordan of SLAM’s era. Yeah, SLAM is the Mamba Mentality of magazines. Yeah, we were lucky to have Bryant, and we’re lucky to still have SLAM. 

Feature photo via Getty Images.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Kobe Bryant  appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

The idea for SLAM came to me sometime in early 1994. A friend of mine suggested I make a hip-hop basketball magazine. This light bulb moment became much brighter that night, and I published the first issue of SLAM three months later. The rest is history—30 years later, it is surreal to me that it has survived this long. 

Keep in mind, there was no internet back then—SLAM was the basketball internet. The world is much different now, but what continues to blow my mind to this day is how many times people come up to me to say how much SLAM influenced their lives. It feels good every time I hear that.

Let’s go back to 1994 in New York City, where it all began. Cory Johnson, the founding editor of SLAM, and I began to plan out that legendary first issue. Larry Johnson would be on the cover, and we had features on Jason Kidd, Rodrick Rhodes and playground legend Joe Hammond, a column on Felipe Lopez, SLAMadamonth and our first PUNKS story on Steve Wojciechowski. No one had seen a sports magazine like this. If you were lucky enough to buy that premiere issue on a newsstand, then you are officially an original member of the SLAM Fam. 

Then we were on to Issue 2. Enter Stephon Marbury—the first of a few players who would help define SLAM through the years. I’ve been following HS basketball since I saw Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) play in high school. And if you followed high school hoops in the ’90s and lived in NYC, you know everyone was talking about Stephon Marbury from Lincoln HS in Brooklyn. The Marburys were New York City’s first hoops family. There were three Marbury brothers who came before Stephon, and now it was his turn to be the first Marbury to get to the NBA. The pressure was real, but you would never know it from watching Stephon play. He was the best point guard since four-time All-City player Kenny Anderson. He had to be in SLAM. 

Stephon appeared in two articles in Issue 2 (the one with Shawn Kemp on the cover). The first was for our inaugural SLAM High School All-American team. Stephon made it as a junior, alongside another junior, Kevin Garnett, and seniors Felipe Lopez, Raef LaFrentz and Jerod Ward. Plus, for our first-ever fashion shoot, we wanted to feature Stephon and his teammates at Lincoln. SLAM dug up some hoop apparel for the Lincoln players to wear like they do in GQ. Thankfully, Coach Bobby Hartstein was open to the idea, as insane as it was.

The SLAM team packed up our cameras and subwayed (no Ubers back then) out to Coney Island. This is the first time I met Stephon, and I will never forget it. When we arrived at Lincoln, the principal directed us to his class. Steph was sitting in the front row rocking a POLO hoodie with a fresh haircut in his signature style. We shook hands and just clicked. We bonded right away around basketball and what it meant to both of us. Looking back, I’m sure we both had no idea how it would shape our lives in so many ways. Steph represented a new generation of hoopers influenced by hip-hop that only SLAM could understand. The photo shoot went down without a hitch. If you want to see the spread, check out the SLAM Digital Archive and look for “School Daze” in Issue 2. Not exactly GQ, but way ahead of its time for any sports magazine. 

Stephon continued to play a prominent role in our early days. He was the first SLAM High School Diarist, which began in SLAM 4 (the John Starks cover—our first real cover shoot). I went on to watch most of his games his senior year at Lincoln and saw him finally win his first NYC PSAL championship at the Garden. He was Mr. Basketball in New York. I saw him announce his commitment to Georgia Tech and then watched him go head-to-head against Allen Iverson at MSG. I was at the 1996 NBA Draft when he was picked fourth by the Bucks and then traded to the Timberwolves to team up with KG. The Marbury family had finally made it to the NBA (for the record, 1996 is unquestionably the greatest NBA Draft class ever). SLAM continued to grow with every issue, and Stephon was on a few more covers along the way. He had a great but underappreciated NBA career. He ended up playing in China, where he won three rings. Go watch the documentary A Kid from Coney Island if you want the full story.

Stephon and I speak or text maybe once a year. I was just texting with him while he was in China. He posted a photo on Instagram of him running a clinic. He had his head down, dribbling with his left hand, going hard to the hoop. The same patented move from Lincoln that only Stephon can do. I recognized it immediately and DMed him: “I know that move.” He replied: “Big bro, you know because you saw it live.” If you know, you know. 

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Stephon Marbury appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

“Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.” Purple “a” in chaos. To this day, still, probably the most brilliant story title and opening spread for a feature in the history of this magazine. The slightly out-of-focus stark-black and shaded- white Bob Berg portrait. Looking like DaBaby’s daddy. Russ spent hours looking at the picture and reading the story in search of the perfect words to call it. Looking at the picture and reading the story again. And again. The story of the drama orbiting Shaq’s basketball world. Penny. Kobe. Lakers. Contracts. Free throws. No rings…yet. Injuries. Shaunie. Hollywood. Career. Then Russ yelled, “I got it!” Damned if he didn’t.

And while the brilliance of the title and spread took center stage, it was the story that became the story. The story of getting Shaq to sit for the interview and photo shoot (Issue 34 + Shaq’s uni number 34 = Levels), of giving us time that very few athletes had given us (two days, if I’m correct?), of the insanity and ignorance of us waiting five years and 31 issues (as Tony explained in his hilarious and equally brilliant “Sixth Man” Ed. letter to open the issue) between covers with him on them. It was a story of society’s unique and unusual love/hate relationship with Shaq. Of the love he gave the world and the hate it gave him in return. The story was a chaotic, all-over-the-place journey of the conflict inside one of the greatest ballplayers we’d ever witnessed as he struggled between the power and indifference between (and the importance of that indifference) greatness and dominance. And how he chose dominance.

There’s also that difference between being loved and being beloved. What we learned from and about Shaq over the 30-year relationship this magazine has built with him is that sometimes it’s better to be one than the other. It all depends on what you are looking to get out of life and how you want the world to receive you and your contributions. See, Shaq changed the course of this magazine (and those of us who worked on the decades of stories that have been done on him), what it would become, and our collective approach in how to make it what it eventually became. He taught us how to balance patience and persistence in approach and storytelling. He taught us to expect nothing while being prepared for anything when it came to plotting and planning stories. He (along with MJ and AI) taught us that icon athletes will always be more important to the reader than the writer telling the story or photographer lensing it. Presence is a present. He is Him. There’s only one Shaquille O’Neal. Rather be loved than beloved.

Aesthetically adjacent to his basketball prodigy was his ability to multi-hyphen on a Donald Glover-level that no one understood while he was collecting Larry O’Briens. Stacking chips, hoisting trophies, spitting bars, dropping gems, moving product, marketing dreams, building brands, getting degrees, becoming police, rescuing cats, investing ingeniously, extending zeros into a cultural and wealth-building account that already had more commas than only a handful of athletes who’d ever lived. The giant wasn’t gentle, he was brilliant. One of none. The one MC Wu should have asked to GA on “C.R.E.A.M.” No one else woulda made sense.

There was a moment toward the end of those two days with Shaq in 1999 when he made it all make sense. The Lakers had won 61 games the previous season and could have easily won 70
had Shaq not missed 22 games and played through an injury instead of saving himself for May and June. He said, “Had I played, we woulda won 75.” But winning 75 games wasn’t the point, having the greatest record in NBA history wasn’t the point, just winning a ring wasn’t the point. It was the way he was going to lead the Lakers to eventually win those rings that was. 

“Domination,” I remember him saying. That he’d rather go through the playoffs unbeaten—something that no team in NBA history had ever done—than to go down in history with the most wins ever in the regular season. Because, if nothing else is learned about how Shaq flows in mind and process, when it’s all said and done, being unbeatable—and unbeaten—is greater than being the greatest. The very next season the Lakers began their three-peat. That TWIsM life: different. 

He also said another prophetic thing that was hidden in that PE entitled story but used as a pull quote: “When the game is over, they’re going to remember my name.” Preach, n****. 

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Shaquille O’Neal appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

“They say I’m hopeless/As a penny with a hole in it.” 

—Dionne Farris, “Hopeless”

For us, at SLAM, at that time, it was always that pass. The one Tony Gervino brilliantly used as cover art for Issue 8. 1995 ’til infinity. From the exit series that ended Jordan’s comeback. But made him come back. It was this cover that made Shea Serrano become a basketball griot. It allowed a reintroduction.

The Anfernee Hardaway Experience was something different. Something basketball at the NBA level hadn’t experienced. The new generation’s first hybrid. Part Oscar, part Magic, part Gervin, part Pippen. All Tracy McGrady before Tracy McGrady became the next Penny. Like a muthafucka invented strictly for Super Nintendo NBA Live 95. By the time he appeared on his first SLAM cover, he was already on some low-key legend shit. Memphis basketball God, Parade Magazine National High School Player of The Year, Blue Chips co-superstar, NBA Rookie All-Star Game MVP, All-NBA Team 1, NBA Finals appearance, leader of the game’s new generation of “We got next.”

Yet what we forget: He got shot. Forgot that all of this career called his could have been just a dream, that none of it was supposed to happen. That the second that bullet entered his right foot, ricocheting off the ground during a drive-by robbery in front of his aunt’s house in Binghampton in April 1991 during his freshman year at then-Memphis State University (University of Memphis, now), the end was supposed to follow. 

Hopeless. Yet, his “oh, shit” moment became his “closer to God” moment. He script-flipped what should have been his basketball and Black life stereotype of a young kid from where “we” from getting shot into what Benji Wilson and more recently Quincy Reese Jr never had the chance to. Which is the part of Penny we don’t discuss enough. The resilience of an 18-year-old not allowing the circumstances he came up in and around define him—but still shape him. Allowing a bullet to provide clarity instead of despair, anger, hate. All of that is lost when we look at Penny because he made sure we never saw what he saw when he looked in the mirror at that point in his life. His foot. A Penny with a hole in it. Never again.

Because a superhero emerged. A basketball alien. A 6-7 point guard with destination talent at almost every phase of the game. Speed, bounce, range, handles, vision, creativity, instincts, leadership abilities, defensive awareness, who was fundamentally sound with survival in him that made him immune to intimidation. Fearless. Young, gifted and generational. Personable. Chill. Unassuming. Humbly arrogant. Unbothered. True to exactly who he was. Strong enough to carry his NCAA squad (only a year after being shot) to the Elite Eight, then his NBA squad (only three years later) to the NBA Finals. Second SLAM cover, toothpick sic. Revenge tip. Blue pinstriped fit. Shining like pre-green copper. 

But the cultural impact (almost) overshadowed the magic (get it?) he was producing on the court. His sneaker acumen and foresight made him illuminati. Foams? Him. Air Max namesakes 1, 2, 3, 4? Him. The only other basketball player at the time to have Nike signatures besides 50, 34 and 23. 1Cent, heaven sent. But God had other plans.

The injuries stacked like cordwood piles. Putting a halt (not a full stop) to an ascend that was legendary. Centual. More than just an athlete, he year-after-year inched closer to single-name American icon status by showing glimpses and flashes of what he had left inside, of what wasn’t stolen from him. Just because the game forced him to stop bouncing the ball never meant the ball stopped bouncing for him. A return to his Mecca allowed the world to see that his basketball mind and heart were far superior and in-need than his basketball body and skills. Deon, not Deion. His coaching, too, became his calling.

He’s become the basketball equivalent of Gale Sayers, Stephen Strasburg. A GOAT for whom the only reason isn’t considered the GOAT is because injuries loved them so much. That singular, idiosyncratic, unparalleled, one-of-a-kind type who, if we just talked about what they showed us—and what they did when they were able to play—we’d admit that they were almost unarguably the best we’d ever seen. Bill Walton. Yao Ming. Grant Hill. Derrick Rose. Penny’s probably above all of them on basketball’s “what if” list. Which makes “what will never be again” much more appropriate.

And oh, one last thing about that first cover, the “wrap-around” cover, the last time we’d see Jordan wearing “45” cover. Two months after it hit the stands, his alter ego Lil Penny was introduced to the world. Shit ain’t been the same since. 

Photo via Getty Images.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Penny Hardaway appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

“Skip to My Lou” was not Rafer Alston’s first nickname. The pseudonym that would stick with the point guard throughout blacktop supremacy and an NBA career was born the summer after his Rucker Park debut. That prior summer, the frail 14-year-old from South Jamaica, Queens, was all the way uptown balling comfortably with collegiate starters. Despite a considerable difference in age and size between him and the other players, not one could remain in front of him. He handled the rock as if it were a yo-yo and treated defenders like turnstiles in subway exits. “Here comes The Energizer!” shouted Rucker Park MC Duke Tango.

“He just keeps going and going,” said Duke’s co-host, Al Cash. Rafer’s new notoriety climbed to a point where Harlemites would anticipate a lopsided score just to witness The Energizer bounce to his own drum.

The following summer, Rafer received the keys to that same Rucker team. During a particular game in which he felt the players and crowd lacked synergy, he premeditated a move in hopes of producing stimuli. The opposing guard found himself alone with a 3-on-1 fast break quickly approaching. Rafer bounced the ball in front of him and shuffled his feet with hope that his defender would take the bait. As expected, the opp reached for the ball. Raf then snatched it back, wrapped it around his own waist and dimed his slashing teammate. Spectators erupted onto the court and Al Cash immediately renamed The Energizer “Skip To My Lou.” 

For Rafer Alston, life has only been easy as Skip To My Lou. When he wasn’t performing on a playground, he was consistently weathering obstacles and downhill winds. As an 11-year-old prodigy, he was too young to understand the neighborhood fuss around his ability. All he knew was that he was better than the other kids, but their parents were present at games and his weren’t. Mama Alston worked two jobs and dad was so consumed by drugs he stole Raf’s Michael Jordan rookie card. Perhaps a healthy home life would’ve prevented one of the greatest high school guards ever from only playing a combined 10 games his junior and senior years.

He averaged over 30 points both seasons at Benjamin N. Cardozo High School, despite playing under 20 minutes per game. He kept his name ringing on the AAU circuit with Riverside Church by besting future legends like Chauncey Billups and Allen Iverson, but his dream was never to be a playground legend before age 18. It happened anyway––before he played a single minute for Jerry Tarkanian at Fresno State, this very publication put him on the front of its December ’97 issue with the cover line: “The Best Point Guard In the World (you’ve never heard of).” The pressure meant little to Rafer. His only goal was to become an NBA point guard like his idols Mark Jackson and Kenny Anderson. 

Even when Alston’s name was called in the 1998 NBA Draft, it was the beginning of yet another scenic road ripe with rocky terrain and opposing nature. Being confined to George Karl’s Milwaukee Bucks bench quickly taught the rookie that the League had little regard for those amazing AND1 mixtapes. After two seasons, he nearly quit his dream job. Then close friend Troy “Escalade” Jackson (Mark’s little brother—RIP) convinced him to join the D-League. One 10-day contract begat another and in a couple years, Rafer was lobbing alleys to new Dunk Contest GOAT Vince Carter in Toronto, zipping by defenses with a rookie phenom named Dwyane Wade in Miami, then running an offense through Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming in Houston. His game was also worth nearly $30 million. 

Today, only one NYC playground legend has played in an NBA Finals. After being traded in the middle of his 10th season to the Orlando Magic, Rafer led prime Dwight Howard and Co. to the mountaintop of the 2009 NBA season for a championship bout with Kobe Bryant’s Lakers. Games 1 and 2 saw rough performances from Alston. Coach Stan Van Gundy pulled his floor general aside and instructed him to abandon the previous contests and return to whichever style of play was most fun. In Game 3, Alston dropped a dazzling 20 points on 8-12 shooting, ushering the Magic to their only win of the series. The highlight of the game was when he spun off of Derek Fisher and hit Lamar Odom with a stutter-step before jelly rolling Pau Gasol. As he ran back on defense, the Magic’s energizer smiled and pointed toward his idol, who just happened to be commentating the game for ABC. 

“I wanted Mark Jackson to know that even though I’m getting old,” said Alston after the game, “I still have a little Skip left in my game.” 

Hell of a journey. 

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Rafer Alston appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

Well, this is awkward. I was asked to write about Reggie Miller’s evolving relationship with SLAM, I’m assuming, because it started very poorly—and specifically because of me. And I just now realized that the 2024 NBA All-Star Game will be in Indianapolis. Given that fact, and the intervening years, I had a thought: let Reggie (the greatest-ever Pacers player) bask in his Hall of Fame-ness and enjoy the festivities without any childishness or negativity.

All these years later, it no longer hurts to give Reggie his flowers for his exemplary career, and we can now accept the fact that he is universally considered one of the greatest long-range shooters in NBA history. Over 25,000 points (including 2,560 three-pointers) in 18 seasons, two Gold medals. One of the greats.

It’s called growing up, people.

SLAM, during what I like to call “The Profanity Era” (issues 3-38), is linked to Miller more than any other player not named Iverson. But the way we treated them couldn’t be in starker contrast. Iverson could do no wrong in our eyes, while the magazine relentlessly targeted Miller. Why? Because we needed a foil. If we were looking to mix things up in the sports media world (lol), antagonizing a perennial All-Star was the most efficient way to do so. 

And Reggie was the best player on the Pacers and the Pacers routinely clobbered the Knicks, while Miller preened, pouted and flopped. He was like the annoying progeny of Mick Jagger and a professional wrestler, enjoying himself so thoroughly while riling the crowd. It was infuriating to us. 

And so we (OK, me) pounced on him and began a campaign of poking Miller with a stick. We (OK, I) said all kinds of things about him to try and get a rise from him. He never responded to me directly but, looking back, his annual teabagging of the Knicks in the playoffs was probably enough of an answer.

During his career, Reggie Miller made an enemy of every NBA fan in every city other than his own. He wore that hatred like Superman’s cape. It intrigued him, amused him, and then it fueled him. The hostility, however, was far, far worse in Madison Square Garden than in any other arena. When Miller played the Knicks, he was extra arrogant and spiteful and scornful and miserably clutch. The 25-point fourth quarter. The 8 points in nine seconds. The choke sign.

Those hijinks went on for years—way longer than our “Glen Rice’s wife” campaign or whatever other idiocy we cooked up—and culminated with SLAM publishing Miller’s high school prom photo—which he attended with his sister Cheryl, who was an unreal basketball player in her own right. That I considered it to be a “gotcha” moment shows that we were completely losing the plot.

Many issues after we’d begun our crusade, we were exhausted, frankly, and pumped the brakes. Not long after, Miller appeared on the cover of SLAM 33, sneering in victory. On the magazine’s spine we put the about-face into context, printing, “Hell Freezes Over.”

Once we crossed that rubicon, it was much easier to accept/swallow the fact that Miller was a clutch big-game player and, thanks in large part to his relationship with SLAM, the greatest and most willing villain in basketball history. It also became significantly less complicated to include his name in a conversation without relentlessly denigrating him and must have been freeing to the subsequent editorial staffs. Thankfully, grudges do not transfer well.

A few years ago, long after Reggie retired and began earning big bucks as a very capable color commentator, SLAM asked me to interview him—a first, as it turned out—in an attempt to settle our differences. We were both up for it.

Over the course of an hour, Reggie and I talked about his storied career, his relationship to SLAM and to opposing fans, and how players today would have a much harder time coping with our level of vitriol. I apologized for publishing the prom photo—a stunt that he accurately described as “crazy”—and then we talked extensively about how SLAM’s unrelenting public hatred of his persona had actually helped him. 

As it turned out, Reggie was likable, and we both blamed my dubious behavior on my misspent youth and a complete lack of journalistic training or, really, morals. As Russ Bengtson would say, “cool, cool.” 

He also credited me for burying my own hatchet and offering him the cover, which is great except for one thing: six months after the Reggie Miller cover was published, I ran away from SLAM, never to return. 

Photo by Clay Patrick Mcbride. Featured image via Getty Images.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Reggie Miller appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

In 1980, Stephen King published a novel called Firestarter. The title character was Charlie McGee, a little girl who could harness a vast power to—among other things—start fires. One important lesson she learned early on was to always push the power out, because to absorb it would destroy herself. Hold that thought.

Kevin Garnett never talked before games. And it’s not just that he didn’t do interviews; he didn’t talk, period. If he knew you, he might give you a nod, maybe a tap on the chest. But he didn’t say anything. Afterward he’d talk, but always last. The equipment guys had long since gathered the sneakers and the uniforms and bagged it all up for the next destination; reporters were getting antsy about deadlines and airtimes. But you waited for the same reasons producers ask Andre 3000 for features—because while you might have to wait forever, it was always worth the wait. KG had bars. He’d tell you things about the game you’d never have noticed in a way you’d never have thought of. 

In between, KG did things on a basketball court you’d never seen before. He’d start plays and finish them, guard every position, somehow be everywhere all at once. Dude was like this from the start, from Mauldin, SC, to Chicago—he came into his first pre-NBA workout and by the end had converted even the most staunch nonbelievers in guys making the high school jump. He went fifth and should have gone first (sorry Joe Smith). He soaked up the NBA like a sponge, put his imprint on ’Sota right away, got the Wolves to grab Stephon Marbury in the following year’s Draft. We documented it with a classic cover: “Showbiz & KG.” Nike slid him their coolest shit—he wore Jordans against MJ—before lacing him with a signature sneaker and making him head of the Fun Police. When we did that first Nike-sponsored KICKS issue, there was no question who’d be on the cover. 

For the December 1999 “100 Percent Real Juice” cover—we shot KG on a gold background but switched it out to orange—Jonathan Mannion and I flew out to Minnesota to shoot him at his crib. Garnett shot hoops in his driveway in his full road Wolves uni, the new Mobb Deep bumping from outdoor speakers. He had “It’s Mine” on repeat, trying to memorize Nas’ verse. By the end of the day, I was like, Man, I need to pick this up—only to find out at the closest record store that it wasn’t due out for another couple of weeks. We did that adidas KICKS cover with him and TD and T-Mac and the roundtable interview that anchored it was one of the most fun interviews ever. KG—never listed at 7 feet despite clear evidence to the contrary—busted on Mac for actually being 6-10 or 6-11 and then acted all surprised when it got turned back around on him.

On the court, his intensity spilled out of him like sweat. He burned so hot he had to constantly push it out lest it burn him up. He talked, yes; he cursed up a storm, but he was always talking to himself, pushing and pushing and pushing. KG picked up an MVP in Minny—but couldn’t make it all the way. By the time he decamped for Boston, it was almost a relief. 

“ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE!” He messed up the adidas tagline, but that happens when you add that final (or Finals) touch. That chip. It took him a minute to say anything at all, he said it quiet first before primal screaming it into the TD Banknorth Garden rafters. Achievement unlocked, weight lifted, program complete. Not that he was finished quite yet; there’d be another Finals trip, a Brooklyn stop, a final return to Minnesota as elder and sage—21 seasons for 21.

And now. Kevin Garnett at 48. He’s a Hall of Famer, a media mogul, doing production and a podcast with Paul Pierce. We did a whole special issue on him in 2021. He’s out in Cali, a Midwest guy retired to the beach. He doesn’t hoop anymore because hoop goes just one way for him—the demon comes out, as he puts it, and the demon needs to stay away. At long last, after two decades of relentless intensity, peace. 

Portrait by Benoit Peverelli. Photo via Getty Images.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Kevin Garnett appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

Forget how Merriam-Webster defines “iconic,” here’s how it should be defined: someone who or something that makes an enormous impact not only through his or her or its presence but also through his or her or its absence. 

“Iverson left.” 

Those were the first two words I remember hearing from Tony Gervino when he called from the NBA’s rookie orientation in Florida where we were shooting what would become the 1996 Draft fold-out cover. This was a huge shoot for us, and now we weren’t gonna have the first overall pick. (This news overshadowed the far funnier story of us having to keep a curious Todd Fuller—11th overall pick, Golden State Warriors—from wandering into the shoot. As an aside to an aside, if we included Golden State’s Draft pick, we probably would have taken out Kobe and wow how things could have been different.) 

“Iverson left.” This wasn’t good.

Over the years, we became incredibly familiar with those words, with that happenstance. Iverson was always there on the court and almost never there for photo shoots. He was 12 hours late for the SLAM 32 “Soul on Ice” shoot, dipped from practice (yes, yes, I know) entirely before we were supposed to shoot him for SLAM 42 the following year. We’d driven from New York to Philly, Clay Patrick McBride had everything set up, done the test shots and for a while we just stood around, hoping beyond hope he’d come back. He didn’t. We finally broke it all down and drove back. Instead, we eventually shot him in a room off to the side at an arena—grabbed him for literally a minute before a game and shot maybe one roll. For the record, every frame was amazing.

But it’s that rookie cover I keep going back to, and how Iverson’s absence ended up defining it better than his presence ever could have. It helped of course that Kobe Bryant and Ray Allen and Steve Nash ended up Hall of Famers (and Stephon Marbury and Jermaine O’Neal should be). In a way, Iverson being on there would have completed it. But in another way, his not being on there makes it cooler. This might just be me after-the-fact rationalizing, but I don’t think so.

Iverson had already had his debut SLAM cover by then, an action shot while he was at Georgetown that Scoop had to convince Dennis would work. He’d get another in short order, “Who’s Afraid of Allen Iverson?” on the June ’97 issue. This was the proto-Iverson, a skinny little dude with one tattoo on his bicep, cornrows, a single long gold chain. This is who the mainstream sports media was railing against? By then he’d been Rookie of the Year, dropped 40-plus in five straight games, dropped Michael Jordan with a quick bap-bap, BAP-BAP crossover (and earned the GOAT’s ire in their previous matchup by proclaiming he didn’t have to respect anybody). Iverson loved Jordan, still does, but on the court? No love there.

Off the court though? I gave Iverson a copy of that “Who’s Afraid of Allen Iverson?” issue—we all used to carry copies of the latest issues to give to players—and in return he gave me a big hug. This was the first time I’d met him. But that’s how Allen Iverson was, and how he is. If he loves you, he shows it. I think of Sosa talking to Tony Montana in Scarface and saying, “There’s no lying in you, Tony.” There’s no lying in Iverson either. The last time I saw him, a couple years ago, he gave me a hug, too. “Who’s Afraid of Allen Iverson?” Someone who never interacted with him, that’s for sure.

The “Soul on Ice” cover, which came nearly two years later (March ’99) happened with the NBA still in the throes of a lockout (note the “84% NBA Free!” in the upper left corner). It—both the cover shoot and the story—were part of a larger Iverson media push, so both the shoot and the interview for it were slotted in right before The Source Sports (The Source’s sports offshoot). We had to hire his hairstylist to both unbraid and re-braid his hair so he wouldn’t go into the Source Sports shoot still sporting a blowout. Of course in those pre-social media days, it was actually possible to keep a secret, so when the cover hit, no one was expecting it (an editor at Sports Illustrated actually asked Tony how we got him to wear a wig).

The interview happened in the morning and was something he wasn’t late for—I rode around NYC in a limo as he went to Modell’s HQ with Reebok (and stopped in the diamond district to get a massive piece of platinum and diamond jewelry repaired) and then out to Teterboro Airport. There, a Source Sports guy would accompany him on the flight and I’d catch a car service back to Manhattan. Now, Iverson is clearly not and never has been a morning guy unless he’s coming at it from the other side and preferably from the Main Line TGI Fridays. But he was still cool and compelling and heartfelt and honest to a fault—asked if he could be any other NBA player, he eschewed his childhood hero MJ (by then retired again) and went with Latrell Sprewell, who had yet to be reinstated by the NBA after choking coach PJ Carlesimo. It’s kind of crazy to think that at the time, he was still just 23 years old and hadn’t even been an All-Star yet. That summer, when KICKS Magazine opened to include all brands (it launched as Nike-only), he was on the cover of that, too.

In 2001, Iverson became a god. There was the All-Star Game in DC in February, where he scored 15 of his 25 points in a furious fourth-quarter comeback from down 21 to win by 1. He was, of course, named MVP. On top of that he dropped 50-plus twice in the regular season and won MVP, dropped 50-plus twice more in a seven-game series against Toronto (and posted a season-high 16 assists in the closeout game), and took the undermanned Sixers to the Finals to face an undefeated Lakers juggernaut that he promptly defeated in Game 1 in Los Angeles with a 48-point masterpiece. To paraphrase then-SportsCenter anchor Dan Patrick, you couldn’t stop Allen Iverson or hope to contain him.

People tried, of course. That magical year in Philly did not lead to sustained postseason success, the clashes with Larry Brown did not cease, the local sports radio call-in types did not become rational. Iverson continued to be judged for what he didn’t do (show up to every practice, shoot at a high percentage) rather than what he did (carry a team on his back every f*cking game). I am half convinced that the analytic nerd obsession with “efficiency” was at least in part embraced because it discredited Iverson, a guy whose misses wouldn’t have even been shots for someone who didn’t have his crossover or first step or long arms or big hands or sheer fearlessness to drive again and again into the teeth of physical defenses.

Here was a guy who stood 6-0 (maybe), weighed 165 pounds (maybe) and led the League in minutes per game seven times! He averaged over 40 minutes a game for his career!

He was as superhuman as could be, but Iverson remained a hero to most for his humanity, in a way that even Jordan never was. Jordan always seemed to be above the fray even when he was in it, unreal even when he was standing right in front of you. The myth became the man. Iverson? He was the people’s champ long before Paul Wall, grindin’ out of VA before The Clipse. If you were a young NBA fan, Iverson was a guy who dressed like you, listened to the same music you did; he faced untold struggles and doubters and still he rose. He was a hip-hop icon who was himself of hip-hop, with the cornrows and the throwbacks and the jewelry and even the (unreleased) album. He did commercials with Jadakiss, pushed a Bentley, kept crazy hours and still dropped 45 whenever he felt like it.

Let’s talk about the throwbacks for a minute. His wearing his own Wilt-era No. 3 Hardwood Classics jersey on the cover of SLAM 32 was instrumental in kicking off the whole craze and making the Mitchell & Ness flagship store in Philly a must-hit spot for everyone (including us). AI even rocked throwbacks on the bench when he was out—I distinctly remember him wearing an Abdul-Jabbar Bucks joint in Milwaukee—but, despite the NBA brand synchronicity, the NBA commissioner didn’t love it. There were rumblings of an NBA dress code long before one was ever implemented. So when we were brainstorming ideas for Iverson on the February ’05 cover, I came up with this: What if we shoot Iverson in a suit? 

The first question was whether he’d be down to do it, which he was. Phew. The second question was, did he even own a suit? The last time he wore one was probably when he got drafted. The answer to that, at least in terms of whether he had one he’d be willing to be shot in, was no. So he had one made. If you look at that cover with its black-and-white Atiba Jefferson photo, you’ll notice the suit is kind of baggy. So is the fedora, somehow. He’s like a hip-hop Humphrey Bogart. I ran into Que Gaskins, Iverson’s long-time Reebok guy, some years later, and he told me that Iverson kept telling the tailor everything had to be bigger, no, bigger than that, so many times that the guy finally just threw up his hands and quit. Well, nearly quit anyway. In October of that year, David Stern finally instituted the long-anticipated NBA dress code and hey, at least Allen Iverson already had a suit.

AI’s career didn’t end the way anyone wanted it to, but it lasted long enough for him to get endless bouquets from the generation that came after his—fitting for someone who never hesitated to pay homage himself, once wearing Dr. J’s No. 6 instead of his own No. 3 in an All-Star Game. Traded to Denver, he teamed with a young Carmelo Anthony, his own 6-7 doppelganger complete with ink and braids and a headband. Their SLAM cover together in March 2008 is a frozen moment of laughter, two guys clearly delighted in each other’s presence. And it wasn’t just Melo; that whole class of 2003 was filled with Iverson fans, from LeBron—forced to cover up his own tattoos in high school—to Dwyane Wade, who wore No. 3 because of him.

Allen Iverson inspired us, too. Here was a guy who, from the very start, was uncompromising in what he believed, in what he did, in what he said. With apologies to the great Kool G Rap, he was the realest. It shone through in everything, from his on-court performances to photo shoots to Reebok commercials. There were layers to go through to get to him of course, but by the time you did get to him, you knew exactly where he stood.

Yeah, he could be exasperating, especially to photographers (and writers) with schedules and families and whatnot, but even they got past it when they realized AI wasn’t being malicious or big-timing them or anything, it’s just who he was. But his presence—or his absence—was always huge. We always did what we had to do to get him, no matter how many times we had to reschedule. After all, we knew what missing him was like, and we didn’t want that to happen again. 

Photo via Getty Images. Portrait by Clay Patrick McBride.

The post THE 30 PLAYERS WHO DEFINED SLAM’S 30 YEARS: Allen Iverson appeared first on SLAM.

We compiled a group of individuals (programming note: 30 entries, not 30 people total) who mean something special to SLAM and to our audience. Read the full list here and order your copy of SLAM 248, where this list was originally published, here.

Where to start? It’s him. Sorry, He. What hasn’t been written or said? What’s left to be said or written? There’s a GOAT, and there’s a God. What do you write about the someone who occupies both? Are you there God? It’s me, Michael. Not Margaret. Your sidekick. Your Pippen. The one you made in your image like your other son.  

He became, over the course of his career and the existence of this magazine, something greater than any human being—including himself, despite how it was displayed in Air—ever expected. At the time, Ali and Babe Ruth were the mystic and mythical sovereigns. Jordan’s ascent above them put him in a god space only God could explain.

Jordan. Name. Brand. Logo. Symbol. Purpose. Meaning. Being. On which he stands. One nation. Under his groove. Under his influence. Under God. Trapped in an awe of “Ahs.” Spiritual connections to what he was doing, fans praying for him, to be like him; defenders just praying. Moving basketball from a game into territories once only reserved for religions and the NFL. Ten feet closer to heaven. He rose. We rose.

“Is this the end? God Only Knows.” 

The dual use of the word “God.” For him and Him. Shared. Black backdrop, black XIIIs, Black Cat. It was the magnum opus of slept-on covers in the history of magazine covers. Even Alex Wong’s doctrinal testament Cover Story (a book about classic mag covers) slept on it. Deeper than “A Star Is Born” and “Bag it, Michael!” Deeper than “Why?”

Above him: “The Only Jordan Story That Matters.” As if we were going to write something biblical. Jordan 6:23-45. As a magazine, we were getting to the point where we were beginning to believe the outside hype that we were a “basketball bible.” Twenty-seven issues deep. Readers repeating the words from our articles and stories back to us like hymns. Worshippers. We called it the SLAM Dome, but it was feeling more like a temple as we were feelin’ ourselves. As if we were serving a greater purpose. Were we wrong? The only Jordan story that mattered was because we were the only basketball publication that spoke His language. To His people. We were one. Couldn’t tell us nothin’. 

As the great Amiri Baraka said: Wise, Why’s, Y’s? A wise man in 1988 said: “Once I get the ball, you’re at my mercy.” Damned if he ain’t prophet and profit off that. The words rang true like gospel. Every note Shirley Caesar’d, TD Jakes’d. Every move Elgin Baylor’d, Julius Erving’d. Every Inc. decision Bob Johnson’d, Oprah’d. Every approval Deloris’d.  He went from entertainer to empire. All the while paying faithfully acute attention to the fact that the words “In God We Trust” are on every dollar bill this country prints.

Thirteen covers.

Thirteen* million stories. What you learn from writing about Jordan for 30 years is that he is the most difficult person (outside of probably Nelson Mandela and Kanye West, for two totally different reasons) to write about. He always blessed us with access, even when he would close himself off from the rest of the media (sans Ahmad, without doubt). Just enough time to build, have and sustain a relationship with him. He never B. Russ’d us, never pushed us off or away. Always made sure we were a part of his congregation.

Somehow Judy Blume knew what to say for Margaret. Had he even been this Jordan at that time, she couldn’ta spoken for Mike. In all honesty, none of us could. But that’s what we attempted to do at SLAM: Speak for Mike while speaking about him. Speak in a way that removed the corporate aura and colorblind force field he’d built to gain acceptance and move forth as no other athlete had in America. His play wasn’t enough, the endorsements weren’t either. Neither were the shoes, the style, the personality, the magnetism. “Be Like Mike” had limits and was for them. “Mike is ours,” was for us.  

And every time he appeared or his name was mentioned in these pages, that sense of belonging to the culture—of basketball and Blackness, of SLAM instead of Sports Illustrated—that was what we tried to preach. Our sermons not only told his story, but spread the word of our own. Of how he represented everything we were trying to do and everything we strived to stand on. Still, because all Gods work in enigmatic and sublimely impervious ways, never really coming close to capturing who Michael Jordan was. 

Just the way He wanted it.

Photo via Getty Images. Portrait by Atiba Jefferson.

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