What I Was Made For: Gage Smith, The Mob and other SlamBall musings

You come to me, on the day of my SlamBall team's championship game

In the Halcyon days of the mid-aughts, there was a network named SPIKE TV. It was a network that dared to ask the question: What if TV…but for the fellas?

That produced a whole slew of content that was basically Dr. Pepper Ten personified.

(A while ago I found out the team that came up with these ads, tried to connect on LinkedIn to figure out what they could have possibly been thinking and was promptly ignored. So once they stop being cowards you’ll get a Dr. Pepper Ten retrospective because seriously what the hell)

SPIKETV’s early-2000s output was very much a product of its time, and a fascinating cultural study. But among all the juicier content came a perfect idea. 

SlamBall. 

If as a child you were ever on a trampoline, it was very easy and fun to imagine that you could dunk a basketball like this. And if you had a trampoline with a basketball hoop attached, game over— you were in the ninth circle of coolness. 

So your brain obviously gets to thinking: what if trampoline basketball?

This is your brain on SlamBall. 

American dreamer Mason Gordon made it a real thing, with structured rules, badass team names, and a primetime slot on SPIKETV. 

I first found out about SlamBall when, as middle school me was obsessed with doing, watching YouTube videos on dunking.

I saw a thumbnail and a title of “SlamBall Dunk Contest” and thought: No way. This can’t possibly be a real thing. This would be too cool. 

It was exactly what I hoped it was. A grainy TV recording of an outdoor court at night with the baggiest templated jerseys you ever darn saw. 

Then, I found out about the sport itself, and even watched some full games people had uploaded, which kept my short attention span all the way through. 

But as a sign of society’s downfall, SlamBall did not last very long. The SPIKETV version only lasted from 2003-2004, and there was a brief one year revival on Versus (remember Versus!) and weekend simulcasts on Cartoon Network in 2008. 

Since then, I was itching for a revival. There was an international version in China but highlights were hard to find and it was never going to hit the same. 

I had resigned it to forever being a product of a time when we used to be a proper country, and a fun YouTube/Wikipedia rabbit hole that could kill a half hour. 

Then, the man himself done brought it back. 

The announcement came in 2022, and was radio silent until a one-month rush in June 2023 where the teams, logos, uniforms, players, coaches, location and TV network were all announced.

It’s new home is ESPN, more specifically ESPN+, which has an undercurrent brand identity of being an ESPN 8: The Ocho-type hub. I think it needs to lean harder in that direction, but you can find more obscure stuff on there than you ever have, so that’s progress. 

The season is now over, concluding a six-week sprint starting July 21. I have a lot of thoughts and observations on it. 

Let’s start with my grievances. 

• There are too many damn rules. Especially in the first weeks, the game flows way slower than what you’d want. The amount of stop and starts is frustrating, especially with a running five-minute quarter clock that puts time at a premium. 

  It’s trampoline basketball, we can understand that simple premise without rules like the reset, the needlessly confusing traveling laws, and an interference system I can not properly explain to you.

• It lists the players’ hometown instead of colleges/other sports leagues. 

  We have XFL players in the league! We have a lot of former college ballers! Why would their hometown be more interesting to me than that? 

• The original version was outside, and that captures the fun summer vibe the sport needs to capture way better. 

  This is the perfect time of year for this sport to occur. It’s right before the onslaught of football, and every other sport is in the dog days of its regular season. 

  SlamBall is for when it’s a summer night, and I wanna watch something fun. It being outdoors just makes things happier. That's a powerful brand association with summer nights it need not be passing up. 

• The three-point arc (two feet longer than an NBA three!) is worth four points. There was no team full of sharpshooters who chucked up as many four pointers as possible. 

  That’s a real missed opportunity, take everything this game’s supposed to be about and break it by spamming the most powerful move. Would’ve loved to see that. 

• The secondary color is so ugly, please pick something more fun than this tonal bronze. 

• Finally, and this is my biggest gripe, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD SHUT UP ABOUT BETTING. PLEASE. 

  I hate how betting has made its inroads into sports media, and it’s only getting worse. Especially with SlamBall. It’s hubbed in Vegas and the second they got a book to do lines THEY DIDNT SHUT UP ABOUT IT. 

  There would be entire quarters where all they’d do was explain and talk about was bets. 

  If you’re betting on SLAMBALL you are a lost soul and I hope you get the guidance you need in life. 

  And if you’re the announcing team SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP I DONT CARE I HATE THIS PLEASE TALK ABOUT THE GAME  JUST SHUT UP ABOUT BETTING ITS SO BAD I HATE THIS. 

Now, time for some good old fashioned side characters from the fastest six weeks in sports. 

The Wild World of Guest Announcers

ESPN assigned John Schiffren to be the voice of SlamBall, his second major gig after taking the Korean Baseball play-by-play gig in August 2020, approximately two months after the novelty of that being the only sport on TV had worn off. 

He’s on the mic every game, frequently paired with betting analyst Stormy Buonantony (a serious misuse of a really talented sideline reporter) and a coach of a team that’s not playing (which is an idea that sounds better than it ended up being).

There were a few exceptions though, when ESPN let another, more prominent sports figure into the booth. These are their stories. 

Nate Robinson

He is everything you’d want in a color commentator for SlamBall. 

A name pretty much every basketball fan recognizes and associates with dunking, popular on social media (he was the sacrificial lamb that kickstarted the Jake Paul boxing extravaganza) and a personality that makes the broadcast fun. 

It was all going so well, then he disappeared after the first couple games. I still don’t understand why. 

Mason Gordon

The CEO himself, his passion for the sport was obviously a cut above the rest, but he fell into corporate bro speak too often for me to clamor for more of him. 

However, as far as sports commissioners go, he did pretty dang well. 

Roger Goodell made the MANNINGS look wild and crazy by comparison when he was on the Manningcast. Adam Silver is a bore on his yearly Inside the NBA appearance. Rob Manfred DEAR GOD NO. 

So Mason Gordon, you’re comparatively cool. 

Jon Dorenbos

The 14-year NFL veteran long snapper who finished third on season 11 of America’s Got Talent thanks to his exceptional side talent as a magician. What was any of that sentence. 

He was on a lot towards the end of the season. I never once figured out why he was here. 

He has no connection to any element of the game (you did not have to hit people as a long snapper stop lying) and just never really clicked the way other guests were able to. 

James Lafferty

The man who played Nathan Scott on popular early-2000s teen drama One Tree Hill joined the booth because of his character’s five-episode SlamBall arc in the original series. 

Wait…WHAT. 

WHAT DO YOU MEAN POPULAR EARLY-2000S TEEN DRAMA ONE TREE HILL HAD A FIVE EPISODE SLAMBALL ARC? AND IT FEATURED TOP SLAMBALL PLAYERS ?! 

NOT TO STEREOTYPE FANS OF EITHER BUT WHAT CROSSOVER AUDIENCE WERE THEY POSSIBLY ANTICIPATING WITH THIS??

Anybody who has or knows somebody who has watched all of One Tree Hill please contact me. I need to know everything this fanbase thinks about SlamBall. 

Anyways, he was fun! Wouldn’t mind some more of him. 

However, he was far from the best and most interesting guest this season. Even Nate Robinson comes up empty compared to the guest who was the best. 

Because for the finale, they pulled out the big guns. 

Marshawn Lynch

In the running for greatest episode of anything ever is the second episode of Netflix’s Murderville. 

The show was an improv comedy show, where Will Arnett played a detective navigating a celebrity through a world of a fictional murder case with kooky suspects and wacky hijinks abound. Everybody but the celebrity guest were actors in on the joke, with the guest having to play along best they can. 

In the second episode, Marshawn Lynch was that celebrity guest, and broke the game instantly. Whatever Will Arnett and the Netflix crew could come up with to put Marshawn off-balance was futile. He was the center of this universe, and everything else was reacting to him. 

That is precisely what he did for SlamBall. 

Marshawn has been one of the foremost proponents of public cussing, which put the mute button on fast and furious mode.  That only made things funnier, because you’d hear the first nanosecond of Marshawn about to scream, followed by an instant audio dump. 

The first game he did was all about explaining the rules to him, which he was constantly confused by, as he should be BECAUSE THERE ARE TOO MANY OF THEM.

Still, having the chaos emerald between John and Jon was a constant state of volatility that was impossible to not be entrapped by. 

One part that really stood out for me was an entire quarter of a playoff game where he was talking about his jalapeno-heavy plate of Nachos. Or when he declared himself to not be a hater then immediately starting to hate on any player who didn’t hit somebody. 

The one major downfall to him being there was that he was so much cooler than everybody else in the booth. That’s not inherently a flaw, but Jon and John really wanted to get in on his coolness, which blows the whole bit. 

You don’t have to be like “Oh you liked that, didn’t you Marshawn” after every dunk or hit, just get out of the way and let the man cook. Otherwise you’re trying too hard. You should just be yourself. That’s why Marshawn is so magical, he’s always himself. 

Jon and John fell into the trap sometimes, but were mostly good partners, and I don’t want to rag on them because there was one HORRENDOUS offender of this principle. 

For the first quarter of the semifinal game, the CEO of the Sportsbook that sponsors SlamBall gambling joined the booth, to talk about betting as if we hadn’t heard enough about it already. 

This chummy Texan-coded chucklefuck was so happy to be near Marshawn. When he wasn’t spewing drivel about how SlamBall was the perfect sport to bet on, he was going above and beyond to laugh at his comments and you could tell he went in for the hug after every big play. 

It was awful. 

You can hear him try to shovel some more gambling slop into the mic when Marshawn bulldozes him out of the way for one of the greatest lines in sports commentary history. 

https://x.com/slamball/status/1692384436497564050?s=46&t=kT6N7NHJEiLHMRoXB5Naaw

(tweets don’t embed themselves anymore and I have no idea how to fix it, thanks Elon great stuff)

Thankfully, he was only on for one quarter. 

Then, he was replaced by Dez Bryant, who either randomly showed up or was drawn out of a hat of forgotten sportspersons. 

Anyways, if Dez’s mic was mixed properly and was uncensored, it’d probably be the best hour in TV history, but as it stands it was still wonderful.  

Marshawn then rejoined just Jon and John for the championship game, which was good clean fun. 

He stuck around for the dunk contest afterwards, well, at least part of it, before he did the most relatable thing I’ve ever seen an announcer do. 

While most people in his position would stick around on the floor and watch the dunk contest, and give some thoughts on the slams, Marshawn’s brain went to one place only.

These trampolines are unguarded 

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Instead of commentating the dunk contest, he chose to bounce on the trampolines by himself. He had the time of his life doing so.  

At the end of the night, when SlamBall was announced for season 2 in 2024, Marshawn said “Y’all better get used to hearing my voice”, which is very promising if you like getting your hopes up. 

Great stuff. 

The Wrath of the Wrath 

An integral part of the sport of SlamBall is that it is a full contact sport, provided you are not in the trampolines. 

Regular basketball can get chippy, so when you add in collisions you open the sport up to some hijinks. 

In just the third game of the year, a match between the Wrath and the Ozone, things reached the inevitable boiling point among the players, and we got our first SlamBrawl. 

That was to be expected, and it wasn’t anything crazier than a typical sports brouhaha. What was not to be expected was the COACHES joining in said brawl.   

https://x.com/slamball/status/1682972642867814407?s=46&t=kT6N7NHJEiLHMRoXB5Naaw

So we not only have grown men trying to fight on trampolines, we have MIDDLE AGED grown men attempting to fight on trampolines. It is logistically impossible to pull this off without looking incredibly goofy. 

Watching people angrily try to mind their step on trampolines while also getting close to their preferred target of anger is great, add on the commentary explicitly encouraging it and you’ve got a moment fit for the SlamBall scrapbook. 

Now, the story does not end there. 

The coaches were suspended for the next game, but as was said on the broadcast (by I believe Nate Robinson but am not 1000% on) the coaches took things outside and fought in the parking lot. 

It unfortunately was never followed up on, and I can not find a second source, but I choose to believe it because that would be incredible. 

These teams did not exist until 2023. These coaches and players would have no way of knowing each other previous to the summer. But now they are mortal enemies both on and off the court. 

It’s like an old kids movie where they’re told the other cabin in the summer camp is their enemy they’ll be competing in challenges with all summer, and the kids lean into that way too heavily before learning the value of true friendship in the end. 

Except there is no satisfying friendship moment here. The Wrath and Ozone have started a cycle of revenge, and they can’t wait to see each other next summer. 

The Social Media Team

Was perfect. There was not a single meme format they missed, they developed several inside jokes with the fans, and got as edgy as you could reasonably expect an ESPN-associated product to be. 

Highly recommend giving them a follow. 

The Main Event

If you know nothing of Modern SlamBall here is where the title will start to make sense to you. I dropped it two thirds of the way into the article because I’m artsy like that. 

I want to reiterate that this sport has not existed in over a decade, and that the teams picked players based on only a handful of tryouts.

Only three coaches from the original iteration of the sport are back, one is basketball coach mercenary Hernando Planells 

One is the literal Coach Carter from the 2005 movie Coach Carter.

The last is Brendan Kirsch, a former NAIA assistant coach who landed a job in the upstart league before it went under. 

Kirsch landed another hyperspecific basketball job afterwards, becoming an authenticity coordinator for movie and television shows that featured basketball, including the aforementioned One Tree Hill and those basketball scenes from The Office. Really.

Of those three, Coach Carter had by far the most success in the original SlamBall, and Kirsch had given up coaching for marketing, and hadn’t seen anything resembling a team in years. 

So naturally in 2023, Coach Carter led the worst team in the league, and Kirsch the best. 

Not just the best team.  But the BEST team.

And it just happened to be the one with the most memorable name of the original bunch. 

The Mob. 

On the first night of the sport’s reformation, the Mob took center stage, and won the first game by 33 points. Keep in mind this sport has five minute quarters, and a running clock that doesn’t stop for a whole lot of things. 

Ok, but that’s just the first game. There’s tons of teams in this league, maybe the Rumble are just that bad (which they pretty much were) and the Mob were just better that day. 

Well, there was another game that night, where the Mob faced the Slashers, the team hosting the other returning coach Planells, and won by 21. 

That opening night was not just a statement. It was a warning. 

The team went 19-0. 

They not only won every game, their AVERAGE margin of victory was 27(!!!) points. No game of the 19 was closer than 13 points. 

THESE PLAYERS DID NOT KNOW EACH OTHER. THE DRAFT WAS TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE SEASON. THE COACH HADNT COACHED IN A DECADE. THEY DIDN’T EVEN HAVE THE FIRST PICK. 

HOW does a league where every team starts from absolute zero have one team reach infinity?

It could be coach Kirsch’s legendary 72-page playbook. It could be picking players based on system fit. It could be Kirsch using his first stint to create a mythos around the franchise of the Mob, which his players bought into HARD. 

ORRRRRRRRRRR

They were literally made for this.

Those things all factor into the equation, sure, but they miss the bigger picture. Brendan Kirsch was made to coach SlamBall, and every player on the Mob was here to play SlamBall. 

How else do you dream of 72 pages of plays for sport that’s never had any? Kirsch invented a new language, speaking in tongues of the SlamBall gods. 

How else do you pull off the greatest trick in any sport, convincing your team that no one believes in you, in a sport with no narratives? Because he knew his players, and knew that they were made for this. 

Look at Cam Hollins. For a sport based on dunking, I realize how vague this compliment sounds, but he dunked a lot. 

The man had an innate sense of the trampolines, knowing where to get the best bounce, where the opponent would be if he bounced there, and the most efficient route to the hoop from there. 

This is sacred geometry, and he did it on the fly. 

And he wasn’t even the best on his team at doing that. 

Darius Clark didn’t care about efficiency in the same way, because he didn’t need to. It didn’t matter where he took off. It didn’t matter who was in the way. Darius Clark was going to dunk that basketball, and there wasn’t a damn thing you could do about it. 

Why? Because he could get up to here and you couldn’t.

He was the ball, trying to dunk himself through the hoop.

The windmill almost every time was a nice touch too. 

There also was Cam Horton, the ultimate assist man and glue guy, but no player exemplified Mob Mentality™ like the one I explicitly name-dropped in the title. 

Gage Smith

There exists a position called the stopper, it’s the most thankless position in sports, since its very existence necessitates you being someone else’s highlight reel fodder multiple times a night. 

They make an underrated amount of blocks, but nobody really cares that they’re there, that would defeat the whole purpose of this sport. 

The exception is Gage Smith. 

The league MVP as a defender in an offensive sport, had players running scared so they didn’t end up on his highlight reel. 

Imagine how powerful you must be to make people pass instead of trying to dunk on you when they have a trampoline. 

Like his coach, Gage Smith is a product of the NAIA, playing for Seward, Nebraska’s own CONCORDIA BULLDOGS. 

Concordia rightfully embraced him as one of their own, in what could be the first case of using SlamBall to recruit for basketball. 

https://twitter.com/cunebulldogs/status/1687990121130332161?s=20

He was so good, Marshawn Lynch jumped over the announcers table, joined the Mob’s huddle, shook Gage’s hand, looked him square in the eyes and said "It's an honor to fucking meet you."

SlamBall success is wild enough, but imagine telling Gage at Concordia that one day Beast Mode would say that to him.

Aside from getting mad props, he got to do two things that are reserved for the rarest air of elite athletes. 

Whenever he decided to join the offense, he was just as good as any dunker the Mob had, being able to deliver the punishment on stoppers that his opponents never could. 

Given that he only did this a handful of times, he reached the most powerful sentence in the world. 

I could do this, I just choose not to. 

While others strive their whole lives to accomplish this one thing, I am here to show you that its not that hard, and in fact so easy that I don’t want to waste my time doing it. So cold. 

The other thing he earned is an even rarer event, the power to try something in game just to see if he can do it. 

He already pulled off the 360 block, a product of being up by so much he can afford to trial and error it. 

When he got it, there was considerably less on the line than his coldest move yet. Going for the first triple double in SlamBall history, he went up for a faceoff.

A faceoff occurs after the first foul of each quarter (though it should be every foul, but that’s another grobble), where the fouler and the foulee go 1-on-1 on the tramps for a dunk-or-block showdown in lieu of free throws. 

Smith is on offense, and could just do his standard two handed rush toward the basket, beating the stopper on pure speed alone. 

But he chooses not to, and chooses to see if he can not only get the first triple double in SlamBall history, but if he can do it while doing THIS. 

https://twitter.com/SlamBall/status/1687995655157874688?s=20

A 360 between-the-legs, known in SlamBall circles as the McNasty, OVER A DEFENDER FOR A TRIPLE DOUBLE. 

WHY? BECAUSE HE CAN. 

I believe that Gage Smith would much rather be doing this than playing in the NBA. He was literally made for this. 

I picture the climactic scene in the Barbie movie (spoilers if you couldn’t tell by how I foreshadowed that I was going to describe the climactic scene of the movie), but instead of the Barbie creator informing Margot Robbie’s character of her purpose, it’s Mason Gordon bestowing Gage Smith his purpose of SlamBall. 

There’s a lesson there. A year ago Gage didn’t know what he’d be doing, maybe playing basketball overseas, maybe something else entirely, then the sky opened up and SlamBall came down. 

SlamBall is a hyperspecific set of skills, involving basketball, acrobatics, hockey and a little bit of football. 

That exact combination of skills was never useful until SlamBall came. 

There’s this quote, widely attributed to Einstein even though it absolutely was not him that said it, that goes like this. 

“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Judge them by the metrics of their original sports, and they were merely good, judge them by SlamBall metrics and they are perfect. 

That’s the lesson of the Mob. 

There’s a SlamBall for all of us out there. You there dear reader have interests, you have skills, and your combined knowledge and experiences are the best in the world at the finest points of their intersections.

You just haven’t had a multi-millionaire invent a career for that yet. 

But if the perfect SlamBall team can fall out of the sky, you can rest assured that you’d do the same if that opportunity came. 

Just don’t think about the other seven teams. 

That’s the natural end of the article but I have one more thought in me

Y’know what I actually think the Mob should do is be a barnstorming SlamBall team. 

Like the Harlem Globetrotters, or the old softball act the King & His Court, I think areas around the country should try to form their best SlamBall teams out of local athletic talent and see how they fare against the unstoppable Mob when they come to town. 

Make it like a contest with a prize on the head of whoever can take down the Mob, which of course they would never do, but you know there are people out there who think they can do this, when they really could not, and we get to see highlight play after highlight play from the Mob. 

This is kind of what the league already is, but I think dropping the pretext would be really fun. 

Anyways, SlamBall is coming back, and the Mob are running it back, so I wonder if we’ll see other teams try to make superteams to take them down. I’m invested. 

Dangit that’s not a good conclusion I messed up, here’s the Space Jam theme song

COME ON AND SLAM AND WELCOME TO THE JAM

There we go