Dennis Page had two main passions in his life: music and basketball. In 1993, Page was doing pretty well with one of them: He had helped launch the rock and roll magazine, Guitar World, in 1980, and was now more than a decade into a successful run as that mag’s publisher. He was happy enough to have abandoned his earlier life goal of being a deejay or working for Rolling Stone, but he was ready to start something new.
Just as Page, who had always loved hoops as much as music (even if he’d never worked in the sport), started to get anxious about what magazine he might launch next, a friend of his from the music business, Alan Grunblatt, suggested he start, effectively, “a hip-hop basketball magazine.”
Sports media would never be the same.
Professional athletes have been “cool” for almost as long as sports have existed as a vocation. Page’s first favorite players were guys he saw in person growing up in Trenton, NJ—local legend Tal Brody, and New York City’s Lew Alcindor, whose Power Memorial team had visited Page’s hometown to take on Trenton Catholic. As Page’s hoops exposure grew with sports media’s gradual growth, he fell in love with players like Earl “The Pearl” Monroe and Julius “Dr. J” Erving. Then there was Isiah Thomas. And by the early 90s, of course, there was Michael Jordan. But the way these superheroes were covered by the press stayed pretty static. Newspapers focused on games and stats. TV focused on broadcasting games. Street & Smith’s magazine took the time to care about spotlighting young players and Sport and Sports Illustrated raised the level of writing in the field, and Page devoured all of them. There wasn’t much flavor, though.
As Page writes in the intro to the recently released book, 30 Years of SLAM: The Definition of Basketball Culture, “The idea crystallized as a basketball-only magazine from a hip-hop point of view. I could see it in my head clear as day; the design would look like those Nike/Mars Blackmon/Michael Jordan print ads, the photography would be as good as VIBE, and the writing would be irreverent like Rolling Stone.”
There were some hiccups over the early years—Michael Jordan retired just as Issue 1 was being planned, Reggie Miller didn’t appreciate some of the jokes made at his expense, some long-time NBA execs and old-school reporters did not enjoy SLAM’s tone—but more or less, Page’s vision played out beautifully. SLAM’s covers showed the players like the “rock stars” they were. SLAM introduced fashion shoots to sports magazines and has covered the look of basketball players in some manner ever since (most famously in the 2020s with its must-follow Instagram account, @leaguefits). SLAM introduced a KICKS section about sneakers that for many years was the first place players and fans would turn when they opened an issue. The KICKS section begat a KICKS Magazine that has come out annually since 1998 and in many ways set the tone for the now-countless numbers of sneaker mags, blogs, and social media accounts (including @slamkicks, natch) that have popped up since.
The mag’s almost non-stop ascension as a business lasted from launch in 1994 to early 2004, when the 10th anniversary issue dropped at a whopping, lucrative and Vogue-like 260(!!) pages, stuffed with ads from every sneaker brand and hip-hop label you could think of and it was the best-selling sports magazine on American newsstands.
Then the internet took over. SLAM—and in particular, Harris Publications, the old-school family publisher that operated it—was pretty slow to figure out how to monetize online. Issues shrank in terms of revenue and page count. There were some terribly hard times from a business perspective, but the staff—Page always had a gift for hiring and empowering talented folks who were on the rise in the profession, the best of whom had a gift for hiring and empowering an even newer generation of on-the-rise future stars—never stopped caring about the sport, the lifestyle, or the “#slamfam” that stayed loyal through it all.
While SLAM had been slow to convert to the world wide web, it was lightning-quick as social media became the new place to reach fans, surpassing one million followers on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook very quickly on each of those platforms without ever spending a dime to “buy” or “boost” its reach. SLAM was, and is, an organic media outlet fueled by the love of the game.
In the most-recent stage of SLAM’s life, from about 2017, when SLAM was acquired by JDS Sports and Page became an actual part owner of the magazine he’d started, to today, you’ll occasionally “hear” Page say—either literally, in his classic South Jersey accent, or virtually, via an Instagram post or comment—“this shit ain’t easy.”
It wasn’t. And isn’t. But with Page’s dedication to the game and the brand, and the many great folks who learned from him matching that devotion, SLAM has made it to 30 years and transformed the sport every step of the way.
Reprinted from the 2024 Induction Weekend Program courtesy of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Ben Osborne is a longtime sports writer and editor who served as SLAM’s Editor-in-Chief from 2007-2016.
