SlamBall
form of basketball
SlamBall is a hybrid sport combining elements from basketball, American football, hockey, and gymnastics played with four trampolines in front of each net and boards around the court edge. While SlamBall is based on basketball, it is a contact sport, with blocks, collisions and rough physical play as part of the game, similar to elements of American football and ice hockey.
Professional SlamBall games currently air on television for ESPN and stream on ESPN+. Previously, they aired on television with Spike TV for two seasons in 2002–2003, and the POWERade SlamBall Challenge was aired on CSTV (now CBS Sports Network) in 2007. SlamBall returned in August 2008, airing on Versus (now NBC Sports Network) and CBS. The 2008 SlamBall season aired at one point on weekends on Cartoon Network. SlamBall was shown on One HD in Australia during 2009. SlamBall held its first major international tournament in China in 2012.
History
SlamBall was invented in 1999 by Mason Gordon, who was working at the time for Tollin/Robbins Productions. The name SlamBall is owned by Gordon's company. Inspired by video games, Gordon sketched an idea on a napkin for a sport that combined several existing ones.
“SlamBall” enters the record as form of basketball. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what SlamBall, form and basketball can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“SlamBall” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, SlamBall, form and basketball provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q392633. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2002, 2003, 2007 and 2008.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “SlamBall” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.