{"id":823162,"date":"2024-12-20T16:07:50","date_gmt":"2024-12-20T21:07:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/?p=823162"},"modified":"2024-12-30T09:56:15","modified_gmt":"2024-12-30T14:56:15","slug":"slam-hof-story-full","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/the-magazine\/slam-hof-story-full\/","title":{"rendered":"How Dennis Page Founded SLAM and Transformed Sports Media"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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<\/em>, in 1980, and was now more than a decade into a successful run as that mag\u2019s publisher. He was happy enough to have abandoned his earlier life goal of being a deejay or working for Rolling Stone<\/em>, but he was ready to start something new. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as Page, who had always loved hoops as much as music (even if he\u2019d 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, \u201ca hip-hop basketball magazine.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sports media would never be the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Professional athletes have been \u201ccool\u201d for almost as long as sports have existed as a vocation. Page\u2019s first favorite players were guys he saw in person growing up in Trenton, NJ\u2014local legend Tal Brody, and New York City\u2019s Lew Alcindor, whose Power Memorial team had visited Page\u2019s hometown to take on Trenton Catholic. As Page\u2019s hoops exposure grew with sports media\u2019s gradual growth, he fell in love with players like Earl \u201cThe Pearl\u201d Monroe and Julius \u201cDr. J\u201d 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\u2019s<\/em> magazine took the time to care about spotlighting young players and Sport<\/em> and Sports Illustrated<\/em> raised the level of writing in the field, and Page devoured all of them. There wasn\u2019t much flavor, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Page writes in the intro to the recently released book, 30 Years of SLAM: The Definition of Basketball Culture<\/em>, \u201cThe 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<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There were some hiccups over the early years\u2014Michael Jordan retired just as Issue 1 was being planned, Reggie Miller didn\u2019t appreciate some of the jokes made at his expense, some long-time NBA execs and old-school reporters did not enjoy SLAM\u2019s tone\u2014but more or less, Page\u2019s vision played out beautifully. SLAM\u2019s covers showed the players like the \u201crock stars\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mag\u2019s 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<\/em>-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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then the internet took over. SLAM\u2014and in particular, Harris Publications, the old-school<\/em> family publisher that operated it\u2014was 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\u2014Page 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\u2014never stopped caring about the sport, the lifestyle, or the \u201c#slamfam\u201d that stayed loyal through it all. 
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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 \u201cbuy\u201d or \u201cboost\u201d its reach. SLAM was, and is, an organic<\/em> media outlet fueled by the love of the game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the most-recent stage of SLAM\u2019s life, from about 2017, when SLAM was acquired by JDS Sports and Page became an actual part owner of the magazine he\u2019d started, to today, you\u2019ll occasionally \u201chear\u201d Page say\u2014either literally, in his classic South Jersey accent, or virtually, via an Instagram post or comment\u2014\u201cthis shit ain\u2019t easy.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It wasn\u2019t. And isn\u2019t. But with Page\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Reprinted from the\u00a0Basketball Hall of Fame Enshrinement 2024 Yearbook courtesy of the\u00a0Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Ben Osborne is a longtime sports writer and editor who served as SLAM\u2019s Editor-in-Chief from 2007-2016.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s publisher. He was happy enough to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":823176,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49435],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-823162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-magazine"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=823162"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":823396,"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823162\/revisions\/823396"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/823176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=823162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=823162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=823162"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slamonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=823162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}