So, the way we looked at it was, if we can get 15-20 dunks, you guys can’t guard us.”Ĭoach Lewis, a Hall of Fame hoops savant, was always interested in efficiency. It was a highly efficient shot and it was an intimidating shot. The dunk was significant for that reason. So our focus was always on efficiency, and the dunk was a demonstrative shot that let the other team know you can’t stop us and if you can’t stop us, we gonna win this game. “And what’s the highest percentage shot in the game? The dunk shot. “Guy Lewis was a phenomenal coach and the reason he was such a good coach was he wanted us to shoot high-percentage shots,” says Drexler. “The opportunity to dunk in a game, that’s what the fans wanted to see.” “Dunking was something that was the highlight of any game,” says Olajuwon. The Zeitgeist was wrong, though, because the moratorium on dunks depleted the game’s excitement.Įveryone knew the bedazzling effectiveness of the dunk shot (the late great Chick Hearn coined the term “slam dunk,” a decidedly immense improvement over “dunk shot.” Thanks Chick!), but none more than Lewis, who encouraged his players to dunk outright because the dunk, of course, was meant to be a breathtaking spectacle and a devastating strategy against competitors. From 1967 to 1976, the dunk shot was banned by the NCAA, a rule that came to be known as the “Lew Alcindor rule.” The rule was put in place to supposedly level the playing field, because players like Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and the extremely athletic men of the reigning champion Texas Western University were dominating the game because of their ability to “stuff” the ball into the basket once they got deep into the paint. The Phi Slama Jama movement came on the heels of the dunkless era. “It was amazing just to have that name and concept and what made it even cooler was that you had to be on the team to be a member.” “To be in college and to come out with our own fraternity, Phi Slama Jama, was so cool,” says Olajuwon. Vanity, as it turns out, is one helluva motivation to excel. The team, now dubbed Phi Slama Jama, dispatched 16 men who boldly bounced off the floor like a Spalding in search of rims to detonate. Of course Houston, a city known for interstellar flight, would spawn a team whose identity centered on its own brand of aerial artistry. The players absolutely loved it because it gave them some notoriety.” And it immediately went viral before things even went viral. “They started playing above the rim and dunking everywhere, so I was trying to think, what would a college dunking fraternity be called? It had to have something with ‘Slam’ in it and most fraternities start with ‘Phi.’ I was on deadline and had to think of something: Phi Slama Jama. “I was intrigued by the University of Houston team because they were so much fun,” says former Houston Post sportswriter Thomas Bonk. They were the thundering herd, barreling and fast breaking toward the basket, racking up 58 dunks during the infancy of the 1982-83 season. With any sports team of historical significance, there’s always a specific moment when everything falls into place and begins to make perfect sense.įor the much-ballyhooed, air-walkin’, slam-dunkin’ University of Houston men’s basketball team, which was led by future Hall of Famers Hakeem “The Dream” Olajuwon and Clyde “The Glide” Drexler, that serendipitous moment came when a certain sportswriter turned in his column about a cadre of high flyin’ dunkers who used Hofheinz Pavilion as their launching pad.
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