SLAM Magazine Review - July 1996

Detlef Schrempf, Shaq Bars, and a few high school All-Americans you may have heard of.

Jun 05, 2025

I’m back.

Paralleling Jordan, I took an unofficial retirement and wrote about baseball for a while. And I loved it! I still do, but writing anything more than 100 words about the current game is a TASK given my other life responsibilities. So until my wife says I can quit my job and write full time, I’m back in my wheelhouse, waxing nostalgic about ‘90s hoops for your (and my!) entertainment.

This time around, I’m reviewing SLAM, the official in-your-face hoops magazine. Let’s get to it!

News & Notes

Just want to highlight this awesome picture of Dr. J. Has there ever been a bad picture of him taken in the red, white, and blue Nets jersey? Random story: I went to an oral surgeon for a consultation to get a couple of wisdom teeth removed. The assistant led me to a very nice room where I had to watch a video of the wisdom tooth removal process. On one of the walls was a huge framed picture of Dr. J that looked a lot like this. I knew at that moment that this was the best oral surgeon on the planet and felt very comfortable with him using pliers to rip out two of my teeth.

Great piece on Brent Barry. Here are the highlights from his dunk contest win in 1996.

I think I’ve heard of a few of these guys..

Say whaaaaat?

I love this issue’s letter from the editor. Tony is talking about a Li’l Penny commercial where Nick Anderson is reading a copy of SLAM. The whole Li’l Penny marketing campaign is an all-timer and this commercial is one of my favorites.

You guys, the letters section of SLAM is wild. Way more snark than any issue of Inside Stuff I’ve ever read. There’s one letter written by a guy named Terry who calls out this other guy Joel who allegedly had some not-so-nice things to say about Shaq. So Terry goes on this long rant about how great Shaq is and then CHALLENGES JOEL AND HIS FRIENDS TO A 5v5 GAME. SLAM even goes so far as to say that sounds awesome and tells Joel to get in touch to they can set it up. I need to know what happened here.

Posterized!

I love both sides of this poster. Absolute perfection.

SneakadaMonth

This issue’s sneaker of the month is the Converse All-Star 2000, worn by Knicks superstar Anthony Mason.

Best Ads

Grant Hill rocking FILA’s legendary sunwear. Nobody did a four-lens beryllium wrap quite like FILA.

This ad for NBA Shoot Out is great. I love that it highlights that you can play an entire season. We didn’t know it at the time, but that was almost as good as it was going to get.