40 Years After Phi Slama Jama, There’s Hope in Houston for a Better Finish

“Does it have any redeeming factor for the fact that we fell short? I don’t really think so,” Gettys, the school’s career assist leader, said of a potential championship run this season. “Now, will the old guys celebrate as hard as a bunch of 60-year-olds can celebrate if we win? Absolutely. One hundred percent.”

Houston has never been a consistent basketball powerhouse, but in the early 1980s, it was one of the hottest tickets in the game. Lewis assembled a team mostly composed of local talent and, in an era when most teams preferred to slow down their offense, encouraged his players to fly above the rim, to run and dunk with abandon. In his reasoning, the slam dunk was a high-percentage play that fired up the team and its fans and, hopefully, intimidated the opponents.

The team’s amusing nickname was birthed after one particularly slam-heavy Sunday afternoon win, when Thomas Bonk, a sportswriter composing a column for the Tuesday edition of the Houston Post, began playing around with a screwball concept: What would a dunking fraternity be called?

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/24/sports/ncaabasketball/houston-phi-slama-jama.html