SLAMADAMONTH!!! (Slam)

Name: andimohr

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Product:	Slam
Date:	04/04/01 (478 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: High Quality Articles

Disadvantages: Toooooooooo many adverts

SLAM is a great magazine. It's the only magazine that I make any effort to go and get (or it was until I subscribed), which to those people who know me, probably says a lot.

It's an American import, which becomes blatantly obvious as soon as you open it. Adverts for the US Navy kinda give it away just a bit. And being a US magazine, there is practically no material on the European game, so if you're looking for that, then SLAM is not the mag for you.

It's not all that widely available, but if you go into a decently sized WHSMITH, they'll probably have it, and for £2.75 it's about the average price for a monthly sports magazine of it's size and without trying to make this op sound like an advert, it fills it's 148 pages full of great stuff.

American sports magazines are fundamentally different to their more reserved British counterparts. For a start, the cover is a prestige position. The player has to earn himself a cover. As a result, the player with the most covers is.....Michael Jordan (6 out of the first 50 devoted to MJ). No surprises there. A neat thing SLAM also does is some months they do multiple-covers, ie they'll be two different people on the cover of the same issue. You could say this is exploiting collectors of the mag but it's nice to get a choice!

The other major difference is that, even if you're followed and played basketball for years and years, you can pick SLAM up, flick through it and feel a bit lost. The slang and jargon used is sometimes quite obscure and initially it seems like parts of it are written in code, particularly on the letters page ("Trashtalk"). Don't forget that this product is aimed predominantly at the 16-25 male American, who is probably also quite into Hip-hop too (bball and hip-hop are eternally intertwined) and as a result there are a lot of references that are pretty much impossible to understand if you're not hip-hop enough (
like me!). However, I'm not saying that there is a music reference every few sentances, they just appear every so often.

If you can get past this minor problem, which isn't really hard at all, there's a whole lot of reading to be done. The mag is produced in a regular format and is rarely changed from month to month. It's split into 3 parts, called "Front Court", "Features" and "Back Court". Clearly two basketball references there.

"Front Court" contains the editor's column (often quite witty, althought the new Ed, Russ Bengtson, is not so funny as his predecessor, Tony Gervino), "Trashtalk" (letters page), "Hype" (a collection of shortish articles followed by a few pages of poster articles- ie A4 poster with a column running down one side) and finishes triumphantly with a double-page spread called "SLAMADAMONTH" (a poster of some amazing dunk, with a short article and slow-mo stills to accompany it).

My two favourite parts of "Front Court" are SLAMADAMONTH and also "Noyz", which is a tiny little column running along the base of the pages in "Hype". The thing I like about "Noyz" is that it consists of random, basketball-related one-liners, running one after another over about 4 pages. Some of the comments are hilarious.

"Trashtalk" is also often quite amusing. It ususally 3 pages long, and the letters chosen are usually of a high standard and aren't just congratulating the magazine on how good it is and actually do have something to say. I often find some of these quite witty, and the short replies they recieve from the Ed are often just as good.

"Features" is the bulk of the magazine. The player on the cover of the mag always gets an article in this section by one of the senior writers or editors. In addition to this main piece, there are usually 8-10 major articles as
well, each recieving somewhere between 3-6 pages of writing. The accompanying pictures are always of a very high standard. I find that the best writer for SLAM is Scoop Jackson. He seems to have a superb flair for writing about basketball, (and also works for the NBA's own official magazine) although he does seem to bring the issue of race into a lot of his stories. He also appeared briefly on British TV alongside John Amaechi (Britiain's premier export to the NBA) on Channel 4's coverage of the 1998 NBA Finals. The other excellent writers are Michael Bradley and Alan Paul. You do get to know the styles of the main writers over a longish period of time, and I think that's better than the Britsh format, whereby articles are a lot more formal, and as a result a bit samey. Also included in this section is a double sided poster of A3 size and has a handy idea that other mags might find useful: it is attached by perforations for easy removal instead of messing about with staples! Although you do have to be careful not to rip it.

"Back Court" is in three subsections: "Kicks", "Punks" and "Postgame". "Kicks" is a great idea which sees the best new basketball trainers on the market reviewed. In fact EMAP (the publishers) do a sister magazine to SLAM called "Kicks" which focuses entirely on the shoes! The study of bball trainers is done a lot more closely over there than say, football boots over here. I've never seen this in the shops though and I can't see it being introduced, although if you really wanted it I guess you could get it imported. "Punks" is a bunch of articles about the up-and-coming youngsters in high schools around America. You'll also find the odd basketball computer game reviewed here. "Postgame" is a column written exclusively by former-NBA champion Kenny Smith and is usually quite thought provoking and comments on the general state of bask
etball. There used to be a page called "Last Shot" showing a spectacular shot that won or lost some vital game, although I have not seen that for quite a while, they may have stopped doing it.

Another thing that I think is great about the magazine is that it doesn't restrict itself to the NBA. It also gives a lot of coverage to the college scene (a concept vastly different to here in England and not one to be discussed at this point), the high school scene and also the women's game: from a professional level down to some college and high school (occasionally). Having said that, the male content outweighs the female and rightly so in my opinion, because the male leagues are far more competitive. And in almost every issue, one of the features is about some game in the past, or some former-great, which is useful cos they'll often get referred to.

The big problem is the number of adverts. In a random copy I found 62 pages of adverts out of 148 which is not a good ratio. However, I don't believe this hinders the mag that much, and I sometimes like seeing the US ads we never get to see over here. Oh, and I'd advise you to ignore all the adverts for "growth drugs" you'll find near the back. I doubt very much they work.

Another gripe some people may have, is the lack of stastics. There is no section at all saying results, standings, league leaders in scoring/rebounding/etc. This is probably because games are played so often in the US, results and standings would very soon become out of date. If you really want stats, look em up on the internet! You're on it now, ain'tcha!

If you're a regular reader to SLAM, I'd suggest you subscribe to it. Over the internet is probably best, saves you posting the little form to New York. To subscribe costs $24 for 9 issues which is a good saving on £24.75 for the same period (note the currencies) if you just get it from the shops. Although having
only just subscribed to it, I cannot comment on promptness of delivery.

The magazine has a very good website which contains some of the material from the magazine as well as completely original stuff and is worth checking out if you're considering buying the magazine.

http://www.slamonline.com

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