SLAMBALL began in a small warehouse in Los Angeles on a makeshift court cobbled together from spare parts. The beginning of the idea started with the ambition to create a fully realized sport that was inspired by the strategies, aesthetics and pacing of video games. I thought about a sport where the athletes fly higher and hit harder performing feats that were once the exclusive domain of the pixelated athletes from Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo. Having grown up with the earliest examples of the UFC and their mixing of different kind of fighting styles, SlamBall quickly found its form as a mash-up team sport derived from parts of basketball, football, hockey and gymnastics.It tooks SlamBall to Mike Tollin, a genius producer who has brought to the screen sports-themed and other projects like ARLI$$, Coach Carter, Wild Hogs, Smallville, Bronx is Burning and Radio. He thought I was crazy at first, but I kept coming and I kept talking to him about how great SlamBall could become. He saw that I was either insane or I was onto something and he committed to work with me to develop the game. Weve been working together ever since to build the sport toward global awareness and an international infrastructure.

THE BEGINNINGI built the first half-court to train five players in the beginning. I had rough ideas about the rules and game play, but it needed real on-the-court R&D to make it work. I recruited dexterous, aggressive athletes from multiple sports backgrounds.James Willis, Michael Goldman, Sean Jackson, David Redmond and Jeff Sherridan worked with me on the court for long hours as the game found its basic structure in the earliest weeks. Jeff was a football player from Chicago, James and David were college basketball players, Sean was an LA streetball guy and Michael was a Jewish All-American high school basketball star. We were a strange collection of athletes, but within minutes of being on the court, everyone could see where their skills fit in and how they could all work together.Shortly afterwards, the first full court was constructed and I started pulling in additional players, which included Stan Shakes Fletcher, Rob Wilson and Dion Mays, who collectively raised the bar for SlamBalls creativity and physicality. Jeff and Dion, the two guys with football backgrounds, started lighting people up in the open floor. The basketball guys didnt like it at first, but then they started getting into it when they got to pancake the opposition (most of the time, me). The spring floor provided a phenomenal safety feature and guys could play a high-impact game for hours at full speed. The first two teams, the Mob and the Rumble played a series of games on a full court in East Los Angeles in front of a frenzied crowd. Mike got the TV people down to the warehouse and we immediately won a cable contract with what would soon become Spike TV.