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. "During the 18 months, we had about 3 months of hardcore fundraising at the end of 2014/beginning of 2015, where we raised the majority of the money, but it definitely consumed a lot of mental space during the entire time period.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. " It was definitely a challenge to manage the fundraising and the business at the same time," Whickham tells Business Insider. While the funding process took a long time, it enabled Wickham and Young to keep the controlling stake in their five-year-old venture. Wickham says Grandex's content sites, Total Frat Move, Total Sorority Move, and Post Grad Problems, are seeing a combined 10-20 million unique visitors per month. Wickham tells Business Insider that Man Outfitters, Grandex's new clothing line that launched in February, is on track to generate $1 million this year without spending any money on third-party advertising.Īlthough revenue is up, Grandex's article traffic has remained relatively flat, in part because of Facebook's ever-changing algorithm. Investors include former Dell CFO Jim Schneider, Tory Burch board member John Hamlin, former Lockheed Martin COO and president Chris Kubasik, EMC CEO Joe Tucci, EMC Vice Chairman Bill Teuber, and Seagate president Rocky Pimentel.
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