{{ variable.name }} : {{ variable.values[selectedVariantsIndex[variable_index]].name }}
Quantity:
Gen pop had its run. SLAM had had enough of it by 1999. Issue 32 became the official bridge between playing the game and creating a new one to play, and the ferryman who took everyone across was Allen Iverson.
Two covers had already featured him, SLAM 9 and SLAM 18. The first was an action shot. The second stayed relatively tame.
Then came SLAM 32. Every locked door to self-expression, keys lost decades back, came down with it: jewelry, tattoos, an afro, an attitude and something called a "throwback jersey", all on the front of a national magazine.
Basketball wasn't in Kansas anymore, Jack. Not in the Land of Oz either. A 23-year-old with a 'fro skipped along the Yellow Brick Road and crossed the Wizard clean out of his little green suit.
Status quo left behind. Bubba Chuck — Iverson's nickname among friends — used that cover to confirm the thing the nation keeps burying under conformity: it's cool to be you. Decades before anyone would have rightly called Iverson HIM, he was simply being him.
"I dress the way I want to dress, I look the way I want to look," he says in the cover story.
Facts, straight like that.
That one image sent SLAM off at speed. We agreed with Bubba Chuck, and from then on everyone on our covers and inside our pages had to be true to themselves. Our voice came out of #3.
A new game was set. Everyone else eventually tried to be like SLAM. We stayed different.
Product details
Choose which cookies you'd like to allow. Necessary cookies keep the site working and can't be switched off.
