Cassandra Cassidy concluded a report in Morning Brew about the TGL, a new indoor golf league headlined by Tiger Woods and Rory McIllroy, by asking an open-ended question: “[T]he sports world is waiting to see if young fans take to the new age game, or if it flounders like SlamBall.” [Cassandra Cassidy at Morning Brew (01/07/25)] I submit for the record that when I started reading the article (I had not previously read about TGL), my first thought was SlamBall. Seldom have I ever felt so on the same weve-length as a reporter. All jokes aside, SlamBall, which is roughly basketball-plus-trampolines (I found it vaguely reminiscent of the NBA Street video games), is neat for the first five-to-ten minutes. I remember when ESPN tried to make it a thing in the early 2000s and I watched a couple of games, but its moment came and went quickly. The TGL is similarly (if not more) gimmicky, but it has the advantage of having the biggest name in golf (still Tiger Woods) whereas SlamBall did not feature any broadly recognizable practitioners. You may be wondering how this is a things I learned post. Learning that TGL exists is not very exciting and I noted that I remember watching SlamBall in the early 2000s. While looking for a good SlamBall link, I learned that ESPN apparently planned to air SlamBall in 2023 and 2024. [Katie Hughes Martin for ESPN Press Room (June 21, 2023)] That was the plan at least, but it does not look like SlamBall 2024 happened. [Wikipedia; January 11, 2025 capture of blank 2024 schedule on SlamBall website] In any event, it was (or is) a solid come-back, I assumed that SlamBall had gone the way of the dodo after the first ESPN rodeo in 2002.