What is Phi Slama Jama? Looking back at Houston basketball's famous 1980s teams

USA Today

07-04-2025

What is Phi Slama Jama? Looking back at Houston basketball's famous 1980s teams
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Kelvin Sampson's funny response to historic Houston win over Duke
Kelvin Sampson and Houston pulled off a historic comeback against Duke in the Final Four and the legendary coach has funny reaction when hearing the stat.
Sports Pulse
Houston men's basketball has become a machine under coach Kelvin Sampson, an unlikely national juggernaut that has risen to the upper echelon of the sport after spending the better part of the previous 30 years in the metaphorical wilderness.
Since the start of the 2018-19 season, Sampson's fifth at the helm, the Cougars have gone 216-35, winning an absurd 86.1% of their games. They've made it to at least the Sweet 16 in each of the past six seasons in which there has been an NCAA Tournament. In each of the past three tournaments, they've earned a No. 1 seed. They've made two Final Fours in the past five seasons. Perhaps most impressively, they seamlessly made the transition from the American Athletic Conference to the Big 12, posting a 34-4 record in their first two seasons in arguably the most difficult league in the country.
On Monday night, all those years of building Houston up from a commuter school that played in front of small crowds in a dingy, outdated arena into a model of sustained success will culminate with a national championship game appearance against Florida.
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For all the Cougars have accomplished in recent years, a list that could soon include a national title, the program is perhaps best known for a group of players it had 40 years ago.
In the early 1980s, at what could still be considered the zenith of Houston basketball, the Cougars were carried by a group of stars that earned one of the greatest, most memorable nicknames in American sports history — Phi Slama Jama.
As Houston prepares to take part in the national title game for the first time since the halcyon days of Phi Slama Jama, here's a closer look at those iconic Cougars teams:
What is Phi Slama Jama?
Phi Slama Jama was the moniker given to Houston's men's basketball team during the 1982-83 season, with the label later encompassing a three-year stretch, from 1981-84, in which the Cougars made the Final Four every season.
The legendary nickname was born from an otherwise forgettable game, a 112-58 rout of Pacific on Jan. 2, 1983. Among those in attendance was Thomas Bonk, a sports columnist for the Houston Post writing about the game. While racking his brain to try to come up with a compelling column about 54-point blowout, he eventually struck gold.
'I thought 'Well, let's see. They had 10 dunks. What would you call a dunking fraternity?'' Bonk said in 'Phi Slama Jama,' a 2016 ESPN documentary about the eponymous Houston teams. 'Well, you've got to start with 'Phi.' Then, OK, 'Phi Gamma,' how about 'Slama'? And then 'Jama' goes with that because slams and jams go together, so it became Phi Slama Jama.'
The name wasn't casually dropped deep into his column, either, instead appearing in the opening sentence in the Jan. 4 edition of the paper:
As members of the exclusive college roundball fraternity Phi Slama Jama, the Houston chapter has learned proper parliamentary procedure.
The following day, Bonk received a call from Frank Schultz, an assistant athletic director at Houston, commending him for the name and asking if the school could use it. Bonk agreed and the nickname quickly caught fire, with the university, its fans and players embracing what became popularly known as 'Texas' Tallest Fraternity.'
'It happened overnight,' Schultz said in the ESPN documentary. 'The marketing department, the media, everybody read the column by Tommy Bonk, saw the name. (The players) just fell in love with the name Phi Slama Jama.'
Who was on Phi Slama Jama?
Houston's success in the early 1980s was made possible by a talented group of players who helped turn Phi Slama Jama from a regional curiosity into a national phenomenon.
The most famous members of the team were Hakeem Olajuwon (who was known then as Akeem) and Clyde Drexler, who went on to combine for 22 all-star appearances in the NBA and won an NBA title together in 1995 with, fittingly, the Houston Rockets. Both men are in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Olajuwon was with the Cougars for all three years of Phi Slama Jama while Drexler left for the NBA in 1983 after his junior season.
Those Houston teams also included forward Michael Young, guard Rob Williams, forward Larry Micheaux, guard Alvin Franklin and forward Benny Anders, among other standouts. Young — who led the Cougars in scoring in the 1982-83 and 1983-84 seasons — Williams, and Micheaux all went on to play in the NBA.
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Phi Slama Jama coach
The maestro of Houston's Phi Slama Jama teams was coach Guy Lewis, who led the Cougars from 1956-86.
Lewis' teams, particularly during Phi Slama Jama's run, employed an up-tempo, entertaining style. True to Phi Slama Jama's name, Houston's teams in the early 1980s were known for their dunking prowess, which came only a few years after the dunk had been banned at the college level for nearly a decade.
Over his 30 years with the Cougars, Lewis' teams went 592-279 and made five Final Fours. Lewis was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2013 and the court at Houston's arena, the Fertitta Center, is named after him.
Did Phi Slama Jama win a championship?
For all its dunks and wins, Phi Slama Jama was never able to cut down the nets and win a national championship.
The Cougars made the Final Four in three consecutive seasons from 1982-84, but never won it all. That run included losses in the national championship game in 1983 and 1984, the first of which they entered as a sizable favorite before falling 54-52 to NC State on a buzzer-beating put-back dunk from Lorenzo Charles that's one of the most famous plays in college basketball history.
Despite not winning a championship, Houston went 88-16 over those three seasons.