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The basketball manga Slam Dunk has endured for years. The 1990 series from Takehiko Inoue with Shonen Jump has become an iconic sports story long after it’s ending in 1996. With NBA players like Rui Hachimura listing it as an influence despite it being well before his time. It’s recent feature film The First Slam Dunk opened to warmly received critical reception and was a blockbuster box office hit. It has sparked a new interest in readers for the old series. New readers will be introduced to the red head problem child Hanamichi Sakuragi, the talented but spacey ace Kaede Rukawa, the reformed sharpshooter Hisashi Mitsui, and the rest of Shohoku High. They will see the highs and lows of our protagonists as they try to challenge the nation in a country wide tournament to see whose the best of the best.
Which leads up to a linger questions that all fans have had about the series even decades after it’s end and the point of this whole post; who actually won the National Championship in the end?
Fans of the series will know that Slam Dunk ended on a bit of a shocker. Our protagonists Shohoku High School had just upset the perennial champions in Sannoh High School. As sweet as their victory was it was also quickly revealed that the depleted Shohoku would go on to lose their next match and eliminated from the tournament. Inoue who has never clearly stated who won it all. This hasn’t stopped fans from theorizing who ultimately won it all. So lets go through the story and look at the likely winners, read through Inoue’s responses to the ending, and check out the wildest theories that fans have come up with.
The Runner Up
The original manga series ended in 1996 but Inoue in a Beatles on the rooftop-esque stunt, finished the series in 2003 in the most unique way. In 2004 he drew an epilogue to the series on 23 chalkboards in classrooms of a defunct High School in Kanagawa Prefecture. Putting it on public exhibition for three days. Titled “10 Days After” it covered the aftermath of the manga in a series of mini stories. The epilogue would be eventually put into printed form. One little major detail revealed in the…
