Everybody Wanted To Keep Playing

The oral history of how Garry Shandling’s super-secret hoops game bonded and inspired a generation of comedians.

- Anna Peele

During his 40-year comedy career, Garry Shandling created two of the most iconic and influential TV shows of all time. But instead of following It’s Garry Shandling’s Show and The Larry Sanders Show with another television masterpiece, Shandling worked on something else: a pickup basketball game. During the 25-year run of the weekly Sunday game, until Shandling’s death at age 66 in 2016, it was attended by celebrities such as Sarah Silverman, Sacha Baron Cohen, Will Ferrell, Brad Pitt, Adam Sandler and Judd Apatow, who directed the recent HBO documentary The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling.

But Shandling’s was not a “Hollywood” game. Participants weren’t allowed to network there or talk about it afterward. “It was Fight Club with better jokes,” says Shandling’s writing partner Suli Mc- Cullough. The players respected this to protect the singular refuge Shandling carefully constructed.

Those Sundays yielded friendships that are responsible for some of the best television and film of the past 20 years. As director Alex Richanbach says, “This group of people found a little family in Los Angeles because we all have the same comedy dad.” This is the story, told by the players, of how Shandling’s generosity, drive and anxiety led to a three-decade basketball game—and the next generation of comedy.

ALEX RICHANBACH, DIRECTOR, IBIZA; PLAYED FROM 2012 TO THE END:

In the early ’90s, Garry was working seven days a week on The Larry Sanders Show, and it was just overwhelming. So on Sundays, he would invite friends and writers from the show up to the house to play basketball, and then they’d go back into the house and eat and start talking through scripts for that week. And when Sanders ended, everybody wanted to keep playing.

SULI McCULLOUGH, WRITER, THE TONIGHT SHOW WITH JAY LENO; PLAYED FROM 1997 TO THE END: