A mall becomes a basketball venue
In January 2022, the Semanhyia Golden Mall in Kumasi signed on as partner of Clockwork Brand for the second edition of the Game of Threes tournament. With the partnership came a new name: the event would be known officially as Game of Threes Golden Jam.
The tournament was scheduled for Saturday, 29 January 2022, at the mall itself, a recently built and upmarket shopping centre in the Ashanti Region capital. It was planned as a one-day event, with every game played on the same day.
The business case
Clockwork Brand's chief executive, Emmanuel Ekow Amoako, presented the move as a commercial one. He described the partnership as a way to "customize" events organized by Clockwork for corporate partners, building a basketball tournament around a company's own premises and name.
For the mall, the attraction was clear enough: a day of fast basketball on its premises would bring extra visitors through its doors. For Clockwork, a corporate host offered a venue, a sponsor and an audience in one agreement. The same model could be repeated with other companies if the Kumasi event worked.
From a campus to a shopping centre
The first edition had a very different setting. The 2021 tournament, which doubled as the maiden Game of Threes, was played at the Brunel Sports Complex on the campus of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi.
Moving from a university sports complex to a shopping mall changed the crowd as much as the court. A campus event draws students and basketball regulars. A mall puts the game in front of shoppers who may never have watched 3x3 before.
Who could take part
Entry was open to players over the age of 15. There were 16 team slots available, and registration for both individual players and teams ran through FIBA's online 3x3 platform, play.fiba3x3. Players were urged to sign up as early as possible because the slots were limited.
The calendar suited players in the city. A month earlier, the 2021 Sprite Ball final had been scheduled for Christmas Eve in Accra, with the Ashanti Region among the six regions sending teams built from community qualifiers. For high school players who had taken part, a 3x3 event at home in Kumasi offered competitive games within weeks, and the age limit of over 15 kept the door open to most of them.
What 3x3 basketball is
3x3 is the half-court form of basketball, played by three players a side with one substitute each and a single basket. Under FIBA rules, a game lasts a maximum of ten minutes. The first team to reach 21 points wins at once; if neither gets there, the team ahead when time runs out takes the game. Teams have 12 seconds to attempt a shot, and baskets count one point from inside the arc and two from outside it.
The format had just received its biggest stage. At the Tokyo Olympics, held in the summer of 2021, 3x3 was played at the Games for the first time, with eight men's and eight women's teams competing at the Aomi Urban Sports Park. Latvia won the men's gold medal and the United States won the women's. The team of the Russian Olympic Committee took silver in both events, with Serbia and China collecting the bronze medals.
| Feature | 3x3 rule |
|---|---|
| Players | 3 on court, 1 substitute |
| Court | Half court, one basket |
| Game length | Up to 10 minutes |
| Winning score | First to 21 |
| Shot clock | 12 seconds |
| Points | 1 inside the arc, 2 outside |
Short games and a small court make 3x3 well suited to a one-day event at a venue that was never built for sport.
The man behind Clockwork
Amoako was no newcomer to Kumasi basketball. As a teenager at Koforidua Senior High Technical School he was named man of the tournament at the first Eastern Regional Sprite Ball in 2008, and by 2014 he was described as a rising star of Ghana basketball while playing for KNUST, the same campus where the first Game of Threes was staged.
He is known in the game as "Clock", the same word the brand is built on. In September 2025, Citi Newsroom profiled him as a player, coach, entrepreneur and disability advocate who has lived with anisomelia, a limb length discrepancy, and noted a documentary about his life titled "13:12 – Make the Clock Work".