All About Basketball

Basketball is a recreational and competitive sports with widespread appeal across age, gender, class, regional, and national lines, which reflects the game’s broadly based origins and early development. The game is played by two teams of five players, who attempt to score points by throwing a ball through an elevated hoop attached to a pole. Basketball was made in the United States, but by a Canadian. Devised by and for young white Protestant male competitors, it was quickly adopted by Catholics, Jews, African Americans, and females. Originally designed for exercise and the inculcation of moral values, it soon became a commercial pastime celebrated the world over.

Whatever the global appeal of soccer (association football), basketball is the game most played and most watched by people around the world. Hoops rattle throughout Asia, as well as Africa and South America. Professional leagues thrive in Europe,and even in distant Australia. In the United States, basketball attracts more participants and spectators than do football and baseball combined.In all,basketball is played by an estimated 200 million people on all continents. No other sport has enjoyed such recent increases in popularity, both in terms of those who play and the number of spectators. Some of basketball’s appeal can be explained by its unique status as a team game that is relatively simple, inexpensive, and easy to produce. People happily play one-on-one. In its  organized form, the game requires only five players at a time, half as many as a baseball or football team. Compared to most team sports, basketball needs little space and minimal equipment to play, and it leaves participants with few bruises and broken limbs. It can be played, and enjoyed, by female youths on a playground court or by an over-the-hill gang of businessmen on lunch break as well as by seasoned collegians and professionals.

The International Federation of Amateur Basketball has governed international play since the 1930s; the Olympics are the principal forum for competition. The United States, Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia have dominated international hoops since the 1950s. In recent years, televised competition has enhanced both the scope of basketball’s global appeal and the quality of play.

History
Basketball was literally created overnight, the result of an assignment posed by a physical education teacher in December 1891 at a Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) training college in Springfield,Massachusetts. A Canadian student, James Naismith (1861–1939), rose to the challenge of constructing an active indoor winter game that would prove attractive to young men.He typed up a rudimentary set of rules, had a janitor nail up peach baskets along the railing at each end of the Springfield gym, and invited his colleagues to toss a soccer ball into one of the two baskets. The first game consisted of two 15-minute halves, with 5 minutes’ rest between. Naismith’s physical education class numbered 18, so 9 men played on each team. Players had to pass the ball; no dribbling was allowed at first. That inaugural game was hardly a spectacle that anyone would recognize today.

Within its first decade basketball changed dramatically. Dribbling quickly became an acceptable means of moving the ball around the court. Standard team size was readjusted to seven, and finally set at five. The value of a field goal, originally set at three points, was changed to two points; foul shots, too, counted three at first, but were soon changed to one. Equipment also changed. By 1895 the old soccer ball was replaced by a slightly larger leather-covered basketball; peach baskets gave way to mesh-wire baskets with strings and pulleys that released the ball, and finally to a bottomless cord net fixed to an iron rim. Metal screens also made an early appearance behind baskets, in order to keep balcony spectators from guiding or deflecting shots.As more solid substance provided greater consistency for angled shots, wooden backboards became standard by the turn of the century.

In 1895, Naismith left Springfield for medical school and a YMCA job in Denver, largely leaving the supervision of basketball to his old Springfield colleague, Luther Gulick (1861–1918).Within the following year, Gulick and the YMCA passed the mantle of guardianship over to the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU). Committed to amateur (“gentlemanly”) sport, the AAU required players and teams to pay a fee and “register” their intention to comply with the amateur code and to compete only against other registered teams.

This policy played havoc with the many teams sponsored by local YMCAs, athletic clubs, settlement houses, churches, schools, and colleges who not only competed with each other but also indiscriminately played against whatever local or touring Professional teams they could schedule. Professional squads made their presence felt early in the history of basketball. In November 1896, a team in Trenton, New Jersey, rented the Masonic Temple, charged 25 cents for admission, and shared the profits after paying expenses. They also introduced a distinctive piece of equipment. A 12-foothigh mesh-wire fence, presumably designed to keep the ball in play, separated players from spectators. For more than two decades, professionals played within a cage of mesh-wire or net, causing basketball to be called the “cage” game.

Never did the AAU register a majority of the basketball teams in the United States. In 1905 seven coaches of powerful college teams drew up their own set of rules. Three years later the newly formed National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) assumed responsibility for the rules governing college basketball. Finally, in 1915 the NCAA,AAU, and YMCA joined forces in establishing a single rules committee to oversee any further changes in basketball throughout North America. While refining its form and governance, Naismith’s new game expanded rapidly. Nearby colleges and athletic clubs embraced it as a competitive antidote to onerous gym exercises during New England’s frigid winters. One of the first converts to the game was Senda Berenson (1861–1954), a gymnastics instructor at Smith College.Early in 1892 she introduced the game to her female students, but divided the court into three equal sections and kept players confined to a single section in order to avoid exhaustion.Within the following year this distinctive form of “women’s basket ball” was being played not only at neighboring Mt. Holyoke College but also at distant Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans, Louisiana, and at the University of California in Berkeley.

For a time, though, basketball remained primarily a YMCA commodity. Its place of origin—an aggressive new training college for YMCA leaders—ensured immediate widespread exposure. Copies of Springfield’s campus weekly, the Triangle, were mailed out regularly to every YMCA in North America. In the January 1892 issue of the Triangle, Naismith described his new game and heartily recommended it to YMCA leaders everywhere. Those leaders, in turn,wrote to the editor of the Triangle with news about the popularity of basketball as it was introduced to more than 200 YMCA gyms in the United States and Canada.

Many of those YMCA chapters and gyms were set on college campuses, especially in the Midwest and Pacific coast regions. Moreover, Springfield graduates— Naismith’s old classmates and fellow athletes—found teaching and coaching jobs in college programs,where they eagerly introduced basketball. High schools especially responded to that gospel, for the game proved useful for physical education classes and interscholastic competition. The women’s game was played with great passion, particularly in Iowa, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Texas high schools. By 1900 high school championship tournaments were held in conjunction with commercial exhibitions in Boston, Buffalo, and Chicago. In 1903 Gulick created a Public School Athletic League for New York City and supervised the construction of basketball courts in both elementary and high schools throughout the city. Within a decade,more than a dozen of the major cities in the United States sponsored similar city-wide leagues for public school athletes.

Basketball also thrived in rural and small-town schools. Hoops not only fed rural school and town pride; it also provided entertainment sorely lacking in remote places. After 1909, when the agricultural colleges of Iowa and Montana produced the first high school state basketball tournaments, land-grant institutions from Maine State College to Washington State College fulfilled their public service purposes by providing space and publicity for annual high school championship playoffs. In the 1920s national tournaments for public and parochial (Catholic) high schools began; by 1925 more than 30 state championship teams were competing at the National Interscholastic Tournament at the University of Chicago.

Early professional leagues also held tournaments to close out their seasons, but barnstorming proved to be the more lucrative route. Around the turn of the century, the Buffalo “Germans” and the New York “Wanderers” emerged as the premier professional teams that traveled afar competing with the best local talent available in armories, dance halls, and high school gyms. Their successors included the Troy Trojans and “Globe Trotters” from upstate New York, but the most successful of all the early touring teams was the Original Celtics. Founded in Manhattan in 1914, the Original Celtics capitalized on the use of the automobile as a popular means of transportation.At their barnstorming pinnacle in the 1920s, they often appeared in southern and western towns previously unreached by the railway. The loosely structured, theatrical character of Professional basketball made the game uniquely attractive to ambitious first-generation Americans.Heroes of the cage game had names like Dehnert,Holman, Lapchick, Friedman, Borgmann, Husta, and Chismadia. All were of East European or Irish heritage; most were Catholic or Jewish. African Americans, too, laid early claims on professional basketball as a means of fun and success. Founded in 1922, the all-black Harlem Renaissance Five quickly became the strongest opposition to the dominance of the Original Celtics.

Most spectator sports took a beating during the economic troubles that began in 1929, but the Depression worked to the advantage of high school and college basketball in the United States.As unemployment mounted, families found themselves unable to spend freely on commercialized amusements, causing social life in the local college and school to take on more importance. Basketball became a weekly social events.At the end of the decade of the 1930s, no less than 95 percent of all U.S. high schools sponsored varsity basketball teams.

A newly formed program, the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO), also made much of basketball’s sociable and socially healthy potential. Begun in 1930 as an antidote to juvenile delinquency in Chicago, the CYO was the Catholic equivalent to the Protestant YMCA and the Jewish Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA). The CYO initially received most publicity for its sponsorship of interracial boxing tournaments, but basketball was always high on its agenda. Chicago’s CYO and B’nai B’rith champions met annually on the basketball court.

Basketball also went visibly international in the 1930s.At the hands of YMCA enthusiasts, the game had been introduced all over the world shortly after its creation. By 1930, fifty nations had adopted the sport. Despite the economic hardships, representatives from Asia and Africa as well as Europe convened in 1932 to form the International Federation of Amateur Basketball (FIBA). Chinese and Japanese students who had learned the game from YMCA missionaries before World War I introduced basketball at the University of Berlin in the mid-1930s. Nazi propagandists overlooked the game’s YMCA origins and gave it their stamp of approval on the grounds that basketball required not only speed and stamina but also an aggressive spirit that allegedly characterized the true German. At the Berlin Games of 1936, basketball became an official Olympic sport. Unfortunately,most of those games were played outdoors in a downpour of rain, with a U.S. squad beating a Canadian team, 19–8. By the mid-1930s, American basketball was thriving at the college level, particularly in New York City where promoter Ned Irish (1905–1982) arranged doubleheaders at Madison Square Garden featuring the best western teams against eastern powers St. John’s University, New York University, and Long Island University. Building on the foundation of these intersectional doubleheaders, the National Invitational Tournament (NIT) was created in 1938 as the first intercollegiate championship playoff. Some 16,000 spectators turned out to see Temple University win the first NIT. Impressed with that successful event, college coaches in 1939 created the NCAA tournament. Their first playoffs, at Northwestern University, suffered from inadequate publicity. The NCAA tournament remained second fiddle until 1951, when scandals discredited the NIT.

Despite the game’s growth during the 1930s, it was perceived by the American public as a second-rate sport.Not only did it lack the cachet of a major Professional organization until the late 1940s, it had modest national media coverage save the minuscule game summaries of YMCA, professional barnstorming teams, or amateur contests in local daily newspapers. The most significant watershed in basketball’s rise to international stature came during World War II. U.S. servicemen introduced the game to people the world over, and government-sponsored cultural Exchange tours fueled a steady flow of U.S. teams and coaches to all parts of the globe.

The Post–World War II Era
The American collegiate game enjoyed the national and international limelight until the early 1950s. Coached by the winningest coach in basketball history— Adolph Rupp (1901–1977)—Kentucky was the biggest winner of the period.Apart from a few tournament appearances by southern schools, basketball languished in football’s shadows in part because the region’s most talented black players were excluded from the leading teams and national tournaments. Formidable black college teams (for example, 1950s power Tennessee A&I coached by African American John McLendon, a Naismith student from Kansas) were forced to compete exclusively against each other in relative obscurity  Gamblers wagered millions of dollars weekly on the major games, triggering a national controversy in 1950–1951 when several New York City teams were implicated in a point-shaving scandal. By the time of this well-publicized scandal, the previously unpopular professional game was in the midst of a fundamental transformation. The pros were renowned for their physical, pushing, grabbing, and defensively oriented style played by a tough, beerdrinking, ethnically diverse group of industrial workers, many of whom had served stints in the military. Respectability came in 1946 when 11 businessmen— skilled in hockey and entertainment promotion—organized the Basketball Association of America (BAA) and brought a cleaner brand of basketball to a mainstream, middle-class audience. The newly formed BAA competed with a less profit-oriented and more knowledgeable, civic-minded National Basketball League (formed in 1937)—located in smaller midwestern, industrial cities. The two struggling leagues merged and formed the National Basketball Association (NBA) in 1949. The number of NBA franchises shrank to eight teams in 1954 as the well-financed, large-city franchises forced the smaller ones to relocate or fold.By the end of its first decade, the young NBA unquestionably showcased the best basketball in the world. The African

American Influence
The transformation of the professional game into its elegant, fast-paced, high-scoring contemporary mode derived from an increasingly innovative style of play centered around big men and an emergent generation of innovative African American players. The conservative horizontal offenses of the 1940s became more daring and vertical in the 1950s when quick forwards like “Jumping” Joe Fulks (1921–1976) and Kenny Sailors (1922–) popularized the jumpshot, and coaches developed tall players and built teams around them. As late as 1947, only 25 players on the 12 NBL teams were 6 feet, 6 inches (1.98 meters) tall or taller, reflecting the popular wisdom that large players were too clumsy and ill suited to the game’s demands.Those stereotypes were forever shattered by George Mikan (1924–) (6 feet, 10 inches [2.08 meters]),Bob Kurland (1924–) (7 feet [2.13 meters]) and Ed Macauley (1928–) (6 feet, 8 inches [2.03 meters]), whose dominance near the basket prompted the young NBA to widen the free throw lane and penalize goal tending. The most revolutionary rule change in the professional game,however,was the introduction of the 24-second clock in 1954,which prevented deliberate offensive stalling and thereby increased scoring by 30 percent over the following five years. The influence of a  black basketball aesthetic was just as revolutionary. Derived from the faster, louder, stop-and-go play of the cement, urban (particularly Harlem) courts, young black players learned that the game was not just about weaves and standard patterns, but also about explosive speed, deception, and slam dunks. Like improvisational jazz music of the 1950s, the emergent black style of play defied the established standards of traditional “white” performance. The Harlem Globetrotters was the most innovative team of the era, whose stars Reece “Goose”Tatum (1921–1967) and Marques Haynes (1926–) integrated improvisational bits from professional comedians and circus clowns into their performance. Organized in 1927 by a Jewish immigrant, Chicagoan Abe Saperstein, the barnstorming ’Trotters took their exciting court antics to the farthest reaches of the globe.

Despite the stellar quality of black basketball, the American professional ranks remained racially segregated until the early 1950s. Earl Lloyd (1928–), Chuck Cooper (1926–), and Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton (1922–) were the first African Americans to play in the NBA in 1950, but the league remained 80 percent white as late as 1960. Though the way was opened up by the Harlem Renaissance, Globetrotters, and several collegiate teams, it was in the NCAA’s Division I that the African American style burst through the locked doors of integrated national competition. Black collegians Bill Russell (1934–), Wilt Chamberlain (1936–), Elgin Baylor (1934–), Oscar Robertson (1938–), and Connie Hawkins (1942–) elevated the game to new levels in the 1950s and 1960s.

At the height of the civil rights movement in the United States, two white coaches devised systems that made black style integral to their teams’ personas and became the two longest running dynasties in basketball history. Arnold “Red” Auerbach (1917–), a feisty street-smart strategist born in Brooklyn to Russian Jewish immigrants, became coach of the Boston Celtics in 1950 and assembled a superb,balanced team around center Bill Russell. They won 11 NBA championships between 1959 and 1969. John Wooden (1910–), a devout Muscular Christian from small-town Indiana, built powerhouse teams at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) around stellar centers such as Lew Alcindor (1947–) (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and won nine national titles between 1964 and 1975.

Women’s Basketball
Between the late 1940s and early 1960s, U.S. women’s basketball became a true varsity sport. Teams had six players, and the court was divided so that the three forwards did the scoring and the three guards covered the backcourt. In 1971 the U.S. Congress passed Title IX legislation, which prohibited sex discrimination at federally funded academic institutions. Thereafter, teams were reduced to five and women were freed from the limits imposed by the halfcourt game. Increased funds to women’s athletics attracted first-rate coaches such as former collegian and Olympic star Pat Head Summitt (1952–) of Tennessee, who recruited players from a growing pool of quality high school talent. When the NCAA took control of women’s basketball in the late 1970s the large universities with strong programs (such as UCLA, Tennessee, Virginia, Texas, and USC) eclipsed traditional small college powerhouses and shifted the production of women’s basketball from New England and the Midwest to southern and western states. The NCAA’s prestigious Final Four tournament conferred the truly national scope of women’s basketball in 1982 and through increased network television coverage, expanded attendance 90 percent during the decade by the early 1990s.

The Olympics embraced women’s basketball in the 1976 Montreal Games. The Soviets won the gold medal in the 1976 and 1980 Games against an impressive field that included strong Chinese and Korean teams. In the aftermath of the 1976 Games, collegiate All-American stars Ann Meyers (1955–) of UCLA and Nancy Lieberman (1958–) of Old Dominion dominated U.S. women’s basketball. Both played in the 1976 Olympics, but their influence came later when they became the first women to be drafted by men’s professional teams, and then led the short-lived Women’s Professional League in 1979–1980. Four years later the United States, led by African American stars Cheryl Miller and Lynette Woodard (the first female member of the Harlem Globetrotters), defeated the Soviets 83–60 in the 1984 Games. In 1988 they repeated by defeating Yugoslavia for  another gold medal, which firmly established them as the world power of women’s basketball. In recent years, the women’s traditional “finesse” game has increasingly come to resemble the speedier, powerful, vertical male version.

The Modern Era
The era of stalwart professional dynasties ended with the creation of a rival professional league—the American Basketball Association (ABA)—in 1967, which shifted the NBA’s balance of power. By 1976, when the NBA absorbed four ABA teams, professional salaries averaged $110,000—more than twice what baseball and football players made.Moreover, the NBA Players’ Association won a collective-bargaining agreement, severance pay, first-class airfare, disability, medical insurance, and pensions. Despite the improvement in players’ salaries and overall play, however, the NBA limped along in television ratings and profitability throughout the 1970s. For the first time since the advent of the 24-second clock, the NBA enhanced the drama by adopting the three-point shot (from 23 feet, 9 inches [7.23 meters]).

The American professional game continues to provide the model for global competition. A U.S. “Dream Team” took advantage of revised FIBA eligibility rules that permitted professional athletes’ participation in the Olympics, to trounce all their opponents at the 1992 Barcelona Games by unprecedented margins. The Dream Team’s success propelled the game into the most geographically diffused and commercially lucrative phase of any sport in history. Even in places without a strong basketball tradition, like Britain, attendance for England’s National Basketball League has soared from an early 1970s’ average of 7,500 to 330,000 in 1985. The game’s popularity since the 1970s continues untrammeled in Latin America, and now China claims more players than the entire population of Europe. Efforts are currently under way to establish a Professional league in Asia, with likely locations for teams in Tokyo, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines. Basketball has enjoyed even greater success on the European continent where NBA stars are celebrated in Italian, Spanish, and French newspapers and glossy magazines. Since 1987, basketball has been Italy’s second most popular sport. More than half the members of the national Spanish junior team are currently playing college ball in the United States.Moreover, of the 21 foreign players on NBA rosters in 1995, 14 had attended U.S. universities.

The renaissance of big-time college basketball came in the 1979 NCAA title game when two of the three dominant players of the 1980s—Earvin “Magic” Johnson (1959–) and Larry Bird (1956–)—were pitted against each other for the first time. The 6 foot, 9 inch “Magic”destroyed the stereotypical notions of how size dictated positions and, along with Bird, elevated creative passing and teamwork. Magic’s dexterity and court vision brought the brilliance of the black aesthetic to new heights. The Magic-Bird rivalry catapulted the month-long NCAA tournament atop the pinnacle of international sport just beneath the Olympics and World Cup competitions. Gross receipts for the NCAA tournament have increased from eight million dollars in 1979 to over 184 million dollars in 1995. The rivalry also sparked unprecedented interest in both the game and the basketball player as a marketable celebrity. Buoyed by the advertising agency’s success in marketing athletic shoes and sportswear (e.g., Nike, Reebok, and Converse) with superstar endorsers, basketball stars, especially Michael Jordan (1963–), have become some of the world’s highest paid athletes and most recognizable personalities.

The game’s hold on the American imagination is reflected in the emergence of a cadre of successful basketball films.Unlike baseball, football, and boxing,basketball was largely ignored by filmmakers until the late 1970s, but recently has become part of a pervasive sports, media, and entertainment enterprise. Since the 1970s filmmakers have moved away from silly, frivolous scripts to ones that dramatize the contradictory nature of basketball in contemporary society.The commercial success of White Men Can’t Jump (1991) and the artistic recognition conferred upon the documentary Hoop Dreams (1995) illuminate the importance of urban playgrounds as breeding grounds of big-time talent, the centrality of the black aesthetic, and the game’s promise of social mobility for millions of young people throughout the world.