Basketball

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Basketball

The sport of basketball was invented at the close of the nineteenth century. By the end of the twentieth century, only soccer surpassed it as the world's most popular sport, as top basketball players from the United States were among the most recognized people on Earth.

Basketball was invented in late 1891 by Dr. James A. Naismith, physical education director at the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in Springfield, Massachusetts. The YMCA students were tiring of standard calisthenics and demanded a new, team sport to be played indoors between the end of football season in autumn and the start of baseball season in the spring. Naismith hit upon the idea of two teams of players maneuvering a ball across a gymnasium towards a set target. He obtained a pair of peach baskets—he originally wanted to use boxes—and nailed them on beams on either end of the gym. The first game ever played resulted in a 1-0 score, with one William R. Chase scoring the lone point with a soccer ball; Naismith and his players quickly realized that the new sport had potential.

Naismith resisted efforts to name his invention "Naismith-ball," preferring "basket ball" instead. He wrote an article describing the sport in his YMCA's magazine in early 1892, and YMCAs across the country and around the world picked up on the sport during the 1890s. By 1895 Naismith had set up standard rules: five players on each team, with successful shots counting two points each. Eventually, players who were fouled by opponents would be able to make "free throws," counting one point each, shooting a short distance from the basket.

Within weeks of Naismith's first game, women athletes in Springfield were also playing basketball, and the first intercollegiate college basketball game, in fact, was between the Stanford women's team and the University of California women's squad in April 1895. Within a year the University of Chicago beat the University of Iowa, 15-12, in the first men's college basketball game. By the first decade of the twentieth century, many colleges were fielding men's and women's basketball teams. Men's college basketball exploded in popularity during the 1930s, with heavily promoted doubleheaders at New York's Madison Square Garden featuring the top teams in the country before packed audiences.

The first successful professional basketball team was the Original Celtics, which were formed in New York before World War I. The team of New Yorkers generally won 90 percent of their games against amateur and town teams, and had a record of 204 wins against only 11 defeats in the 1922-1923 season. In 1927, white promoter Abe Saperstein started the Harlem Globetrotters, a barnstorming basketball team made up of blacks (when most college and pro teams had no African American players). They became best known for their irreverent on-court antics and their theme song, the jazz standard "Sweet Georgia Brown."

The scores of basketball games prior to the 1940s seem shockingly low today, as teams rarely scored more than 40 points a game. It was customary in early basketball for players to shoot the ball with both hands. Once the one-hand jump shot, popularized by Stanford star Hank Lusietti, gained acceptance in 1940, players were more confident in taking shots, and scoring began to increase.

Professional basketball leagues began and folded many times in basketball's infancy. By the end of World War II, there were two leagues competing for top college prospects, the National Basketball League and the Basketball Association of America. The two leagues merged in 1949, forming the National Basketball Association (NBA). The NBA's first star was the first great basketball tall-man, George Mikan. Improbable as it seems now, players over six feet in height were once considered to make bad basketball players, seen as ungainly and uncoordinated. The 6' 10" Mikan, who had starred as a collegian for DePaul University, erased this stereotype single-handedly, winning five NBA scoring titles as his Minneapolis (later Los Angeles) Lakers won four NBA championships. In a poll of sportswriters in 1950, Mikan was named "Mr. Basketball" for the first 50 years of the twentieth century.

As Mikan starred in the professional ranks, college basketball was shaken to the core by revelations of corruption. In 1951 the New York district attorney's office found that players at many of the top schools had agreed to play less than their best—to "shave points"—in exchange for gambler's money. The accused players frequently met gamblers during summers while working and playing basketball in New York's glamorous Catskills resort areas. Players from the City College of New York, which had won both the National Invitational Tournament and the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) basketball finals in 1951, were implicated, as were stars from Long Island University, coached by popular author Clair Bee. The image of top players testifying to grand juries would stain college basketball for the rest of the decade.

Basketball had been marked by stalling tactics, where one team would possess the ball for minutes at a time without shooting or scoring. In 1954, the NBA adopted a shot clock, requiring that a team shoot the ball within 24 seconds of gaining possession (College basketball would wait until 1985 before mandating a similar shot clock). This one rule resulted in an outburst of scoring, which helped push professional basketball attendance up in the 1950s. Fans of the era flocked to see the Boston Celtics. Led first by guard Bob Cousy, and later by center Bill Russell, the Celtics won eight straight NBA titles from 1959 through 1966. Their arch-nemesis was center Wilt Chamberlain of the Philadelphia Warriors and 76ers. The most dominant scorer in NBA history, Chamberlain averaged 50 points for the 1961-1962 season, including his memorable performance on March 2, 1962, where he scored 100 points. Chamberlain outperformed Bill Russell during Boston-Philadelphia matchups, but the Celtics almost inevitably won the titles.

As the Celtics were the NBA's dynasty in the 1960s, so were the UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) Bruins college basket-ball's team to beat in the 1960s and 1970s. Coached by the soft-spoken, understated John Wooden, the UCLA Bruins won nine NCAA tournament titles in one ten-year span, including seven straight from 1967 to 1973. Wooden's talent during this time included guards Walt Hazzard and Gail Goodrich, and centers Lew Alcindor (who would change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and Bill Walton. During one stretch encompassing three seasons, UCLA won an improbable 88 consecutive games, an NCAA record.

The NBA found a new rival in 1967, with the creation of the American Basketball Association (ABA). The new league adopted a red, white, and blue basketball and established a line some 20 feet from the basket, beyond which a field goal counted for three points. The three-point line and the colored ball made the ABA something of a laughingstock to basketball traditionalists, and ABA attendance and media coverage indeed lagged behind the NBA's. But by the early 1970s, the ABA had successfully signed several top college picks from under the NBA's nose, and its top attraction was Julius Erving of the Virginia Squires and New York Nets. Erving, nicknamed "Dr. J," turned the slam-dunk into an art form, hanging in the air indefinitely, virtually at will. Erving was definitely the hottest young basketball talent in either league. In 1976 the NBA agreed to a merger, and four ABA teams joined the NBA. Erving signed a $6 million contract with Philadelphia. In the first All-Star game after the merger, five of the 10 NBA All-Star players had ABA roots.

The merger, however, was not enough to stem the NBA's declining attendance and fan interest. People were not only not following professional basketball in the 1970s, they seemed actively hostile to it. The perception of pro basketball as being dominated by black athletes, some felt, prevented the sport from commanding television revenue and advertising endorsements. According to one disputed report in the late 1970s, fully three-quarters of NBA players were addicted to drugs. Once again, the NBA found its salvation in the college ranks. In 1979 Michigan State, with star guard Earvin "Magic" Johnson, defeated Indiana State, and star forward Larry Bird, for the NCAA basketball title. The game drew a record television audience, and helped popularize the NCAA basketball tournament, later known as "March Madness." The tournament eventually included 64 teams each season, with underdog, "Cinderella" teams such as North Carolina State in 1983 and Villanova in 1985 emerging to win the championship. By the 1990s, the tournament spawned hundreds of millions of dollars in office pools and Vegas gambling, as cities vied to host the "Final Four," where the four remaining teams would compete in the semifinals and championship game. Even the official start of college basketball practice in the fall became a commercialized ritual, as schools hosted "Midnight Madness" events, inviting fans to count the minutes until midnight of the first sanctioned day college teams could practice.

In the fall of 1979 Bird had joined the Boston Celtics and Johnson the Los Angeles Lakers. Johnson led the Lakers to the 1980 NBA title, playing every position in the deciding championship game and scoring 42 points. Bird and Johnson would usher in a new era in the NBA—Bird, with his tactical defense and Johnson with his exuberant offense (the Lakers' offensive strategy would be called "Showtime"). The Celtics and Lakers won eight NBA titles in the 1980s, as Bird and Johnson reprised their 1979 NCAA performance by going head-to-head in three NBA finals.

The success of the NBA created by Bird and Johnson during the 1980s rose to an even greater level during the 1990s, due in no small measure to Michael Jordan. The guard joined the Chicago Bulls in 1984, having played three seasons at the University of North Carolina; as a collegian, Jordan had been on an NCAA championship team and the 1984 gold medal United States Olympic squad. Jordan immediately established himself as a marquee NBA player in his first seasons, scoring a playoff record 63 points in one 1986 post-season game. His dunks surpassed even Erving's in their artistry, and Jordan developed a remarkable inside game to complement that. Slowly, a great Bulls team formed around him, and Jordan led the Bulls to three straight NBA titles in 1991-1993. Jordan then abruptly left basketball for 16 months to pursue a major league baseball career. A chagrined Jordan returned to the Bulls in February 1995, and in his final three complete seasons the Bulls won three more consecutive championships. The 1996 Bulls team went 72-10 in the regular season, and many experts consider this team, led by Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, and Toni Kukoc, to be the finest in NBA history. Jordan retired for good after the 1997-1998 season; his last shot in the NBA, in the closing seconds of the deciding championship game against Utah in June 1998, was the winning basket. Jordan's announcement of his retirement in January 1999 received media coverage usually reserved for presidential impeachments and state funerals.

Though the United States had been the birthplace of basketball, by the end of the twentieth century America had to recognize the emergence of international talent. The Summer Olympics introduced basketball as a medal sport in 1936, and the United States won gold medals in its first seven Olympics, winning 63 consecutive games before losing the 1972 Munich gold medal game, 50-49, to the Soviet Union on a controversial referee's call. After the United States lost in the 1988 Olympics, the International Olympic Committee changed its rules to allow the United States to assemble a team made up not of amateurs, but of NBA stars. The "Dream Team" for the 1992 Barcelona Games was, some insisted, the greatest all-star team ever, in any sport. The squad featured Larry Bird, Magic Johnson (who had retired from the NBA in 1991 after testing positive for the HIV virus), Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, and David Robinson. The United States team crushed its opponents, frequently by margins of 50 points a game. Many of the Dream Team opponents eagerly waited, after being defeated, to get the American stars' autographs and pictures. The 1992 squad easily won a gold medal, as did a professional United States team in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics (whose stars included Grant Hill, Scottie Pippen, and Shaquille O'Neal).

The 1990s also saw an explosion of interest of women's basketball, on professional as well as collegiate levels. Many credit this popularity with the enforcement of Title IX, a 1971 federal statute requiring high schools and colleges to fund women's sports programs on an equal basis with men's. The top college team of the time was Tennessee, which won three straight women's NCAA titles in 1996-1998, narrowly missing a fourth in 1999. In 1996, a women's professional league, the American Basketball League (ABL) was inaugurated, followed a year later by the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA), an offshoot of the NBA. The ABL folded in 1999, but the WNBA, which held its season during the summertime, showed genuine promise; its stars included Rebecca Lobo of the New York Liberty (she had starred at the University of Connecticut) and Cynthia Cooper of the Houston Comets, which won the first two WNBA championships. Women's basketball was characterized less by dunks and flamboyant moves, and more by fundamental offense and defense. John Wooden, for one, said he generally preferred watching women's basketball to men's. College and pro women's games were known, in fact, for having a strong male fan base, as well as entire families in attendance.

As the twentieth century closed, the NBA proved it was no longer immune to the pressures of American professional sports. As major league baseball and the National Football League had suffered through lengthy and devastating strikes during the 1980s and 1990s, the NBA had its first-ever work stoppage in the fall of 1998. NBA team owners locked players out in October, declaring the collective bargaining agreement with the player's union null and void. At issue was the league salary cap; each team had been previously allowed to exceed the cap for one player (in Chicago's case, for Michael Jordan), but the owners wanted to abolish this exception. The players steadfastly refused, and the first half of the 1998-1999 season was lost. Both sides reached an agreement in early 1999, and the regular season began three months late, on February 6. To the surprise of players and owners alike, the NBA lockout garnered little attention from the fans.

Basketball slowly entered other elements of American popular culture during the latter part of the twentieth century. "Rabbit" Angstrom, the middle-aged hero of four John Updike novels, had been a star basketball player in high school. Jason Miller's Pulitzer-Prize winning play That Championship Season (1972) reunited disillusioned, bitter ex-jocks on the anniversary of their state high school title victory. One of the most acclaimed documentaries of the 1990s, Hoop Dreams (1994), tracked two talented Chicago ghetto basketball players through their four years of high school, each with an eye towards a college scholarship and an NBA career. Novelist John Edgar Wideman, who had played basketball at the University of Pennsylvania during the 1960s, often used the game metaphorically in his award-winning fiction (his daughter Jamila was a star player at Stanford, and later the WNBA). Wideman's teammate at Oxford University while on a Rhodes Scholarship was Bill Bradley, who played for Princeton, and later had a Hall of Fame professional career with the Knicks. Bradley served three terms in the United States Senate, and wrote a bestselling book defining basketball's qualities (Values of the Game) as he prepared a presidential campaign for the year 2000.

—Andrew Milner