Basketball Facts
This great collection of basketball facts is contains short some of the strangest and funniest stories in basketball history. We hope you enjoy them.
Basketball Facts
A Canadian, James Naismith (1861-1939), is regarded as being the originator of basketball, although a similar game is believed to have been played in Mexico in the 10th century. Naismith invented the game in 1891 at the YMCA college in Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, using peach baskets on a gym wall. The game was originally designed merely to bridge the gap between the baseball and American football seasons, but it soon became popular in its own right.
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Before 1954 there was no limit to the time that a team could hold on to the ball. Games were often blighted because once a team held a lead it simply chose to retain possession without attempting to score. So the NBA introduced a 24-seconds clock to limit the time that a team could retain possession before shooting.
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Perhaps the most famous basketball team of all, the Harlem Globetrotters were founded in 1972 by Abe Saperstein. They have kept busy ever since, playing their 20,000th game in 1998. In that time they won 19,668 and lost just 332 games. Curiously, the team did not actually play a game in Harlem until 1968, the name being coined solely to reflect the fact that all the players were black.
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When basketball was first included in the Olympic Games in 1936, the games were played outdoors on courts of sand and clay. The final took place in pouring rain which turned the playing area into a swamp.
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Perhaps the most memorable basketball match of all time was the final of the men's Olympic tournament at Munich in 1972 between the USA and USSR. The USSR scored in controversial circumstances in the final seconds of the game to turn a one-point deficit into a surprise 51-50 victory. The defeated American players were so incensed at the manner of their defeat that they declined to accept their silver medals, which remain in a Munich bank vault to this day.
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Basketball Facts
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In the game between Argentina and Uruguay in the 1952 Olympic Games, so many players fouled out that there were only four players from Uruguay and three from Argentina to be on court at the end of the game. At one point, 25 players were involved in an on-court brawl. In their previous match, against France, Uruguay had finished with only three eligible players.
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The former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was a basketball enthusiast and arranged games in which he took part himself. However, the outcome of these matches was rarely in doubt, as nobody else on the court was allowed to score.
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The idea of rewarding players for shooting from long range originated in the American Basketball Association, a rival league to the NBA that ran for nine years from 1967. In an attempt to make the game more exciting, the ABA introduced a new line, 6.7m/22ft from the basket, and awarded three points, rather than two, for field goals scored from beyond that point. The experiment was a success, and the NBA adopted the three-point line in 1979.
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In 1956, a four-day ceasefire was declared in a civil war raging in Peru to allow the Harlem Globetrotters to play a series of exhibition games.
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In the 1970's, American basketball players such as Julius Erving and Darnell Hillman led the way in popularizing the Afro hairstyle. In later later years, Dennis Rodman amazed and astonished fans by sporting a variety of hair colours that often changed on a daily basis, while Allen Iverson has done much to make braided hair or 'cornrows' fashionable in urban culture.
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The average height for a professional basketball player is around 6 feet, 7 inches. Romanian-born Gheorghe Muresan and Sudanese-born Manute Bol are the tallest players to have played in the NBA at 7 feet 7 inches. However shortness of status is not necessarily a barrier to success: Muggsy Bogues made a career in the NBA despite standing just 5 feet 3 inches tall.
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