A2-13 · The Story of Basketball

The Story of Basketball

Basketball is one of the most popular sports in the world. Millions of people have played it. But do you know how it started?

A game for winter. In December 1891, James Naismith, a young PE teacher from Canada, worked at a college in Springfield, Massachusetts. It was a cold winter, and his students were bored. They couldn't play outside, and indoor exercises weren't much fun. So Naismith invented a new game. He nailed two peach baskets to the walls of the gym, took a soccer ball and wrote thirteen simple rules.

The first game was not very exciting. The final score was 1–0! And after every goal, somebody had to climb up and take the ball out of the basket. Players used baskets with a closed bottom for a few years before they got the idea of nets with a hole.

From a gym to the world. The new game traveled fast. Basketball has been an Olympic sport since 1936. Naismith was in Berlin to see it. The NBA, the American professional league, has existed for eighty years (since 1946), and today it has players from all over the world. Since 1891, the rules have changed many times, but the basic idea hasn't changed: put the ball through the hoop.

A Czech legend: Emil Zátopek. The Czech Republic has had many great athletes, but one of them is special. At the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, the runner Emil Zátopek won three gold medals in one week: in the 5,000 meters, the 10,000 meters and the marathon. It was the first marathon of his life! People called him "the Czech Locomotive". Since then, no other runner has won all three races at one Olympics.