pl-a2-13 · Reading (edycja polska)
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 Polish legend: Robert Korzeniowski. Poland has had many great athletes, but one of them is special. At the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, the race walker Robert Korzeniowski won two gold medals in one week: in the 20 kilometers and the 50 kilometers. No man had ever won both walking races at one Olympics before! Altogether, he won four Olympic gold medals. Since then, no other walker has won both races at one Olympics.
