THE BEGINNING
In the beginning, there was nothing. Then several hundred million years passed and
we got around to inventing basketball.
Nothing much happened in those years, outside of the dinosaurs being
killed off by George Gervin. Regardless, to
truly understand mankind one must start with the invention of basketball. To start anywhere else would be silly,
especially because you are reading a book about basketball. If you want to start with Beowulf or something, why don’t you go
read a book about Beowulf[1]?
 |
| A movie about Beowulf. |
Basketball was invented in 1891 by one Dr. James Basketball
of Basketballtown, Indiana. Mr.
Basketball[2]
ran the local YMCA, which was of course in those days overrun by giant
monstrosities with no choice but to board within lest they be enslaved and
forced to battle Paul Bunyan to the death.
Having no axes to fit their gargantuan frames nor blue oxes to assist
them in battle, these young men hid in YMCAs across the country, occasionally
leaving the safety within to steal entire herds of sheep for their meals. It was a terrifying time in America, which
was just beginning to recover from the Great Depression 40 years in the future.
Mr. Basketball knew that he had to do something to keep his
charges occupied through the long winter nights of Indiana. The winter of 1891 was particularly harsh, as
Hoosiers did not see the sun rise above the horizon for 2 months straight,
allowing vampires to take hold of the land.
Mr. Basketball was thankful for his post at the YMCA, as being
surrounded by 7-foot tall men in the prime of their athletic development scared
off all but the most overconfident vampires.
Like any good Hoosier, however, Mr. Basketball longed for the
sunshine. He pined for the beautiful
muggy July days, when the Indy Cars went out to pasture and even Bob Knight
shut up and was happy for once. The
outdoors called to Mr. Basketball and he desperately wanted to return to them.
Unfortunately, vampire martial law has a way of putting a
damper on such dreams. Mr. Basketball
knew he would never be able to venture forth with so many vampires running
things throughout Indiana, and he’d never be able to solve the vampire problem
on his own.
And so came inspiration.
Blessed with a cadre of 13 young men, all over 6’11” and all possessing
that freakish athleticism everyone assumes only black players can have, Mr.
Basketball set to work training his own personal army. The denizens of the YMCA were still young
men, of course, which meant that he couldn’t in good conscience put them
through a strict boot camp. No, he
needed to make a game of it, so that those 13 boys would be fooled into
thinking they were having fun and not being explicitly trained to take back
Indiana from the vampires.
 |
| The first basketball team. |
Having grown up the poor son of a rich peach farmer, Mr.
Basketball had a bit of experience to draw from. He never travelled far from home without his
trusty peach baskets, and now that he could hardly travel at all, the baskets
had become a true burden on him. Mr.
Basketball had been desperate to find a use for them and so decided to
incorporate them into his game.
Originally, he set the two baskets on their sides at either end of the
YMCA’s indoor ice rink and challenged his charges to shoot a small rubber puck,
or “puck” in the parlance of the time, into them. Then he realized that this was the game of
hockey, a game only played by also the United States and men on death row.
His next attempt involved hanging each peach basket from on
high. The idea behind this was that in
any fight against vampires, one would need to be able to reach the top shelves
of the vampire’s home. Indiana vampires
were known (at the time) to store their most dangerous belongings up there out of
reach, such as wooden stakes, garlic, and that bottle of rice wine vinegar they
only needed for one recipe but Safeway doesn’t sell it in a smaller size.
Thankfully, the YMCA was equipped with a standard high-rise
trapeze set, as most gyms were at the time.
Mr. Basketball was able to jury rig the ladders used for this trapeze
set to hold one peach basket at either end of the gym, roughly 10 feet off the
ground. The two men who had been using
the trapeze set at the time died of dehydration days later, still clinging to
the bars in the rafters of the YMCA.
There would be little challenge in just placing an object in
the baskets, and even less to learn from it.
To counteract this, Mr. Basketball decided to introduce the concept of
“dribbling.” Anyone who wished to move
about the court would have to bounce the ball between the ground and their hand
while doing so, all while keeping the ball from bouncing above their waist.
After this, Mr. Basketball decided to add a ball to the
game, as to make dribbling less of a challenge.
The ball was designed to mimic the basic shape and feel of a
vampire’s head in order to create the association between vampires and
headlessness. When they saw a vampire,
Mr. Basketball hoped his charges would immediately feel the need to behead them
and dribble their head up and down the floor.
It wasn’t a very good plan, if we’re being honest here, but Mr.
Basketball made do with what was available.
The balls were made of tanned cow hide, with dimples added by rolling a
golf ball across its surface while it was still forming. Each ball incubated for 2-4 weeks[3]
in a sensory deprivation chamber, another invention of Mr. Basketball’s that
isn’t nearly as interesting. Upon their
maturity, the ball would be removed from the chamber, given a brief week-long
symposium on human society, and used for upwards of 5 full basketball
games. The NBA still cherishes this
traditional method of basketball creation after their attempt at changing over
to synthetic balls taught knowledge of humanity through subliminal images shown
to them in the womb was rejected by the players for the balls “playing sticky.”
There was one last addition needed to the physical framework
of the game: the court itself. Mr.
Basketball decided that his game would be played on a 94-foot long slab of
wood, to better ward of vampires. The
area directly in front of each basket was painted differently, which is of
course the source of that area’s colloquial nickname “the key.” The key could only be occupied for three
seconds at a time by offensive players.
Mr. Basketball added this rule to better simulate the trap-door lava
pits so many vampires kept in the vicinity of their coffins. With this rule in places, the players would
know to never stand in front of a coffin for very long, lest they meet a
gruesome fate wished only upon the corrupt and the Terminator. A line was drawn across the middle of the
court, to indicate what half a court was.
Players weren’t allowed to cross back over the half court line with the
ball once they had initially crossed it, because sometimes Mr. Basketball liked
to just add rules for his own amusement.
A circle was added at the center of the half court line, as everyone
involved agreed circles were very pretty shapes and weren’t being utilized nearly
enough. Mr. Basketball’s original
suggestion of a pentagram at half court[4]
was shot down as being “pretty creepy” and not at all in the spirit of good
fun.
With the court itself taken care of, Mr. Basketball turned
his attention to the rules of the game.
He had already decided points would be awarded whenever a player could
place the ball in their peach basket, with the other team doing everything they
could to stop such an act. This seemed
like enough in Mr. Basketball’s mind, though he relented and added more rules
later after the first game saw several deaths on the court. Fouls were added to prevent this: a defender
was no longer allowed to grab, elbow, shank, keel-haul, trip, People’s Elbow,
spear, or choke to death their opposition.
Similarly, any offensive player that ran into a stationary defender
would be called for an offensive foul, a rule that everyone agreed was very
simple and would never lead to any problems at any level of the game.
The biggest problem came with how to integrate the dangers
associate with fighting vampires into the game.
Players had to be wary of getting to close to vampires, lest they be bit
and turned. It just wasn’t feasible to
encourage players to try and bite each other, however, thanks in large part to
the poor dental care provided by the YMCA.
Having to deal with constant gummings on your way to the basket was
off-putting but didn’t really convey the danger of vampiric combat.
It was from this conundrum that the set shot was born. Mr. Basketball outlawed the practice of
dunking as soon as he started creating rules, lest players become too
enthralled by getting as close to the basket (and, in the future, the vampires)
as possible. Throwing the ball to the
basket taught the players how to knock important objects off of high
shelves, but throwing the ball overhand too often led to knocking the peach basket from its precarious perch. Abraham Whistler, one of Mr.
Basketball’s YMCA charges, suggested that players be encouraged to hoist the
ball from the chest, sending it under control to the peach baskets. This would keep them far from the basket as
well as encourage them to create space from their defenders. Additionally, the set shot would keep the
game from looking aesthetically pleasing, lest basketball garner too much
attention in its infancy. Mr. Basketball
wanted nothing less than for the vampires to become aware of his plans and so
worked diligently to ensure that the first iteration of basketball was dull,
ugly, and not worth any spectator’s time.
Focusing on players jumping slightly and throwing the ball at stuff would
ensure nobody gave a damn.
A handful of dry runs were all Mr. Basketball’s collection
of YMCA monsters needed before they were hooked. From then on out, it was nothing but wet
runs. Basketball as a sport was ready to
go, all that was left was a name. Mr.
Basketball decided to name it in honor of his family and his beloved hometown
which was why it was so strange that the sport was known as
“hoopsballsportingdowns” until the 1930s.
It was at that time that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt decried
that the sport would henceforth be known just as “basketball” because I mean
duh, right?
 |
| President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. |
Since Dr. James Basketball’s death in 1939 at the hands of
Judy Garland’s flying house, basketball has had a number of rule changes to
keep the sport up to date with new trends.
Basketball is a sport for the masses and has needed to changed here and
there to make sure that it is accessible and that the Pistons stop just
punching everyone in the face when they try to drive the lane. The three-point shot was added in 1961 and
eventually became a staple when it was added to the NBA in 1980 in order to
give value to some of the guards and sharpshooters who had previously been
resigned to been held at arm’s length as they futilely attempted to take the
ball from taller players. Hand-checking
was removed after Gary Payton killed Michael Adams and preceded to taunt the
entire Adams family for several generations[5]. Throughout it all, however, Dr. Basketball’s
vision for the sport remained strong, which is why we don’t have vampires
running rampant in the streets anymore.
Oh, also the YMCA Kaiju-esque human beasts killed all the
Indiana vampires through the magic of organized sport. To learn more about that odyssey, I suggest
seeing the feature film based on the story, which has never been made but
undoubtedly will be by one of the inspired readers of this book.
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