March Madness is here. But did you know...
I am NOT a basketball fan at all. It just doesn't hold my interest. Not sure if it is the egos and attitudes ("me me me") that is pervasive throughout the NBA; or the fact that there just appears to be nothing competitive about a bunch of 8 foot tall players trying to dunk a ball into a 10 foot high hoop or more generally where 3-digit scores are not uncommon. It's just never really interested me the way football and hockey have.
However - since it is that time of year here in the good ol' U S of A, I thought it worthwhile mentioning (since it's not as well known a fact as I thought it would be) that basketball was actually invented by a Canadian.
Yup. Them's my people!
Exerpt from inventors.about.com:
James Naismith was the Canadian physical education instructor who invented basketball in 1891. James Naismith was born in Almonte, Ontario and educated at McGill University [Heather's note: my alma mater, by the way] and Presbyterian College in Montreal. He was the physical education teacher at McGill University (1887 to 1890) and at Springfield College in Springfield, Massachusetts (1890 to 1895). At Springfield College (which was then the Y.M.C.A. training school), James Naismith, under the direction of American phys-ed specialist Luther Halsey Gulick, invented the indoor sport of basketball.
The first formal rules were devised in 1892. Initially, players dribbled a soccer ball up and down a court of unspecified dimensions. Points were earned by landing the ball in a peach basket. Iron hoops and a hammock-style basket were introduced in 1893. Another decade passed, however, before the innovation of open-ended nets put an end to the practice of manually retrieving the ball from the basket each time a goal was scored.
In 1959, James Naismith was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame (called the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame.)
Incidentally, the rules for Modern Ice Hockey (hockey as we know it today), were also invented by a Canadian, J G A Creighton, who was ALSO a student at McGill university.
Go McGill!
Go Canada!
Go Team! (I guess if I have to pick one, I'll root for the Huskies. But I likely won't actually watch any of the games ;-))
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