Great Basketball Trivia
Why 'Basketball" and not Boxball?, Rim Heights & China's '36 Team
Basketball Trivia – Why the game is not called BoxBall
So, the story goes that Naismith shows up early one morning at the gym to prep for his new game and asks the janitor for two boxes. But the janitor, fresh out, says he only has peach baskets, (see basket image at top of below photo) and to please not cut out the bottoms as he needs them back.
Naismith accepts the peach-baskets. Not boxes. You know the rest… (Thank heavens Naismith didn’t borrow cantaloupe or apple crates).
What are Basketball Rims 10ft/3.04m feet from the ground?
No matter where you play or watch basketball on this planet, the adult rim height has always, always been the same: 10 feet/3.04m. That’s because when Naismith originally hung those famous peach baskets from the running track railings back in Springfield, they were exactly 10 feet off the ground. Seems to have been an ideal height.
Despite the occasional call for changes in the height, the 10ft standard seems likely to stay that way. Did Naismith know something we don’t?
Basketball in China - “Basketball is Our National Pastime”
But four years after basketball's invention Christian missionaries arrived in and introduced the game to the YMCA in Tianjin, China.
The game was phenomenally popular, with China declaring basketball a national pastime in 1935 and the following year sending a team (the lads above) to the ‘36 Berlin Olympics (which beat France!) More trivia…the ‘36 games were the first where basketball was an official Olympic medal event. And, – OK, the last one,….Canada won the Silver & the U.S., the Gold medal.