Made In America - Bill Bryson [182]
Even with Camp’s refinements American football remained violent and dangerous. In 1902 twelve American players died. In 1905 the number rose to seventy-one. To make matters worse, schools began to hire professional players. ‘One man played, under various pseudonyms, at nine schools over a period of thirteen years,’ Page Smith notes.36
Professional football grew up in mining and factory towns in the early 1900s, and the team names tended to reflect local industries, as with the Pittsburgh Steelers and Green Bay [Meat] Packers. Professional football was slow to establish itself. As late as 1925 the New York Giants franchise was purchased for just $500. Not until the 1950s and the age of television did professional football attract a huge and devoted following.
Although football has spawned a vast internal vocabulary – T-formation (1931), play-off (1933), handoff and quarterback sneak (early 1940s), to name just four – surprisingly few football terms have entered mainstream English. Among the few: to blindside, cheap shot, game plan, and jock for an athlete (from jockstrap for protective wear, and ultimately from a sixteenth-century English slang term for the penis).37
At the time that football was rising to eminence in colleges, another perennially popular sport was taking shape. In the fall of 1891, a young Canadian named James Naismith had just joined the staff of the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he was instructed to devise an indoor game that didn’t involve bodily contact, would not result in damage to the gym, and in which every player had a chance to get in on the action. The game he invented was basketball – or basket ball as it was called until about 1912. Naismith hung peach baskets at either end of the gym and used a soccer ball for play. The first game, in December 1891, involved two teams of nine men each and was not exactly a barn burner. The final score was 1-0.38
As an off-season recreation, basketball took off in a big way, largely because it was so cheap and easy to set up. Within three years, a company was producing balls specifically for the sport and many of the nuances of play had already evolved. For instance, in 1893 came the free throw – or free trial for goal as it was at first called. Five players to a side became standard in 1895, but the names of the positions – centre, two forwards and two guards – weren’t fixed until the 1920s. By 1907, basketball was being called the cage game. Cager, whose continued currency is very largely the result of its convenience to writers of headlines, is first attested in 1922 in a newspaper in Ardmore, Oklahoma.
Oddly, although peach baskets were soon replaced by nets, until 1912 it didn’t occur to anyone to cut a hole in the bottom of them. Until then it was necessary for someone to climb a ladder and retrieve the ball after each score.
Scores remained low for years. During the first National Invitational Tournament at New York in 1934, New York University beat Notre Dame 25-18, and Westminster beat St John’s 37-33. Not until the evolution of the jump shot in the 1930s and hook shot in the 1940s and above all the fast break in the 1950s did the sport take on some real pace.
Many YMCA teams evolved into the first professional teams, notably the Celtics, who were formed in 1915 and came not from Boston but from New York. But financing was always a problem and teams often had to resort to desperate expedients to keep from going under. One early team, to secure sponsorship, called itself the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons. It was named for a Fred Zollner who, as you will have guessed, manufactured pistons. Professional basketball didn’t really get going until the formation in 1949 of the National Basketball Association, created by the merger of two smaller leagues. Like football, professional basketball was essentially a child of television, and, like football, it has had surprisingly little influence on American English. In fact, if you discount occasional