There have been a lot of repostings recently of the video above of Zach LaVine's between-the-legs dunk at the most recent NBA dunk contest. More interesting to me, however, is the story at Vice Sports entitled "The Plot to Kill the Slam Dunk" -
The first thing you need to know is that the inventor of basketball never intended for the rim to be set at 10 feet...Way more at the link. Excellent fodder for March Madness party conversations.
From as early as 1930 until the late 1980s, not a year went by without talk of raising the rim—and with it, killing the dunk—in order to cure the game's ills...
When an all-time basketball greats list was assembled in 1940, the average height of the players was 5'10". Only gradually did people realize what an advantage size could be. ..
Sports Illustrated published a 1967 cover story, "The Case for the 12-Foot Basket." The magazine even staged an experimental game like Newell wanted, one of many during this era...
"No one was making a basket as the result of a hyperactive pituitary gland," Morrison said. "You had to develop skills.".. .A 1981 syndicated column complained, "Slam-dunking is how gorillas would play basketball if let out of the zoo." A 1981 LA Times column demonstrated that basketball players' heights have gotten out of hand by referring to old "suits of armor and the length of bunks in old slave ships." The racial politics of the dunk, and the sport, still had a ways to go...
The next most popular highlight is the three, which has the dunk to thank for its existence, and maybe vice versa. "The legalization of the dunk," Schultz suggested, "led to conversations about the three-point line."
Basketball is a wonderful sport, raising the rim won't eliminate the size advantage however. But creating hight classes will !? Potentially opening basketball for many more people.
ReplyDeleteEvery fighting sport has weight classes, which are a complete hassle to observe, even something as savage as MMA.
It can't be that mostly people with freak genetic disorders become top athletes and idols, or people with overambitious parents/coaches who are willing to feed HGH to teenagers.