Basketball is still a young game. In the winter of 1891, a
certain college was having trouble with its boy students. The weather was so
terrible that the students had to stay indoors. Since they could not enjoy their
sports outside as usual, they were unhappy, and some of them often got into
fights from time to time. Finally, one of the teachers at the
college, J. E. Naismith, was asked to invent a new game for the students. It was
not an easy job because such a game had to be played indoors, and the court was
not very large. Naismith thought for a few days and invented a
kind of ball game. It was a fast, exciting game with much moving and passing of
the ball. It was played between two teams. To make score, the ball had to be
thrown into a basket ten feet high above the floor on the wall. At each end of
the court there was such a basket. At first, Naismith had planned to have the
ball thrown into a box. As he could not find boxes of right size, he had to use
fruit baskets instead. That is how the game got its name. The basketball
inventor: (46) . Basketball was invented as (47)
at first. Basketball is much (48) some of the
other ball games. (49) were fixed on the wall instead of
the boxes. To make score, basketball players must (50)
into a basket.