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SLAM! Sports Century in Review INTERACTIVE CONTESTS ALSO ON SLAM!  |
FROM CAGES TO COURTS In a doorway stood Lenny Wilkens, who revered baseball as a child growing up in Brooklyn only to become one of basketball's greatest players and coaches. He remembers the days when the NIT was king, the NBA barely merited a mention and the WNBA was 40 years away from even being considered. Just a few feet away sat Dikembe Mutombo, who grew up playing soccer in Africa but sprouted to 7-feet and took up a new game that made him a multimillionaire. He has traveled the world, and he has seen the future. "To see how many kids are getting away from soccer to start playing basketball is amazing," Mutombo said. "In Africa, kids are putting a little hoop in the trees and shooting a basketball made of plastic bags. "It will take over in the next 10 years." From modest beginnings in the early part of the century, this rapidly growing sport evolved into a worldwide phenomena featuring players such as Oscar Robertson, Wilt Chamberlain, Julius Erving, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and, of course, Michael Jordan. Invented in 1891 by Dr. James Naismith in Springfield, Mass., the game was first played in cages rimmed in chicken wire at places like YMCAs and lodge halls. Players wore padding on their elbows and shins, took two-handed set shots at a rim with no backboard, often underhanded, and had a jump ball at center court after every basket. Pennsylvania and New York were the early hotbeds of the game, and the Original Celtics were the top barnstormers of the 1920s, to be followed by the Harlem Globetrotters The first professional league, the ABL, began in 1925, and 1930s were marked by the rise in popularity of college basketball. Wilkens remembers coming back to New York as a college junior when Providence qualified for the NIT. "The NIT was THE tournament at the time, much bigger than the NCAA. All the best teams would come in, and at the old Garden you could see the smoke hanging above the floor. "Everybody seemed to hang around the Garden, talk about the games. I remember everybody had on suits and ties; they were a little more dressed on a whole than today," Wilkens said. As television, especially the world of cable, brought games into living rooms around the country, the sport still couldn't shake its murky side. Virtually every decade had a gambling scandal involving college basketball. From CCNY's tainting of the sport's only double championship in the 1950s until this year's sentencing of two former Arizona State players, the words "point shaving" have cast a shadow over the sport. Still, every March the country's attention centers on a tournament that has grown from eight teams playing in front of small crowds 60 years ago to a field of 64 that leads to office pools galore and TV contracts worth $6 billion. From the dynasty of UCLA to the consistency of Kentucky, Kansas and North Carolina, certain schools have dominated the sport. None did as much as UCLA when coach John Wooden led the Bruins to 10 national championships in 12 years, including seven straight starting in 1967. Dean Smith's 879 wins -- all in 36 seasons at North Carolina -- were the most of any coach, three more than Adolph Rupp had in 41 seasons at Kentucky. Each generation had its star players, from Wooden's days at Purdue in the early 1930s, through the first of the game's big men -- DePaul's George Mikan -- past Kansas' Chamberlain and UCLA's Lew Alcindor, who brought his game from East Coast to West then changed his name to Kareem Adbul-Jabbar. Then there was Johnson of Michigan State and Bird of Indiana State, who both changed the way game was played and were replaced by a new generation of acrobatic stars -- most of whom don't stick around for four years of college, choosing instead the fame and fortune of pro basketball. "I never imagined players could make the amount of money they make today, that's huge," said Wilkens, whose center, Mutombo, is making $12.3 million this season. "But also the travel. Most teams have our own planes, and the new arenas, you look at these new places to play and they're incredible." The move toward multimillion dollar salaries and taxpayer-financed new arenas happened in the final decade of this century, coinciding with the rise and then the retirement of Jordan. Considered the greatest player in the history of the game, Jordan used his unmatched knack for scoring, winning and taking over a game to transform himself from an American success story into a worldwide sensation. Jordan won six championships with the Chicago Bulls, a run unseen since the days of Bill Russell's Boston Celtics, who won 11 championships in 13 seasons from 1957 to 1969. Jordan wasn't the greatest scorer. Chamberlain holds that distinction as a pro for having put up 100 points in a single game and an average of more than 50 in a single season, while at the college level "Pistol" Pete Maravich averaged 44.2 points a game at Louisiana State from 1968-70. The Celtics won three more championships in the early '80s behind Bird, engaging in a decade-long rivalry with the Los Angeles Lakers of Magic, Abdul-Jabbar and coach Pat Riley, who won four titles in the decade. In international basketball, amateur teams competed in the Olympics and World Championships until the rules were changed in 1989 to allow professionals, which spawned the original Dream Team -- including Jordan, Johnson, Bird, Karl Malone, John Stockton and Charles Barkley -- that won the gold medal at the 1992 Olympics. The international arena also was the site of what is considered the greatest upset in the sport's history, when the United States lost to the Soviet Union in the gold medal game of the 1972 Olympics in Munich. In a highly controversial finish, the clock was reset for the final seconds after the Americans thought they had won, allowing the Soviets one last chance to score, which they did. The Americans also lost an Olympic basketball game in Seoul in 1988, but by then the world had caught up to America's amateurs -- much like the world's professionals can be expected to catch the pros in the early part of the next century. Women's basketball is growing, too, as shown by the establishment and quick expansion of the WNBA and the growing popularity of women's college basketball. "As we move into the new century, basketball will be the most popular sport," Mutombo said. "I see a dramatic change from '91, the first time we went to Africa with the commissioner and were surprised to see kids wearing NBA jerseys. "It's very big, growing very fast. You have to travel to see it, you can't just sit here in America to see it. But if you travel worldwide like some of us do in the summertime, you will see it." 
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