Some time ago I found an old wiro notebook in a drawer. A scruffy wiro bound notebook with a photo of 2 men in a kayak with a bear on the front cover. In that notebook I found terrible sketches drawn in pencil made while travelling in 1991. One sketch leapt out at me. It was a rough pencil sketch of Mt Ararat from a backpacking trip to eastern Turkey. The sketch really surprised me – it was a very basic pencil sketch, drawn using a .5mm technical pencil on a cheap notepad. The sketch is just black and white… To my surprise the sounds and smells of the day came flooding back. Meeting some Kurdish goat herders and their flock near the base of Mt Ararat, about 10km from the Iranian border on a bright sunny but cool, alpine day. Along with memories of driving across the mountain steppe in an old Renault 19 and the smells of chai and coffee in a Doğubayazıt pasta solunu. It all came back come flooding back! Why did it evoke such vivid memories? I’m not really sure to be honest. Maybe t...
A Canadian bloke called James Naismith invented basketball in 1891. Something to do with providing an "athletic distraction" for wintertime sportsmen in Springfield, Massachusetts.
He sent a copy of his basketball rules to a sports teacher in New Orleans who in turn sent an interpretation of those rules to a school in England.
Somehow by the time basketball was first played in England a year or so later it had only a passing resemblance to Naismith's rules.
Somehow it had turned into a passing game - no dribblers thank you very much! (Naismith's rules at this stage allowed for 'ball rolling' only). Basketball was played outside, in all weather (today an exception is made for lightning storms) and played almost exclusively by women.
The sport of basketball initially spread through the British Empire and is now played worldwide by over 20 million people according to Wikipedia. Naismith had inadvertently created what is today called Netball.
The first international netball match was played in 1938 when a New Zealand team toured Australia – helping to fuel a sports rivalry that continues to this day and inspiring thousands of Kiwi kids to drag their parents out of bed early on cold, wet winter mornings for the netball run.
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