BASKETBALL. It could have been called boxball. In the winter of 1891 an instructor at a YMCA training school asked the janitor to hang a couple of boxes from the gymnasium balcony for an experimental indoor ball game. A former divinity student who had played rugby, he disliked the rough side of sports so he thought about guidelines that would rule out physical contact in the new game. He decided upon upright goals to minimize force on the ball and to keep some distance between the players and the actual scoring. The game became known as basketball because the janitor, unable to find boxes to make the elevated goals, nailed up two half-bushel peach baskets.
The inventor's "fundamental principles" of basketball, and most of the 13 original rules he posted a century ago, have endured. By penalizing offensive or defensive fouls, court officials preserve the sport's old-fashioned ideals. But style and performance give modern basketball a wholly different look. The new era's......

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Title: Basketball
Approximate Word Count: 4085
Approximate Pages: 17 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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