This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

When basketball was invented as an indoor sport that could be played during long New England

winters, the basket was literally a peach basket. And that basket was quickly replaced by a metal

hoop with a rope and net. But it was still closed at the bottom, so every time a player scored a basket,

the game had to stop and someone pulled out a ladder and retrieved the ball. You could also

sometimes knock it out of the hammock with a long stick. But it took over a decade for someone to

come up with the brilliant idea of cutting a hole in the bottom of a net. And it finally put an

end to the practice of manually retrieving basketballs every time a goal was scored. That took a decade.

Maybe it's a testament to how fun basketball is to play that the game could endure 10 years of

such bad game design. Regardless, if someone not invented open-ended nets, basketball would sure

suck the watch on TV. But it's a more subtle development that came decades later that made basketball

the sports juggernaut that it is today. Okay, I appreciate that not everyone listening is a sports

fan. I'll learn from the radio program backstory, our reporter, Eric Manel. But what's your feelings

about basketball aside for just a few minutes and listen to the raw human emotion in this?

Five seconds for a tie to 90. This in basketball is called a buzzer beer.

The game-winning shot may just as time expires. It's exhilarating. It's heartbreaking.

It's a moment of pure anxiety that millions of people can share as one.

And the fact that a 48-minute game of basketball can still be won in its final microseconds.

Thereby keeping you on the edge of your seat, chewing your fingernails to bits until the final buzzer,

that, my friends, is what we call good design. Yeah, it is good design, but it's not the way basketball

was originally designed. In fact, the drama of the game clock really only became relevant after

the advent of another clock, the 24-second shot clock. This is the story of how this smaller,

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