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 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

retrieve 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 the 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 to 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 as a sports fan. on loan from the radio program

backstory our reporter Eric Mennel but what your feelings about basketball

aside for just a few minutes and listen to the raw human emotion in this.

Five seconds to go.

Tied at 90.

Janobley step back.

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