3 Good Things: A romp to school, resilient eagles and responsive rats
The National Basketball Association (NBA) began to take hold about a century ago, after the first few American professional basketball teams began to rise from a few scattered cities. The first major professional sport in history, America’s National Basketball Association (NBA) has more or less revolutionized American sports as we know them. The NBA has become the largest sports league in the world, with 32 teams and more than 60,000 NBA-licensed players.
Each week, I’ll be sharing a few of the good things that have come from the sport. Here are four:
1. A little league team was born
The idea behind the Little League World Series (LLWS) was to bring the best young players from around the world to play in a televised contest at each tournament. (The idea behind a televised tournament was a separate idea, of course.) The league, originally called the American Little League, began in 1946.
The first LLWS, in 1947 in New York City, was a huge success, so much so that it is the first tournament that the tournament doesn’t play in. The teams then traveled to Miami, then to Honolulu, where they played a three-game series against the boys’ basketball teams from the major United States high schools. Each game was played on Thursday night, a day on which all teams had to be there at 5 p.m. local time.
The teams were divided into two groups — the U.S. teams and the foreign teams. It is thought that the boys from the U.S. teams were able to have more success because they had no fear of the other teams — they were the best. The foreign teams (which were mostly from Europe, particularly Germany, Italy and Spain) did not have those same advantages, and the games were sometimes very close.
In 1948, the league moved to the Chicago Stadium, which was then in use for the NFL. The LLWS teams were joined by two regional tournaments — one of nine teams in New Orleans,