9781422288009 Players & the Game Around the World

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G lobal B asketball

B asketball today touches every nation in the world. Its growth has been amazing. Only forty-nine years after James Naismith invented the game, players were get- ting paid to be basketball pros. By the time Naismith died in 1939, his original rules for the game had been translated into fifty different languages. The YMCA and the armed forces had helped to spread the game. So had missionaries to remote areas of the world, who brought the game with them, along with the Christian faith. The NBA, however, was the organization that did the most to bring the game to other cultures around the world, starting in the 1980s. In 1983, the first NBA games were televised in Italy. It was the first time viewers outside the United States were able to see the games. Soon, though, basketball was in people’s homes everywhere there was television. Now, each region of the world was exposed to basketball at a far wider level than every before.

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