Hip Hop x Basketball -- 1: Humble Beginnings
1:
Humble Beginnings
We all know the story
of basketball’s beginnings. Dr. Naismith was commissioned with the creation of
an indoor activity to keep kids in his YMCA busy on rainy days or in the harsh
New England winters in Springfield, MA. In a dearth of seed money or other outside
resources, a peach basket was nailed to a wall ten feet in the air and the
objective was to throw the ball (then a soccer ball – specifically-designed
basketballs wouldn't come until later) into the basket within the constraints
of a set of rules he had written out prior to nailing the baskets up.
Compared to what “basket-ball” – as
a then-skeptical Dr. Naismith called the game in his diaries – would become, it
really doesn’t seem feasible that beginnings get more humble than that. From his brainchild, the activity became sport
played in YMCAs throughout the US, spreading through the rest of North America
as well and eventually into high schools and colleges en route to taking hold
as an organized and regulated sport with the Great Doctor’s rules evolving with
the changing times and advances in equipment, such as symmetrical specifically-designed-for-basketball
balls, opening the bottom of the baskets, and the use of a backboard. Rather than being cast aside, basketball was
accepted and spun into the programs at YMCAs and schools pretty quickly.
Basketball, as it were, was such a
big draw due to its less-than-consumptive equipment and personnel requirements.
With only one ball, five players on each
side all requiring very little in the way of necessary special safety equipment
and a game that could be reasonably regulated by one or two referees at the
time. For non-organized games, the
“officiating” could (and usually is) be reasonably handled by the participants
themselves.
Ease of involvement on this level made basketball just as easily-installed as a game of recreation as it was as a competitive one – all one needs is a flat surface abutting a place where a flat board to which a hoop could be mounted and a ball sized well enough to fit through it at a reasonable rate of successes per attempts. Even with Chuck Taylor’s 1935 re-design of the basketball itself to the 8-panel ball that we still see in use to this very day, the cost of a dedicated basketball was far from prohibitive. Comparison of these requirements and given consideration of the low maintenance requirements of it all, there should be no genuine wonder as to why basketball courts began popping up on school playgrounds and in public parks all over the United States, often displacing or witnessing the unchecked decay of comparatively higher-maintenance baseball fields that began to take hold in the late 80s and early 90s and continues to this day.
Ease of involvement on this level made basketball just as easily-installed as a game of recreation as it was as a competitive one – all one needs is a flat surface abutting a place where a flat board to which a hoop could be mounted and a ball sized well enough to fit through it at a reasonable rate of successes per attempts. Even with Chuck Taylor’s 1935 re-design of the basketball itself to the 8-panel ball that we still see in use to this very day, the cost of a dedicated basketball was far from prohibitive. Comparison of these requirements and given consideration of the low maintenance requirements of it all, there should be no genuine wonder as to why basketball courts began popping up on school playgrounds and in public parks all over the United States, often displacing or witnessing the unchecked decay of comparatively higher-maintenance baseball fields that began to take hold in the late 80s and early 90s and continues to this day.
As with basketball, a
great many of us know the history of hip hop, from the house parties and in the
parks of the South Bronx in and around the legendary 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. Initially, we were given an amalgamation of
poetry, Jamaican “toasting,” set to backdrops consisting of break beats of
established records looped by the DJs of the time possessing a keen ear and
well-trained hands to keep the beat going for extended enough periods of time
the rappers to keep doing what they did. Newly excited by a medium of entertainment
featuring people who looked, sounded and lived like they did and simultaneously
empowered by a culture that openly accepted their fashion, their general
activities and art, and hip hop was born.
Hip hop quickly became and rooted
itself as a medium for the drawing of similarly-minded people together to a
common interest and grew from a the small house and block parties to the
ostensibly more lucrative club parties, to the guaranteed more lucrative
for-retail-sales recordings, to the machine that we all know and some of us
even continue to love to this day, filling arenas worldwide.
The glue connecting
the two activities was the “anyone can be included” feeling indelible to the
mediums that happened to be both basketball and hip hop when taken at their
surfaces. With few supplies, none of
which being particularly expensive or difficult to source, you’ve quickly gone
from standing around with as few as three to as many as nine friends to being
fully ensconced in your best impersonation of your favorite ball player. Similarly, it takes not much more than someone
banging out a rhythm on a table for you to get into the zone in which you are
your favorite rapper for the amount of time that it will take to repeat his (or
perhaps your own) verses.
While far from intended, given who came up with hip hop and where, why and how they did it compared to basketball, they seem the most natural blood brothers when spoken of as if they were human beings, despite being dreamt into existence more than 80 years apart.
While far from intended, given who came up with hip hop and where, why and how they did it compared to basketball, they seem the most natural blood brothers when spoken of as if they were human beings, despite being dreamt into existence more than 80 years apart.
Despite the elder of the mediums having had a generations-long head-start, the explosion of popularity of
the two would be largely parallel.
Lessening the blow doled by the “pay-to-play” element made the either of
them much more easily gotten into by people whose parents might not be able to
afford the necessary gear for a collision sport like Football or Hockey on one
medium; or special instruments (or the necessary lessons to play them) for
another musical medium on the other. Given
the advantages given to both basketball and hip hop on that particular level,
there’s no surprise that the two share popularity in the same demographic and
often do so at the same time.
Like the interest of the
participants in either would go on to experience in their own rights as time
progressed, hip hop and basketball were born from the simple necessity that
comes with needing to create something from very little. We know that Dr. Naismith was skeptical of
what he had created, specifically of how viable it could be expected to remain
in the long-term. What we do not know
directly from the fathers of hip hop is whether or not they legitimately felt
that they had created something that would become as popular as it did, and
that it would grow as swiftly as we witnessed.
Given the personal nature of it, being a method of expression for people
in the neighborhoods with them, it doesn’t necessarily feel as if they
did. Either way, and very much to the
successes of both the best of the participants and those tasked with marketing
them, both basketball and hip hop music would go on to belie their no-frills
meager beginnings and become majorly profitable machines. What one may neglect to notice is how much of
the creation of their respective machines came as cooperation, even while not
in competition with one another.
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