Aim High 6 Unit 1 : Beginnings

Unit 1 page 4. exercise 3 Read and listen to the text.

Sports origins

A public school product.
A new form of football originated in England during the 19th century, taking its name from the place where it was supposedly invented rugby school. In the early 1800s, football was played throughout England and in many other countries too, but there were no standard rules and in most versions of the game the ball could be caught as well as kicked. However, running with the ball was largely outlawed . Legend has it that in 1823 a student at rugby school called William Webb. Ellis picked up the ball during a football match and ran with it towards the opposing goal line. This illegal action caused a permanent change in the rules of the game, or so the story goes, and from that day onwards , rugby school played its own version of football, which became known as Rugby Football. The more familiar kind of football is officially known as association football. To distinguish it from Rugby Football. To this day there is an inscription at Rugby School celebrating William Webb Ellis and his actions and although the historical truth of the events is highly questionable, the story endures . The plaque reads this stone commemorates the exploits of William Webb Ellis, who with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the rugby game.

A Canadian invention.
James Naismith was a Canadian physical education instructor who worked at the YMCA, Young Men's Christian Association Training School in Springfield, MA in the USA. In 1891 he was asked to devise a new sport which the students could play indoors during the winter, to stave off boredom. Naismith came up with a game which involved two teams of nine players trying to throw a ball into Peach baskets, which were fixed to the wall at either end of the gym. It was loosely based on a game from his own childhood called Duck on a rock. On the 15th of January 1892, he published the rules of his new game, which he called basketball. Naismith's handwritten Diaries, which were discovered by his granddaughter in 2006, revealed that he was anxious about the new game and thought it would prove a failure. Like many other attempts at inventing new indoor sports, On the contrary, the game was a huge success and rapidly became very popular throughout the USA, spreading across the country through the network. With YMCA gyms and beyond. Ironically , the YMCA banned the game from its gyms a few years later because it was too rough. In 1893, iron hoops with Nets were introduced to replace the original baskets. However, it was another 10 years before open ended Nets were developed. Prior to that, players had to climb up and retrieve the ball from the net whenever a basket was scored.

An all American sport.
In 1905, a famous sportswriter named Henry Chadwick wrote an article suggesting that baseball evolved from the Old English game of Rounders. This upset Albert Spalding, one of the game's earliest players and a manufacturer of sports equipment. He resolutely refused to accept that the Great American game did not originate in America so Spalding organized a Commission of seven prominent and patriotic men to determine the true origin of baseball. The project was widely reported in the newspapers in charge of the Commission was Colonel mills of New York. He had played baseball before and during the Civil War, and was the 4th President of the National League in 1884. The Commission's investigations were essentially at a dead end until Abner Graves, a mining engineer from Denver who was traveling through Ohio at the time, happened to see a newspaper article about it. He sat down in his hotel room and wrote a long letter to the Mills Commission. In the letter grades stated categorically that, at Cooperstown in 1839 he had watched a U.S. Army officer called Abner Doubleday scratching out a baseball pitch on the ground and instructing other young men how to play baseball with teams of 11 players and four bases. Graves described how the ball that they used was made of roughly stitched horsehide and stuffed with rag. The Mills Commissioners and Spalding were elated . They promptly proclaimed baseball was invented by an American army officer, Abner Doubleday, in Cooperstown in 1839. The only evidence for this was the testimony of Graves, who was perhaps not the most reliable of witnesses. A year later, he murdered his wife and was committed to an asylum for the criminally insane.

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