September 21, 2023 • 50 mins
As James Naismith's new sport became increasingly popular, more and more people looked for ways to evolve, adjust, or flat-out change Naismith's original rules. In the second part of this series, Ben, Noel and Max explore how basketball continued to change over time -- and how some kids at Yale found a loophole to "pass the ball to themselves."
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the
(00:27):
show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for
tuning in. Let's hear it four our super producer Max
the ref Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
The Incorrigible.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Yes, so, I absolutely, with all passions, hate threads and
umpires like I'm waiting for technology to make them like irrelevant.
Speaker 4 (00:45):
Right, Well, what's the one where you're like underwear snitcher? No,
that's picture. But there there are various rhymy kind of
ways of maligning the Uh.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Yes, I hate themselves. It seems like a danger. But
do you not acknowledge if their their net?
Speaker 3 (01:01):
I mean I'm waiting for the purpose I mean, I
I baseball and parts of the worst ones. They their
purpose they believe is for everyone to watch them, don't.
Speaker 5 (01:09):
I mean, look, we're the star of the show.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
No one else take away from us, watch us, which
they're just you know they take away from the game.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Did they're an officiants? Did did something happen?
Speaker 3 (01:22):
I as brian O Nora who finds note listens. Brian
O Nora is currently under investigation for soliciting a prostitute
as and he got caught by the FBI for in
a sting.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
From sex worker if you will.
Speaker 5 (01:38):
Yeah, so that's saying what the FBI said, Cleveland, Ohio.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Okay, well, before you introduce those guys, I said the
P word. Before you introduce those guys, let us introduce ourselves.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Did this is? This is part two of what is
becoming an increasingly.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Spicy series, very spicy history of basketball.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
A lot of hot takes and tangents.
Speaker 4 (02:00):
Oh yeah, that's a good one. Yeah really, really, I'm serious.
You know, I'm the first to admit that I am
not a big sports guy, but I always have always
found basketball to be the most enjoyable and watchable of
all of the sports.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
And the history of.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
It is just as enjoyable and listenable, you know. And
I think you guys are going to enjoy this part
too a lot. So, as as we know, basketball became
kind of a big deal, and it happened relatively quickly.
I believe the first public game was played in a
YMCA gym and was recorded or reported on by the
(02:35):
Springfield Republican, and that was on March twelfth of eighteen
ninety two. We had around two hundred folks show up
to watch the game. Despite having never heard of it
before and not having previously existed. When that don't we
don't have enough of that, man, we don't have like
a new sport like ooh, you guys, hear about the
new sport.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
That'd be cool.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
I might, I might get in on that, you know,
like rollerball or you know, like the running man.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
That'd be cool. I yeah, I love.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
I love the idea of new sports being invented. There
are a lot of quirky ones.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Is big.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
It's not new, but it's it's it's achieved insane popularity
in the last handful of years. But I think it
is sort of a new ish game. It's it's styled
on kind of. It's like a full court version of
ping pong, isn't it kind of?
Speaker 2 (03:22):
You could go in the other direction.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
You could say that pickleball is to tennis what putt
putt is to golf, you know. And I say that
because a good friend of mine who actually listens to
stuff they want you to know, is a a retired
marine who is now a tennis coach.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
He's the coolest dude.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
I met him just because we hang out the local
pizza place and he's got some hot takes. You dig him,
but he he hit me up a few weeks of gosh,
a few months ago actually, because he teaches tennis and
he's furious about the rise of pickleball, and it will
hit me up and we'll say steel my thunder Man.
He's like Ben Well because he teaches pickleball too, and
(04:02):
he's like, these people have no respect for the game.
It's just a bunch of pickleballers out here. And I'm like, wow, you,
thank you.
Speaker 4 (04:10):
Did you hear that pickleball's become so popular, but that
it's a lot of these dead malls that they are,
like big box stores are being converted into pickleball arenas.
I mean, it's solving a problem, I guess, because what
else are they going to do with those things?
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Yeah, they're also uh, there are a lot of parody
songs about it. MPR did a great piece on it
where they talked about pickleball parody songs.
Speaker 4 (04:32):
There is There was like a limited run maybe it
was a YouTube series with starring Paul Sheer and his
wife June Diane Raphael that was like a lot of
those like Lonely Island kind of adjacent La comedian folks
or what was it human giant some of those guys. Yeah,
there's like a you know, sort of like a basketball
kind of pickleball kind of send up. But yeah, I
(04:53):
mean basketball really took off pretty quickly, like, you know,
just within a couple of weeks after this original game.
The positives of it were immediately clocked by those in
the field of I guess physical education. You know, they
acknowledged that folks that play and that were good at
(05:14):
it had to have, you know, certain agility and sportsmanship
and hand eye coordination and stuff. It kind of combined
some things that existed in other popular sports, but it
was inherently a little bit less brutish, you know, right.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
There was this emphasis on agility, on teamwork, on nimbleness,
as he said, and students who went to other schools
would go to their own YMCAs and say, hey, we
got to start playing this, you know what I mean.
Rugby and face slap is for the birds. Face lap
was a very popular game at the time. Jeez, oh
(05:51):
my god.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
Shout out to I think someone that you know as well,
Gabby Watts, who's a local musician and comedian and just
launched a podcast that I think ridiculous historians would be
a fan of It's called American filth, and it's all
about it's like a history podcast, but it's very X rated.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
It's like and she recently did an episode.
Speaker 4 (06:11):
On a little known American sport called Rough and Tumble,
which in where it which is basically fight club. It
involved like eye gouging and things like that. Basically it's
like a fight to the death. But it was very
popular at a time in the probably the early eighteen hundred's.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Face slap was exactly what it sounds like.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Yeah, yeah, I may or may not have made that up,
but yeah, there's a lot of there are a lot
of weird sports out there. And I got to say
basketball inspires a lot of very specific versions of basketball.
You know, you've got people who are differently able playing basketball.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
You've got that's true. Yeah, and then you've.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Also got basketball where people just put their own weird
rules in.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Of course, well, and you can do one on one,
you can do smaller tea.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
You know, it's a lot like since you know, obviously
there are positions and stuff.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
But it's pretty nimble.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
Again, like I was saying earlier, not only do you
have to be physically pretty nimble to like maneuver around
the is malleable, you know what I mean? Like there
there are different ways of being and I don't think
we mentioned this with that first game that was reported
on in eighteen ninety two was between students and the
teachers at that particular Ymcagim and I believe the students
(07:25):
won five to one, much more interesting score than what's
reported for that first ever basketball game one to nothing.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
But still, gosh, it seems like the teachers just got trounced.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
And the article in the Springfield Republican credited the teachers
with having agility, but the students having science.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Ye that they were younger.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
I guess their physical prowess is what led them to win.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
I think it meant more that they had a better
understanding of the game. Okay, so they knew when to
pass to whom right and how to position players and stuff,
just because they have played more often than the teachers
who were at best watching the game.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
So we still don't.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Know when exactly the first intercollegiate basketball game occurred. We
know that high schools began introducing it in the early
nineteen hundreds. By nineteen oh five, basketball was officially recognized
as the go to winter sport, and in eighteen ninety three,
two college newspaper articles published separate recordings of different college
(08:34):
basketball teams go into court with each other. So we
don't know exactly who was first, but we know that
it's set one heck of a precedent.
Speaker 4 (08:43):
Yeah, you know, we haven't really heard much of did
Nay Smith, like patent this did he is this intellectual
property that's protected when you invent a game. He wrote
down the rules, he pinned them to the wall. I mean,
you know, technically you can claim a copyright just by
committeed something to any media. You know, you can say
I wrote the song because I wrote it down first
(09:05):
or whatever.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
But even if you don't file.
Speaker 4 (09:08):
But I'm just wondering, like, did he become a rich
man off of this in his lifetime.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Or you know, if that's a good question here. He
definitely in the public mind. He definitely was the father
of basketball, and anytime somebody brought it up, they brought
him up. But I don't know if it's like a
Nike swoosh situation.
Speaker 4 (09:27):
Yeah, and it's also sort of like whoever was the
first that quote invented the fidget?
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Spinner.
Speaker 4 (09:33):
We don't know who that person is because either they
didn't patent it or it was ununique enough that it
could be done a bunch of different ways. And I
think that's probably true of a game. You can't really
say you can't play my game unless you pay me.
That's not really how games work. Yeah, it's just the
way you would have to approach that. As you could say,
(09:55):
you can't televise my game without getting cut, or you
can't hold a thing where people pay to watch you
play it, but you can't stop people from throwing a
ball around.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
No.
Speaker 4 (10:06):
I just don't get the sense that Nace Smith had
any quote unquote ownership over basketball, like as a trademark er,
as like a concept, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
I think he was. I think he was kind of
driven by the mission. He just wanted to give it
to the world.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Yeah, I think he felt really interested in spreading it.
In eighteen ninety eight, he becomes the first official men's
basketball coach at the University of Kansas. He is also,
at this point the only coach in the program's history
to have a losing record, and while he is while
he is coaching these college students, he watches his original
(10:42):
thirteen rules evolve. Eventually they do cut the bottoms out
of the peach baskets and transform them to hoops, and
free throws eventually become part of the game. Nineteen oh one,
dribbling is introduced, and that meant that now you can
run with the ball, you just have to bounce it.
At the same time, Nay Smith originally said, look, the
(11:05):
size of your basketball team can be anywhere from three
to get this forty players. And then they said, nah,
it's crazy, man, We're gonna do five people on each squad.
And that makes a lot more sense. The sports spreads everywhere,
it goes viral, as they would say, these days, you
see professional leagues forming across the country, basketball fans or
(11:29):
cheering on their hometown teams, so.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
The game starts spreading like wildfire.
Speaker 4 (11:34):
And yeah, man, that conversation about the whole ownership of
the sport really intrigues me because obviously, once you start
getting into professional leagues, that's when there's money to be
made and like endorsements to be had and all that stuff.
And I was just doing a kind of a cursory
Google and it doesn't seem like Nay Smith.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Like cleaned up, like no money in his life.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
He didn't become a coach in Kansas later to hilarious effect,
which we'll get to when the time is right.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
But this is it.
Speaker 4 (12:01):
This is when you know basketball really comes into its own,
and you know, we're on the beginning the very end
of the eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds, we start to
see the formations of leagues in the US. Like the
first one is the National Basketball League, which is you know,
I guess a precursor to the NBA in some ways.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
There were a couple of different leagues. We don't have
to get two two in the leads, but just the
high level stuff. The first professional league was the NBL
National Basketball League that was six teams up in the Northeast,
and that league only lasted about five years. It dissolved
in nineteen oh four, and then three decades passed until
(12:51):
nineteen thirty seven and a new league occurred. And this
league had corporate support. They had Goodyear, fire Stone and
General Electric footing the bills.
Speaker 4 (13:03):
And it's really interesting the National Geographic article that we
source for this, which is behind a paywell, I'm having
a hard time loading it up to get the writer
credit where credit is due. But if you if you
have a subscription type in basketball, it's like the title
is something like from peach baskets to something that is
now below a black square. But they describe it as
(13:26):
the corporations owning the teams like it, like it's bigger
than just they're sponsored by These are like corporately held leagues,
which I think is very interesting.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Yeah, it's a it's a new evolution for sure. And
the game continued to involve because as it became more popular,
more and more people were paying attention to it, and
they were pointing out things that they thought could improve
the rules. So not all of Naysmith's ideas were winners.
This is what we this is what we talked about.
Some of some of this stuff in his head was weird.
(14:01):
One of the rules was when the ball goes out
of bounds, it's thrown into field by the first person
touching it. Does that mean that you just die like
ten dudes running for this ball.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
It also goes against kind of the spirit of the
whole non contact sport thing. I just picture like a
cartoon where it's just a dog pile of everyone just
jumping on the thing and piling on top of each
other and like a you know, swirling like dirt, kind
of dust. And then you see a player crawl out
of the melee and get dragged back in by their leg. Yeah,
(14:32):
that's not a winner, as let's see. Eric Zimmerman, who
is a professor of game design and game theory, notes
He also noted that it was unclear. The rule was
very vague, and I think did they replaced this with
like a tip off or something now or maybe it's
(14:52):
just Max helping me out here.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
What is the sort of replacement the modern replacement?
Speaker 3 (14:57):
So now it's the last person who touched the ball,
the other team gets the ball. So if like you
and me are playing against the other and you touched
the ball out of bounds, I get the ball.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
That makes sense, easy penalty, right and just it changes.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Sides and it and it incentivizes you not knock the
ball out about absolute which is smarter.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
So one example of this is stuff like early YMCA games.
The ball landed in a balcony and one team sprinted
up the stairs to get it, and then two of
the players on the other team boosted a third guy
up so he could climb on the balcony the ball.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, get the ball first. Yeah, shout out to Jack
and Miles.
Speaker 4 (15:39):
There was another tale of like a kid who strikes
me as maybe one of the ones that you were
sort of characterizing as like the one that would just
come a swink, come in. Yeah, tough home life, got
a really wicked scar.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Lloyd. Where is this kid's name?
Speaker 4 (15:54):
And Nate Smith writes about this, and I believe in
his in his memoir that this kid took quote great
pleasure when in a jovial move in exhibiting a scar
that he got when he dives for the ball and
came into contact with the sharp corner of a radiator.
See that rule to me feels like a holdover from
something like rugby, you know, or like a like a
(16:17):
dog pile kind of tackle situation, which again goes against
the spirit of the type of game that Nate Smith
was trying to create.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
And to jump in here like one thing that basketball
and baseball and football all have. It's very different than
like a rugby or a soccer. Is there sports that
I don't know got invented with clocks were in greater
greater supply, So there's pauses and goes, pauses, and goes.
We watch rugby and watch soccer. It's just constantly going
(16:45):
a moving thing like soccer. They're like, oh, we don't
stop in soccer, and the clock never stopped.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
What he's saying, they were just lousy with clocks.
Speaker 4 (16:52):
In the old days, there were just clocks falling out
of the sky, which this is a time where clocks
were more plentiful.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
I don't understand.
Speaker 3 (16:58):
What I'm saying is in sports like basketball, you can pause,
you can stop the action. But it feels like at
this point now it feels more like a soccer or
rugby where it's like you.
Speaker 5 (17:07):
Don't stop, you just keep going.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
I see, because I mean the fifteen minute clock will
probably just hit start and they just played for fifteen minutes,
and then if the ball rolls out of bound, clocks
keeps going.
Speaker 5 (17:17):
Now, basketball you stop the clock if it goes out
of bounce.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
And of course think about it. Think about this, folks.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
If you were absolutely unfamiliar with basketball and you watched
the first game, probably one of the weirdest things for
you is going to be dribbling.
Speaker 4 (17:34):
Well, it's a weird word to describe bouncing of the ball.
I wonder where that came from. Would love a little
bit of etymology behind dribbling. It's very visual if you
think about it, and it is as though the ball
were some sort of fluid that is just kind of
dripping out of your hand repeatedly and back up like
a bead of moisture of some guy.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Then I'm grossing myself out.
Speaker 4 (17:56):
But yeah, like nas Smith's whole rule about not moving
with the ball did not include discussion of how you
could move with the ball, right, excuse me, there.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Was no moving with the ball. No.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Once you had the ball, you had to wait for
someone to run to a better position.
Speaker 4 (18:11):
Which is kind of dull, right, Like I mean, it
doesn't add much dynamism to the game. It doesn't add
much like movement. It sort of cuts down on a
lot of the things that make watching sports fun.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
And it feels like a pe teacher, yeah game right.
It feels like the teacher saying, look, I've got these
kids for two hours and I can't let them get.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
Her get I got a wicket hangover, yeah exactly, and
I am so hungover.
Speaker 4 (18:35):
These are mad men drinking days, you know. There he
had a big old carafe of gin. You know in
his office, nothing else.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Gin and coffee mixed in together at room temperature.
Speaker 5 (18:48):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
The place across the street, you know, you know, folks
were recording in the office more and more often though.
The place across the street has coffee lemonade, which I've
never heard of. I'm gonna go try it after we record.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
I want to try it. You want to go? Oh, definitely,
you want to go? Max? Absolutely? Okay, see, well so
so Steve. It's pouring down rainstill.
Speaker 4 (19:05):
But yeah, this was an important addition because a lot
of eyes were on the game now, a lot of scrutiny,
and we have now Ding Ding Ding corporate sponsorships, and
there's a lot of money at stake, so they there
are certain interests in making the game as competitive and
interesting to watch as possible.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
It's becoming a spectator sport.
Speaker 4 (19:28):
It's no longer relegated to the to the gym, you know,
with the with the incorrigibles.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
And Natesmith feels like at some points he has a
dark knight of the soul and he wonders whether people
have just taken his idea and twisted it, perverted it
into something different. The idea of a player not being
able to run with the ball is what he predicated
the entire sport of basketball on. And it wasn't until
(19:56):
the Yale basketball team introduced dribbling and dribbling, you know,
basically fall and drops.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Right, that's what it is. Okay, So I was I
was barking up the right. So it was.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
It was very it was a very legalistic kind of
work around because they're like, I'm holding the ball, I
can't walk.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Bounce I'm walking because I'm now not holding the ball.
Bounce I'm walking. Still I'm not holding the ball.
Speaker 4 (20:18):
And it may have been more of a byproduct of it,
but it's also an opportunity to do some cool fancy footwork,
you know what I mean, Dribble it between your legs,
do a little fake outs and stuff. And I mean,
I don't think that was necessarily the intent. It's a
good example of something that's established for a very functional
reason that then becomes a sort of stylistic feature of
(20:38):
the game that makes it a way of flexing, a
way of kind of a spectacle peacocking around.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
And these these guys at Yale, at the Yale basketball
team around eighteen ninety six, they referred to dribbling first
as passing to themselves.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
What a bunch of law school Yeah, but that also
that makes me think of something else.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Oh yeah, it was a bunch of school kids though
to say that, like, no, I'm not walking with the ball.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
I wasn't holding it when I stepped. Oh I'm sorry,
I'm a child.
Speaker 4 (21:08):
All these Yale's in there, fancy shoes, yes, and dapper haircuts.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
They're who's who columns in the in the local paper,
society pages exactly, And so dribbling might have ended there
with just a clever loophole, right, But everybody kind of agreed,
and even Naismith eventually agreed that dribbling was a really
cool idea.
Speaker 4 (21:35):
It is, like, like you say, it led to so
many other you know, sort of byproducts. Did we mention
that these Yale guys were really good, that they were
sort of the top, Yeah, they were, they were very Yeah,
so we're sort of what I mean, I'm sort of
in my head just sort of laughing at the idea
of late eighteen hundreds Yale students being the best at basketball,
(21:55):
because again, it just hadn't hit the cultural high water
mark that they ultimately would.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
It was still very early days, capital Capitol shots, capital
basket there, old chum, did they even let black people
play basketball in these days? I didn't think so. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4 (22:15):
Yeah and again yeah, I mean again, I'm not saying
only black people are great basketball players, but it is
such an important part of like hip hop culture, shoe
culture and all of this stuff, you know, and that
is really the identity that we have for it now,
and it's just you really wouldn't think of it any
other way, and then it's just.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
So white bread and dull. The early stages of basketball sports.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
Have done a lot to improve the state of racial
discrimination in America, which continues today obviously.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
But then they also have their their issues. Oh they're
huge in yeah, you know, who.
Speaker 4 (22:48):
Actually owns the teams and some of the perhaps they
say that's right, and also just the taking advantage at
times of of you know, young athletes and.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
Things like that, college athletes not getting paid, not.
Speaker 4 (23:02):
Getting paid, and also just the fact that you can
have a very lucrative career or a very like promising
career and then get injured to the point of you
have no backup plan and like it's like you're kind.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Of toast right your shelf life in that career can
be pretty especially in college.
Speaker 4 (23:17):
You can get injured to the point where it ruins
your prospects of a professional career before you even have
a chance to get paid. I think the whole not
paying college students anything and he making it illegal for
them to it's a real selling.
Speaker 5 (23:29):
Yeah, well, it has been getting better.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
I heard it, had, I heard it had.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Also, I wanted to cross reference this first black basket
professional basketball player, first black basketball player in the NBA
with Earl Lloyd, and it wasn't until make sure I
get the state right October thirty first. Nineteen fifty's a
long time.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
So the sport got way better in the fifties. The Also,
I want to give a shot to Nay Smith quote
when he came around to dribbling, he called that one
of the most spectacular and exciting maneuvers in basketball.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
And that's the way he's going to sound now. It's
just difference. I say, swimming. Snosberry's tastes like Snosberry. I
don't know why. He's like a Willy Walker. Ask figure
in minds and he knew.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
The reason he was saying dribbling was better is because
he heard he had seen other attempts to try to
bring movement to the game. He said players would lose
possession of the ball voluntarily, by which means they dropped
it and they would roll it somewhere.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
That's kind of boring to watch.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Dribbling was a much more sophisticated version of this tactic,
and later people like philosopher doctor Sean Klein would call
it a subversion. Dribbling as a subversion. They were adhering
to the rules the yelites, but they were subverting the
expectations of how those rules.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Would be followed.
Speaker 4 (24:58):
Hey, Klein, stay in your lane. Stick to talking about
play nerds. Yeah, you know, what do you know about sport? Yeah,
you can't dribble, nietzschee bro it's a subversion that does
sound like something professor of philosophy.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
You you guys saw that fantastic show Kunk on Earth.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
I have heard of it, and I know it's related
to a really great British guy who wrote Black Black.
Speaker 5 (25:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
I read it like a bunch of Charlie Brooker. Yeah,
that's you. You especially on Netflix now.
Speaker 4 (25:27):
And I thank you for reminding me because lately I
have been running dry in that phase where you just
scroll for forty five minutes and you have subscriptions to everything,
but yet there's nothing for you.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
And it's very disheartening.
Speaker 4 (25:41):
We're in an age of oversaturation that yet feels like
we have no options at all.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
I feel it somehow a mean statement about my intelligence.
If I look on Criterion channel, I'm like, I don't
feel like watching any of these.
Speaker 4 (25:54):
I do love Criteria. I love it recently. Why there's
a great collection on there. I think you'd like, Ben.
It's a Roger Korman and directed all of these Edgar
Allan Poe adaptations, because I guess it was just like
free intellectual property, you know, because it was like in
the public domain. And some of them like share the
same sets, like Pitt in the Pendulum and follow the
House of Usher clearly reuse some of the same spooky
(26:17):
skeletons in the Crypt, but they're like really well done.
And you know, Roger Corman, of course was a super
important creature feature kind of director. He gave a lot
of the best, biggest, you know, blockbuster directors their start,
like James Cameron, I think worked on The Cruise with
him and stuff, and you know, he was real scrappy
and kind of figured out how to make use of
what he had. But those Poe adaptations are great, and
(26:39):
there's like ten of them, and the Vincent Price is
in almost every one of them.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
All. I really appreciate that.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
No, I'm going to check those out, and when you
check out Kunk on Earth, I don't want to split up.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
I've been meaning to, and thank you for the reminder.
I'll give you a heads up. Could you like this?
Speaker 1 (26:52):
So Kunk talks to a lot of top notch experts
on history of very specific aspects.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Kunk has sort of like an explica. She's like Steve
Colbert when he's doing the Cobert Rapport.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
Okay, but it's sort of like a blank slate, kind
of like figuring things out, like kind of like taking
the stock of what this earth is all about.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
There, kind of.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Aggressive with the profound confidence of the unshakeably stupid. There
you got is the best way to describe Kunk as
a character.
Speaker 5 (27:19):
I got it.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
But anyway, there's this one guy's a philosopher that she
talks to who is not enjoying the conversation, and he's hilarious.
That's what I think of whenever I hear about a
philosopher now, oh gosh, okay, just text me when you
watch it.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
I will so well.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
For some time, when you were saying kunk on Earth,
I pictured it like a Morgan Mindy kind of situation
where it's sort of like an alien taking in like
this absurd planet. But it does not seem like it's
that at all, but it sounds amazing. So this idea
of dribbling being kind of not popular to some right.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
They're always going to be you know, some quote unquote
traditionalist or people who say, hey, that's again the rules,
and they're right, it is kind of against the rules.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
But if I describe this amorl though, like this philosopher
guy Klin, he's like, you referred to the a moral
underpinnings of dribbling, right.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Right, Yeah, And then and then says later says, despite this,
you know, more than a century after the invention of dribbling,
it's safe to say basketball is better thanks to it,
and points this out, which we see in so many things.
Client says, in the creation of any game, there are gaps.
The players discover, these ambiguities and vagueness and the rules.
(28:34):
It's the way that the game evolves, which I think
is a fair point. Now it is, and I was
mischaracterizing Clin. He wasn't saying that he was against it.
He was just describing kind of.
Speaker 4 (28:42):
The evolution of this and how yeah, it technically was
changing the rules, but it was, like he said, more
flipping them a little bit and making it a little
more interesting.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
I'm still thinking about Clin now. I like the idea
of this being Klein's Mary mission in life is to
stop drippling, because it's.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
To end dribbling. This shall not stand.
Speaker 4 (29:08):
Only classic basketball is Professor Natesmith intended exactly only with
peach baskets.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
And they're like, all right, doctor, let's get your back
to the bus.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Let's get Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
So originally to let's talk about the ball. Originally the
soccer ball, right, yeah, it was a soccer ball, and
later Naismith asked a former baseball pitcher named A. G.
Spaulding to create a ball specifically for basketball.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
I've heard of him, You have at least heard of
the name.
Speaker 4 (29:39):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
It looked way different than the modern basketball today. It
had uh suutures on it, you know, yeah, Frank.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Like a medicine ball.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Yeah yeah, yeah, very that's a great comparison. And because
this stitched up scar basically running down the middle of it,
it affected how the ball moved, so you had to
try to bounce it.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
On the flat part, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (30:11):
And it's funny though, because the modern basketball still does
have those kind of visual seams, like I don't know
if they're actually doing anything.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
It's obviously all molded, you know, and all of that.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
There's a pattern to it because it is consistently around
the you know, it's spread in a consistent design around
the ball. But to your point, it does remind me
of when you go to a fast food place and
you can tell they put fake grill marks on the thing.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
That's right. It feels like fake grill marks. That's so funny, man. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (30:40):
And and I bet to your point, Ben, if you
did dribble it on one of those seams, it probably
would fly off willy nilly, you know. Yeah, it wouldn't
be consistent, so that would probably be a little more tricky.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
And that's where that is, apparently, where trick dribbling comes
around the stuff you were talking about earlier.
Speaker 4 (30:57):
You can make it kind of put a little english
on it on a sideway.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
So we did say that. Nasmith came around to dribbling,
he became a dribbling fanboy. But make no mistake, he
didn't love all the changes into his sport. After he
stopped coaching, he watched a contest in nineteen ten between
Kansas and Missouri and he freaked out. He freaked out.
He said, they're killing my game. He said, the referees
(31:25):
are need to be more authoritative. He said, you know,
this game is full of fouls. I made rules for
there not to be fouls. And he was irritated with it.
And then to your point about corporate America. Just one
year later, in nineteen eleven, he published an editorial talking
(31:47):
about the problem of quote commercialization in sports.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Oof. Yeah, I think that ship has sailed.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
Brou Yeah even then, like what we were talking about
earlier with Max, Like you know, now it's just they're
just squishing the game.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Talk about making the.
Speaker 4 (32:01):
Rules malleable for the wrong reasons, you know, to like
fit in more advertisements. I mean, this is definitely the
early stages of the utter corporatization and commercialization of sports.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Yeah, he said, look, you need to keep money out
of college basketball. I hate the idea of quote, the
worship of the dollar in the field of athletics. And
then he gets a little high faluting here. I'm on
his side, but he gets high faluting. He says he's
invented his game to be a quote, a laboratory in
which the great moral lessons of fair play and the
(32:36):
square deal are taught.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Again, cool, cool idea, but weird some truth to that.
It isn't good, you know.
Speaker 4 (32:44):
It is certainly if you're young and you're learning to
play basketball. It's a community building thing. It's a way
of making friends, you know, if you're playing in college
or in high school, even like you'll you're in you're
in the trenches with these people. You're learning how to
think of others, you know, and not just yourself. And
saying what he's saying, though, is more about the I
(33:04):
don't know, I guess kind of the idealistic.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Version of what the sport is kind of drink in
his own flavoring.
Speaker 4 (33:11):
He definitely is no question about it, and he's going
to go on to drink some even more oddly flavored
as we're to get to that for sure. But again,
that ship has sailed. This guy and is out of
his hands now like truly he is. He is passed
the ball Ah there it is, whether by choice or
(33:31):
just again, it's just it's just what happens. An idea
is you can't really own it at the end of
the day. Especially you can own you can, but you
can say I created this, or like I made this.
But it's like with the work of art, you know,
once people are interpreting it and looking at it and
then enjoying it and making it part of their lives,
then it's no longer even it doesn't even belong to
the artist anymore.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
And if it's a good idea, then should it not
belong to everyone?
Speaker 2 (33:55):
And should you not be able to improve it?
Speaker 4 (33:57):
That's another thing though, that makes a different than say
Van Go going back and touching up his paintings. Like
this is an idea and it's a little bit fluid.
But then you start to get into these debates whether
it's like, you know, strict constructionist kind of views of sports.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
It's funny you say that because I was I went
to the Prato, you know, when I's traveling a while
back and they've got a bunch of Picasso stuff, and
I heard this amazing, amazing conversation from two people. I'm
still trying to figure out what exactly their relationship was,
but it's like it was this older guy and this kid,
(34:35):
and the kid is pretty young, maybe eight or ten.
I don't think the older guy was his father from
the way they talk to each other because the dad.
They're staring at the huge the huge Picasso painting, which
is the bull fight thing. Yeah, I can't remember Guernica
that yeah, yeah, I think right, the big one.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
Yeah yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. So they're staring at it.
Speaker 1 (34:57):
It's kind of slow because we're there on a weekday morning,
and uh in Spanish. The older guy is saying, what's
the big deal about this? It's impressive, you know, as
a matter of fact, I could do this. And then
they right, and then the kid looks up without missing
your beat, and he goes, yeah, but you didn't. You
won't and you never will. And I was like, I
(35:17):
don't think that's your dad.
Speaker 5 (35:19):
Game set match.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
How does that go?
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Yeah, that's like no one can well knock you out.
Speaker 5 (35:25):
That's good.
Speaker 4 (35:27):
Yeah, cool, I know I know from sports thee love
it makes a super who super who.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
I was thinking of the interstate gas station, which is
a cool one. Yeah, it's it's no BUCkies. It's no BUCkies.
But who is nothing.
Speaker 4 (35:41):
Sadder than a love's across the street from a BUCkies.
It's like, y'all just is not going.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
To go up.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Yeah, so the sport was going to undergo this kind
of transformation as soon as it got popular. Dribbling probably
saved basketball, to be honest with you.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
No question.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
And this goes to something that you were you were
talking about at the very beginning when we started this
series this week, Basketball is something that is continuing to evolve.
Colleen Macklin. In conversation with author Nick Greed, Colleen Macklin
says games are a democratic art form. The beauty of
(36:21):
a physical game is that you don't have to be
a programmer or an artist to make changes. The rules
are modified and tweaked and then played by regular humans.
So it's kind of like crowdsourcing.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
That's exactly right.
Speaker 6 (36:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (36:32):
Then again, the art comparison, it's a tricky one because
you know, you sure art belongs to the public, but
also you're not going to go back and change a
work of art like that would be considered black unless
you're like George Lucas, in which you shouldn't do that point.
But with basketball or any sport, or like hell, the Constitution,
(36:53):
it's designed to be somewhat fluid and living so that
it can change with the times, you know what I mean,
varying degrees of success. But I would argue and agree
with you that dribbling was an incredibly important innovation in
the sport.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
And that's where it verges into something poetic, because Nick
Green says basketball is the only major sport that can
be traced to a single person. But that person's most
important contribution was that he relinquished control of his invention,
and so he built the car and he let other
(37:29):
people drive it and decide where it would go, you know,
And there's there's something poetic to that. It's still work
in progress, as you said, and it's gone far beyond
just keeping a bunch of rowdy kids from beating the
stuft out of each other.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
You know.
Speaker 4 (37:45):
Sometimes we save these these tangents and trivia bits for
like our new kind of clip show concept, and we're
starting to do, but I think that some of these
would be a great way to wrap this one up.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
Yeah, just we we've kind of been hinting at some
of nath Smith's.
Speaker 4 (37:58):
Sort of let's do it otter proclivities, and also the
fact that despite having invented the game, he only ever.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Played it twice.
Speaker 4 (38:06):
Yeah. Yeah, and like, you know, some of the images
of him in the early days are hilarious.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
And there's one where it's like him and this like
old like kind of washer woman.
Speaker 4 (38:15):
Looking type figure Kobe, and he's holding the basket up
and she's just got this like really it's like it's
again a soccer ball, really really funny.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
But yeah, only played it twice.
Speaker 4 (38:27):
His team in one of those games, the teachers at
the YMCA lost five to one, so he did. He
played in that original game, that's the five to one
game that we were talking about, the one that was
first for public consumption, and the one point for his
team that was scored in that game was by his pal,
a guy named AA Stagg, who was kind of the
inventor of American football.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
And uh yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
And it's it's interesting how these stories coincide because Nay Smith,
along with his spouse Bodney Smith, they invented an early
version of the football helmet to help out Stag and
their early version was flannel.
Speaker 4 (39:08):
It makes me think of like the Pete and Pete hat,
you know, like the kind of what do they call
that a deer stalker hats or whatever, but like the
flannel classic red and black, you know, checkered kind of pattern.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (39:19):
It was made to prevent something called cauliflower ear, which
is a condition that happens and he get bashed in
the ear and repeatedly and it starts to kind of
swell up and then stays that way.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Yeah, and this is this is strange because he also
he also had beef with coaches, even though he himself
was a coach at University of Kansas for a while.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
He thought terrible coach.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Yeah, he had a bad losing record because he thought
coaches basically shouldn't do their job.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
He said, if you're a coach who micro manages your
players by telling them what to do while they're on
the court.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
It's like cheating your tantamount. Huh, you're evil? WHOA? So
he was. He was way worse than evil.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
He was way more like I think a ted where
he's like, come on, guys, you know basketball, it's a
lot like falling in love.
Speaker 4 (40:04):
Following it's like going on a magical journey with your
best friend and being a goldfish.
Speaker 6 (40:10):
Shall you just get out there? You'd be a dog
with peanut, but you have a good old uh No.
But that all that tracks though, doesn't it. It's philosophically,
he's still stuck in the gym trying to get these
horny teenagers to chill out.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
You know.
Speaker 4 (40:23):
All of this other stuff is sort of against his
whole philosophy of the game. And I was saying earlier
it almost sounds like he thought telling them what to
do was cheating or something. It was like depriving them
of the part that actually matters, where they figure it
out themselves.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Ah. Yes, And that is a good point. It is
an aesthetic philosophical point. We also know and maybe this
is our maybe this is our rap, because I know
we're all three excited about this. What happened to Nasmith
after basketball? After coaching? If you look at Rob Raine's
biography of our buddy James, you find that he spent
(41:01):
his years after coaching working on medical experiments. This is
a true story.
Speaker 4 (41:06):
Look at John Harvey Kellogg type figure. You get deep
into this. Yeah, Betty was really into enemas. But you know,
he invented or was developing, something called a sobriety tester,
which I imagine must have been some early form of breathalyzer,
right kind of. I mean, they didn't really go any
further than that. He also had all of these notions
(41:27):
about what testing people to see if they add natural
athletic abilities, and the test that he developed is boggers.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
Oh yeah, so he would he was okay, is true
story Again, He would blindfold his students or his patients, right,
his subjects, he will clog up their ears. He would
put them in the driver's seat of a car and
see if they could sustain a speed of thirty five
miles an hour. Doesn't that just mean that they're like
(41:59):
loose can and kind of insane. What does that have
to do with anything? It doesn't even involve coordination.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
He can't sell you.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
He says, if you do that, you've got a great
canesthetic sense. And it's like, thank you, I'm glad no
one died.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
No joke.
Speaker 4 (42:15):
Hopefully they were doing it in like a park and
abandoned parking lot or some sort of test track.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
But again, he was not a rich man. I'm not
sure where he would have conducted.
Speaker 5 (42:24):
He wasn't even a good driver.
Speaker 4 (42:25):
No, he hated driving, that's right. And then the last one,
I think, which is maybe what we've been hitting at.
He invented this like stretcher machinet machine for children to
like help them grow taller.
Speaker 2 (42:42):
Well, you know, for anybody.
Speaker 4 (42:43):
Didn't have to be for children, just for short kings
and queens out there. And he was was interviewed about
this device by a school newspaper and he said that
babies between the ages of five months in one year
should be given a good stretching oh tight. But there
was something that he was a little concerned about. He
did have something that he hadn't quite figured out yet.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
My torture rack is so effective that the children may
never stop growing.
Speaker 5 (43:10):
And definitely these.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
String being giants have ruined basketball. Yeah, yeah, the playing
field has no longer been leveled. The very playing field
has been leveled. The other kind destroyed this device. But
what a guy, man.
Speaker 4 (43:25):
I'm really such an interesting story despite all of the
inherent racism.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
Obviously that we I wouldn't say we glossed over. I
think we just what a what a week? Two? And
we're not even done because we may come back to this.
Speaker 4 (43:36):
I think there's more because again we haven't even gotten
into the modern era and all of the you know,
again we've we've hinted at it, but at the tie
ins to fashion and music and I mean.
Speaker 2 (43:45):
Just the the level.
Speaker 4 (43:48):
Of stardom that is achieved by you know, some of
these individuals. It's almost like for it's to me. I
don't know about you, but doesn't it feel like basketball
is kind of the stars sports, star maker sport more
so even than baseball household more, household amy kind of.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
Thing for us.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
Yet in pop culture, basketball, like very very well known
athletes achieve a level of fame that transcends the sport.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
That's what I'm getting at, and you nailed it.
Speaker 3 (44:20):
I would say, of the sports, basketball is the one
where one person can take over the game a lot
more and baseball you could go like four for four
with three home runs and your team loses. Football, you
like a quarterback can be really good. But like you know,
Michael Jordan, Lebron James, star.
Speaker 4 (44:36):
Maker, like on the by the nature of the very
nature of the sport right.
Speaker 3 (44:40):
How it's played too, is in a lot of systems,
like you know, our local team in a lot of
Hawks is the offense goes through Trey Young and he
runs it, so that person can sometimes get because they're kind.
Speaker 5 (44:52):
Of like, you know, the point guard.
Speaker 3 (44:53):
They're running the whole thing, so they get the attention
focused on them, which you.
Speaker 4 (44:56):
Know, doesn't That also mean though that it could be
more conducive to fixing games and chiefs and if you
have inside information that a player is not going to
be there or something like that, or you could make
bets accordingly, I mean early two thousands.
Speaker 3 (45:11):
I forget forgetting his name the top my head. My
buddy Kevin would be very disappointed. But there was an
NBA ref who yet we talked about.
Speaker 4 (45:19):
Him, and it was easy to do because he'd kind
of do it like death by a thousand cuts, like
little little inaccurate, and that nobody could even notice.
Speaker 2 (45:27):
Those are so subjective. Also, I want to Scott Foster.
Speaker 3 (45:30):
I don't think christ Paul has ever won a playoff
game with this guy.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
Shout out to Brian Towey. That's right, that was the
guy about. You know, he believes all.
Speaker 1 (45:41):
Sorts and uh and also gather ye Spaldings, while you may,
I posit to you the basketball is in its heyday
until sumo wrestling becomes more normal.
Speaker 2 (45:56):
That is a hot take back. No, I can't wait
to see sumo arrests. Still, it's very popular in Japan.
I mean like it's also a.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
Huge organized crime element to it totally, because you know,
it's fixing sports, right.
Speaker 4 (46:09):
I always really liked i Honda in Street Fighter too. Yeah,
he always fought in like the weird Japanese bathhouse, you know,
and he had the cool torpedo move and uh and
the slap.
Speaker 2 (46:20):
He did a yeah, good, good animation on that.
Speaker 1 (46:24):
I I was so disappointed because I thought I was
going to go see a sumo match. But they're really expensive. Really,
they're really expensive. And then I thought I was talking
to a friend and was like, what are we paying
for here? For equipment or something like that, and he goes, man,
it might just be for you know, the upkeep of.
Speaker 4 (46:43):
The yeah, massages and stuff, you know, and barley.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
I mean, because they might look like they might like
look like they're not in shape.
Speaker 4 (46:52):
Oh no, it's a different kind of in shape, right. Yeah,
it's like competitive eaters.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
You know. I bet you too, I mean maybe you
saw this.
Speaker 4 (46:59):
I bet you that there are like sumo stars, just
like there are basketball stars.
Speaker 2 (47:04):
Yeah, and then they're just an individual kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
Like go into business, like how Shock owns the Krispy
Kreme here in town.
Speaker 2 (47:11):
They own stuff.
Speaker 1 (47:13):
You know, You'll be walking by a restaurant and then
you'll see a picture of a sumo guy who's just.
Speaker 5 (47:17):
Like some you know.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
Boom, I'm into noodles now.
Speaker 1 (47:22):
But that's but so we we hope we delivered, folks
on what we're saying in part one of this series,
which is that even if you yourself don't tune into
every basketball game, there's a lot to learn.
Speaker 4 (47:34):
Oh man, No, the history of it is so interesting
and uh, you know it also being one of only
two uniquely American sports, you know, which.
Speaker 2 (47:44):
Is kind of a big deal. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:47):
And speaking of big deals, we want to thank you
for tuning in, folks. We also want to thank some
of the big deals on our show, our research associate
doc Z of course, super producer Max Williams. And I
don't know if he deserves it, but I'm still gonna
thank Jonathan Strickland, aka the Quister, even though he high
(48:08):
roaded the heck out of us in me he's in
the office right.
Speaker 2 (48:11):
Now you think I didn't see him.
Speaker 3 (48:12):
He's using the biggest and nice studios just for himself.
Speaker 4 (48:16):
I caught a glint out of the corner of my
eye and it was the light reflecting off his bald head.
Speaker 5 (48:20):
He's also in the studio that does not have blinds.
Speaker 2 (48:22):
Yet it never can stare at he did that.
Speaker 5 (48:27):
We're in the one with the best ac.
Speaker 4 (48:29):
Speaking of the zoo, if anyone's gonna be in Vegas
next week for the iHeart Music Festival, your boy's been
bowling and Noel Brown will be podcasting in something of
a human zoo type scenario.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (48:43):
I mean there's like a booth of some sort that
we will be housed in. I hope there's snacks. I
think there's air conditioning. But it is as part of
like a a Bose promotion of some kind, which I
love and not getting paid to say that I love
their products. But you can come and put on headphones
that observe us like like reptiles in a reptile house
(49:07):
or something.
Speaker 2 (49:08):
You know.
Speaker 1 (49:08):
Yeah, I don't word is still out on whether or
not you can feed us, but.
Speaker 2 (49:14):
You know, be the change, just like James NS exactly.
Speaker 4 (49:18):
But we'll be there on Friday doing ridiculous history and
then also stuff that I don't want you to know,
in addition to several other podcasts that are in our
kind of og stuff, kind of network family.
Speaker 2 (49:33):
You know who else is going to be there to Jonathan, Yeah,
that's right.
Speaker 4 (49:36):
You know who else is else is going to be there,
Lenny Kravitz, Oh yeah, Cheryl Crow, Little Wayne, Yeah, yeah, lots,
Travis Scott, who's apparently got quite popular. Yeah, I'm stoked
about Cheryl Crow. I'm actually genuinely kind of dig Chryl.
Speaker 2 (49:52):
Didn't we have a fake beef with Cheryl Crow back
in the day. She knows what she did. Okay, fair,
Maybe we can address it. We can squash the beef
for set it on fire. She just pushes people. We'll
see you next time, folks.
Speaker 4 (50:12):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the
(00:27):
show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for
tuning in. Let's hear it four our super producer Max
the ref Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
The Incorrigible.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Yes, so, I absolutely, with all passions, hate threads and
umpires like I'm waiting for technology to make them like irrelevant.
Speaker 4 (00:45):
Right, Well, what's the one where you're like underwear snitcher? No,
that's picture. But there there are various rhymy kind of
ways of maligning the Uh.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Yes, I hate themselves. It seems like a danger. But
do you not acknowledge if their their net?
Speaker 3 (01:01):
I mean I'm waiting for the purpose I mean, I
I baseball and parts of the worst ones. They their
purpose they believe is for everyone to watch them, don't.
Speaker 5 (01:09):
I mean, look, we're the star of the show.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
No one else take away from us, watch us, which
they're just you know they take away from the game.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Did they're an officiants? Did did something happen?
Speaker 3 (01:22):
I as brian O Nora who finds note listens. Brian
O Nora is currently under investigation for soliciting a prostitute
as and he got caught by the FBI for in
a sting.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
From sex worker if you will.
Speaker 5 (01:38):
Yeah, so that's saying what the FBI said, Cleveland, Ohio.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Okay, well, before you introduce those guys, I said the
P word. Before you introduce those guys, let us introduce ourselves.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Did this is? This is part two of what is
becoming an increasingly.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Spicy series, very spicy history of basketball.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
A lot of hot takes and tangents.
Speaker 4 (02:00):
Oh yeah, that's a good one. Yeah really, really, I'm serious.
You know, I'm the first to admit that I am
not a big sports guy, but I always have always
found basketball to be the most enjoyable and watchable of
all of the sports.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
And the history of.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
It is just as enjoyable and listenable, you know. And
I think you guys are going to enjoy this part
too a lot. So, as as we know, basketball became
kind of a big deal, and it happened relatively quickly.
I believe the first public game was played in a
YMCA gym and was recorded or reported on by the
(02:35):
Springfield Republican, and that was on March twelfth of eighteen
ninety two. We had around two hundred folks show up
to watch the game. Despite having never heard of it
before and not having previously existed. When that don't we
don't have enough of that, man, we don't have like
a new sport like ooh, you guys, hear about the
new sport.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
That'd be cool.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
I might, I might get in on that, you know,
like rollerball or you know, like the running man.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
That'd be cool. I yeah, I love.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
I love the idea of new sports being invented. There
are a lot of quirky ones.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Is big.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
It's not new, but it's it's it's achieved insane popularity
in the last handful of years. But I think it
is sort of a new ish game. It's it's styled
on kind of. It's like a full court version of
ping pong, isn't it kind of?
Speaker 2 (03:22):
You could go in the other direction.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
You could say that pickleball is to tennis what putt
putt is to golf, you know. And I say that
because a good friend of mine who actually listens to
stuff they want you to know, is a a retired
marine who is now a tennis coach.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
He's the coolest dude.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
I met him just because we hang out the local
pizza place and he's got some hot takes. You dig him,
but he he hit me up a few weeks of gosh,
a few months ago actually, because he teaches tennis and
he's furious about the rise of pickleball, and it will
hit me up and we'll say steel my thunder Man.
He's like Ben Well because he teaches pickleball too, and
(04:02):
he's like, these people have no respect for the game.
It's just a bunch of pickleballers out here. And I'm like, wow, you,
thank you.
Speaker 4 (04:10):
Did you hear that pickleball's become so popular, but that
it's a lot of these dead malls that they are,
like big box stores are being converted into pickleball arenas.
I mean, it's solving a problem, I guess, because what
else are they going to do with those things?
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Yeah, they're also uh, there are a lot of parody
songs about it. MPR did a great piece on it
where they talked about pickleball parody songs.
Speaker 4 (04:32):
There is There was like a limited run maybe it
was a YouTube series with starring Paul Sheer and his
wife June Diane Raphael that was like a lot of
those like Lonely Island kind of adjacent La comedian folks
or what was it human giant some of those guys. Yeah,
there's like a you know, sort of like a basketball
kind of pickleball kind of send up. But yeah, I
(04:53):
mean basketball really took off pretty quickly, like, you know,
just within a couple of weeks after this original game.
The positives of it were immediately clocked by those in
the field of I guess physical education. You know, they
acknowledged that folks that play and that were good at
(05:14):
it had to have, you know, certain agility and sportsmanship
and hand eye coordination and stuff. It kind of combined
some things that existed in other popular sports, but it
was inherently a little bit less brutish, you know, right.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
There was this emphasis on agility, on teamwork, on nimbleness,
as he said, and students who went to other schools
would go to their own YMCAs and say, hey, we
got to start playing this, you know what I mean.
Rugby and face slap is for the birds. Face lap
was a very popular game at the time. Jeez, oh
(05:51):
my god.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
Shout out to I think someone that you know as well,
Gabby Watts, who's a local musician and comedian and just
launched a podcast that I think ridiculous historians would be
a fan of It's called American filth, and it's all
about it's like a history podcast, but it's very X rated.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
It's like and she recently did an episode.
Speaker 4 (06:11):
On a little known American sport called Rough and Tumble,
which in where it which is basically fight club. It
involved like eye gouging and things like that. Basically it's
like a fight to the death. But it was very
popular at a time in the probably the early eighteen hundred's.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Face slap was exactly what it sounds like.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Yeah, yeah, I may or may not have made that up,
but yeah, there's a lot of there are a lot
of weird sports out there. And I got to say
basketball inspires a lot of very specific versions of basketball.
You know, you've got people who are differently able playing basketball.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
You've got that's true. Yeah, and then you've.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Also got basketball where people just put their own weird
rules in.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Of course, well, and you can do one on one,
you can do smaller tea.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
You know, it's a lot like since you know, obviously
there are positions and stuff.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
But it's pretty nimble.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
Again, like I was saying earlier, not only do you
have to be physically pretty nimble to like maneuver around
the is malleable, you know what I mean? Like there
there are different ways of being and I don't think
we mentioned this with that first game that was reported
on in eighteen ninety two was between students and the
teachers at that particular Ymcagim and I believe the students
(07:25):
won five to one, much more interesting score than what's
reported for that first ever basketball game one to nothing.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
But still, gosh, it seems like the teachers just got trounced.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
And the article in the Springfield Republican credited the teachers
with having agility, but the students having science.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Ye that they were younger.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
I guess their physical prowess is what led them to win.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
I think it meant more that they had a better
understanding of the game. Okay, so they knew when to
pass to whom right and how to position players and stuff,
just because they have played more often than the teachers
who were at best watching the game.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
So we still don't.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Know when exactly the first intercollegiate basketball game occurred. We
know that high schools began introducing it in the early
nineteen hundreds. By nineteen oh five, basketball was officially recognized
as the go to winter sport, and in eighteen ninety three,
two college newspaper articles published separate recordings of different college
(08:34):
basketball teams go into court with each other. So we
don't know exactly who was first, but we know that
it's set one heck of a precedent.
Speaker 4 (08:43):
Yeah, you know, we haven't really heard much of did
Nay Smith, like patent this did he is this intellectual
property that's protected when you invent a game. He wrote
down the rules, he pinned them to the wall. I mean,
you know, technically you can claim a copyright just by
committeed something to any media. You know, you can say
I wrote the song because I wrote it down first
(09:05):
or whatever.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
But even if you don't file.
Speaker 4 (09:08):
But I'm just wondering, like, did he become a rich
man off of this in his lifetime.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Or you know, if that's a good question here. He
definitely in the public mind. He definitely was the father
of basketball, and anytime somebody brought it up, they brought
him up. But I don't know if it's like a
Nike swoosh situation.
Speaker 4 (09:27):
Yeah, and it's also sort of like whoever was the
first that quote invented the fidget?
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Spinner.
Speaker 4 (09:33):
We don't know who that person is because either they
didn't patent it or it was ununique enough that it
could be done a bunch of different ways. And I
think that's probably true of a game. You can't really
say you can't play my game unless you pay me.
That's not really how games work. Yeah, it's just the
way you would have to approach that. As you could say,
(09:55):
you can't televise my game without getting cut, or you
can't hold a thing where people pay to watch you
play it, but you can't stop people from throwing a
ball around.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
No.
Speaker 4 (10:06):
I just don't get the sense that Nace Smith had
any quote unquote ownership over basketball, like as a trademark er,
as like a concept, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
I think he was. I think he was kind of
driven by the mission. He just wanted to give it
to the world.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Yeah, I think he felt really interested in spreading it.
In eighteen ninety eight, he becomes the first official men's
basketball coach at the University of Kansas. He is also,
at this point the only coach in the program's history
to have a losing record, and while he is while
he is coaching these college students, he watches his original
(10:42):
thirteen rules evolve. Eventually they do cut the bottoms out
of the peach baskets and transform them to hoops, and
free throws eventually become part of the game. Nineteen oh one,
dribbling is introduced, and that meant that now you can
run with the ball, you just have to bounce it.
At the same time, Nay Smith originally said, look, the
(11:05):
size of your basketball team can be anywhere from three
to get this forty players. And then they said, nah,
it's crazy, man, We're gonna do five people on each squad.
And that makes a lot more sense. The sports spreads everywhere,
it goes viral, as they would say, these days, you
see professional leagues forming across the country, basketball fans or
(11:29):
cheering on their hometown teams, so.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
The game starts spreading like wildfire.
Speaker 4 (11:34):
And yeah, man, that conversation about the whole ownership of
the sport really intrigues me because obviously, once you start
getting into professional leagues, that's when there's money to be
made and like endorsements to be had and all that stuff.
And I was just doing a kind of a cursory
Google and it doesn't seem like Nay Smith.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Like cleaned up, like no money in his life.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
He didn't become a coach in Kansas later to hilarious effect,
which we'll get to when the time is right.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
But this is it.
Speaker 4 (12:01):
This is when you know basketball really comes into its own,
and you know, we're on the beginning the very end
of the eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds, we start to
see the formations of leagues in the US. Like the
first one is the National Basketball League, which is you know,
I guess a precursor to the NBA in some ways.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
There were a couple of different leagues. We don't have
to get two two in the leads, but just the
high level stuff. The first professional league was the NBL
National Basketball League that was six teams up in the Northeast,
and that league only lasted about five years. It dissolved
in nineteen oh four, and then three decades passed until
(12:51):
nineteen thirty seven and a new league occurred. And this
league had corporate support. They had Goodyear, fire Stone and
General Electric footing the bills.
Speaker 4 (13:03):
And it's really interesting the National Geographic article that we
source for this, which is behind a paywell, I'm having
a hard time loading it up to get the writer
credit where credit is due. But if you if you
have a subscription type in basketball, it's like the title
is something like from peach baskets to something that is
now below a black square. But they describe it as
(13:26):
the corporations owning the teams like it, like it's bigger
than just they're sponsored by These are like corporately held leagues,
which I think is very interesting.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Yeah, it's a it's a new evolution for sure. And
the game continued to involve because as it became more popular,
more and more people were paying attention to it, and
they were pointing out things that they thought could improve
the rules. So not all of Naysmith's ideas were winners.
This is what we this is what we talked about.
Some of some of this stuff in his head was weird.
(14:01):
One of the rules was when the ball goes out
of bounds, it's thrown into field by the first person
touching it. Does that mean that you just die like
ten dudes running for this ball.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
It also goes against kind of the spirit of the
whole non contact sport thing. I just picture like a
cartoon where it's just a dog pile of everyone just
jumping on the thing and piling on top of each
other and like a you know, swirling like dirt, kind
of dust. And then you see a player crawl out
of the melee and get dragged back in by their leg. Yeah,
(14:32):
that's not a winner, as let's see. Eric Zimmerman, who
is a professor of game design and game theory, notes
He also noted that it was unclear. The rule was
very vague, and I think did they replaced this with
like a tip off or something now or maybe it's
(14:52):
just Max helping me out here.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
What is the sort of replacement the modern replacement?
Speaker 3 (14:57):
So now it's the last person who touched the ball,
the other team gets the ball. So if like you
and me are playing against the other and you touched
the ball out of bounds, I get the ball.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
That makes sense, easy penalty, right and just it changes.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Sides and it and it incentivizes you not knock the
ball out about absolute which is smarter.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
So one example of this is stuff like early YMCA games.
The ball landed in a balcony and one team sprinted
up the stairs to get it, and then two of
the players on the other team boosted a third guy
up so he could climb on the balcony the ball.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, get the ball first. Yeah, shout out to Jack
and Miles.
Speaker 4 (15:39):
There was another tale of like a kid who strikes
me as maybe one of the ones that you were
sort of characterizing as like the one that would just
come a swink, come in. Yeah, tough home life, got
a really wicked scar.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Lloyd. Where is this kid's name?
Speaker 4 (15:54):
And Nate Smith writes about this, and I believe in
his in his memoir that this kid took quote great
pleasure when in a jovial move in exhibiting a scar
that he got when he dives for the ball and
came into contact with the sharp corner of a radiator.
See that rule to me feels like a holdover from
something like rugby, you know, or like a like a
(16:17):
dog pile kind of tackle situation, which again goes against
the spirit of the type of game that Nate Smith
was trying to create.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
And to jump in here like one thing that basketball
and baseball and football all have. It's very different than
like a rugby or a soccer. Is there sports that
I don't know got invented with clocks were in greater
greater supply, So there's pauses and goes, pauses, and goes.
We watch rugby and watch soccer. It's just constantly going
(16:45):
a moving thing like soccer. They're like, oh, we don't
stop in soccer, and the clock never stopped.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
What he's saying, they were just lousy with clocks.
Speaker 4 (16:52):
In the old days, there were just clocks falling out
of the sky, which this is a time where clocks
were more plentiful.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
I don't understand.
Speaker 3 (16:58):
What I'm saying is in sports like basketball, you can pause,
you can stop the action. But it feels like at
this point now it feels more like a soccer or
rugby where it's like you.
Speaker 5 (17:07):
Don't stop, you just keep going.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
I see, because I mean the fifteen minute clock will
probably just hit start and they just played for fifteen minutes,
and then if the ball rolls out of bound, clocks
keeps going.
Speaker 5 (17:17):
Now, basketball you stop the clock if it goes out
of bounce.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
And of course think about it. Think about this, folks.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
If you were absolutely unfamiliar with basketball and you watched
the first game, probably one of the weirdest things for
you is going to be dribbling.
Speaker 4 (17:34):
Well, it's a weird word to describe bouncing of the ball.
I wonder where that came from. Would love a little
bit of etymology behind dribbling. It's very visual if you
think about it, and it is as though the ball
were some sort of fluid that is just kind of
dripping out of your hand repeatedly and back up like
a bead of moisture of some guy.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Then I'm grossing myself out.
Speaker 4 (17:56):
But yeah, like nas Smith's whole rule about not moving
with the ball did not include discussion of how you
could move with the ball, right, excuse me, there.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Was no moving with the ball. No.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Once you had the ball, you had to wait for
someone to run to a better position.
Speaker 4 (18:11):
Which is kind of dull, right, Like I mean, it
doesn't add much dynamism to the game. It doesn't add
much like movement. It sort of cuts down on a
lot of the things that make watching sports fun.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
And it feels like a pe teacher, yeah game right.
It feels like the teacher saying, look, I've got these
kids for two hours and I can't let them get.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
Her get I got a wicket hangover, yeah exactly, and
I am so hungover.
Speaker 4 (18:35):
These are mad men drinking days, you know. There he
had a big old carafe of gin. You know in
his office, nothing else.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Gin and coffee mixed in together at room temperature.
Speaker 5 (18:48):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
The place across the street, you know, you know, folks
were recording in the office more and more often though.
The place across the street has coffee lemonade, which I've
never heard of. I'm gonna go try it after we record.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
I want to try it. You want to go? Oh, definitely,
you want to go? Max? Absolutely? Okay, see, well so
so Steve. It's pouring down rainstill.
Speaker 4 (19:05):
But yeah, this was an important addition because a lot
of eyes were on the game now, a lot of scrutiny,
and we have now Ding Ding Ding corporate sponsorships, and
there's a lot of money at stake, so they there
are certain interests in making the game as competitive and
interesting to watch as possible.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
It's becoming a spectator sport.
Speaker 4 (19:28):
It's no longer relegated to the to the gym, you know,
with the with the incorrigibles.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
And Natesmith feels like at some points he has a
dark knight of the soul and he wonders whether people
have just taken his idea and twisted it, perverted it
into something different. The idea of a player not being
able to run with the ball is what he predicated
the entire sport of basketball on. And it wasn't until
(19:56):
the Yale basketball team introduced dribbling and dribbling, you know,
basically fall and drops.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Right, that's what it is. Okay, So I was I
was barking up the right. So it was.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
It was very it was a very legalistic kind of
work around because they're like, I'm holding the ball, I
can't walk.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Bounce I'm walking because I'm now not holding the ball.
Bounce I'm walking. Still I'm not holding the ball.
Speaker 4 (20:18):
And it may have been more of a byproduct of it,
but it's also an opportunity to do some cool fancy footwork,
you know what I mean, Dribble it between your legs,
do a little fake outs and stuff. And I mean,
I don't think that was necessarily the intent. It's a
good example of something that's established for a very functional
reason that then becomes a sort of stylistic feature of
(20:38):
the game that makes it a way of flexing, a
way of kind of a spectacle peacocking around.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
And these these guys at Yale, at the Yale basketball
team around eighteen ninety six, they referred to dribbling first
as passing to themselves.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
What a bunch of law school Yeah, but that also
that makes me think of something else.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Oh yeah, it was a bunch of school kids though
to say that, like, no, I'm not walking with the ball.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
I wasn't holding it when I stepped. Oh I'm sorry,
I'm a child.
Speaker 4 (21:08):
All these Yale's in there, fancy shoes, yes, and dapper haircuts.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
They're who's who columns in the in the local paper,
society pages exactly, And so dribbling might have ended there
with just a clever loophole, right, But everybody kind of agreed,
and even Naismith eventually agreed that dribbling was a really
cool idea.
Speaker 4 (21:35):
It is, like, like you say, it led to so
many other you know, sort of byproducts. Did we mention
that these Yale guys were really good, that they were
sort of the top, Yeah, they were, they were very Yeah,
so we're sort of what I mean, I'm sort of
in my head just sort of laughing at the idea
of late eighteen hundreds Yale students being the best at basketball,
(21:55):
because again, it just hadn't hit the cultural high water
mark that they ultimately would.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
It was still very early days, capital Capitol shots, capital
basket there, old chum, did they even let black people
play basketball in these days? I didn't think so. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4 (22:15):
Yeah and again yeah, I mean again, I'm not saying
only black people are great basketball players, but it is
such an important part of like hip hop culture, shoe
culture and all of this stuff, you know, and that
is really the identity that we have for it now,
and it's just you really wouldn't think of it any
other way, and then it's just.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
So white bread and dull. The early stages of basketball sports.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
Have done a lot to improve the state of racial
discrimination in America, which continues today obviously.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
But then they also have their their issues. Oh they're
huge in yeah, you know, who.
Speaker 4 (22:48):
Actually owns the teams and some of the perhaps they
say that's right, and also just the taking advantage at
times of of you know, young athletes and.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
Things like that, college athletes not getting paid, not.
Speaker 4 (23:02):
Getting paid, and also just the fact that you can
have a very lucrative career or a very like promising
career and then get injured to the point of you
have no backup plan and like it's like you're kind.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Of toast right your shelf life in that career can
be pretty especially in college.
Speaker 4 (23:17):
You can get injured to the point where it ruins
your prospects of a professional career before you even have
a chance to get paid. I think the whole not
paying college students anything and he making it illegal for
them to it's a real selling.
Speaker 5 (23:29):
Yeah, well, it has been getting better.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
I heard it, had, I heard it had.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Also, I wanted to cross reference this first black basket
professional basketball player, first black basketball player in the NBA
with Earl Lloyd, and it wasn't until make sure I
get the state right October thirty first. Nineteen fifty's a
long time.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
So the sport got way better in the fifties. The Also,
I want to give a shot to Nay Smith quote
when he came around to dribbling, he called that one
of the most spectacular and exciting maneuvers in basketball.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
And that's the way he's going to sound now. It's
just difference. I say, swimming. Snosberry's tastes like Snosberry. I
don't know why. He's like a Willy Walker. Ask figure
in minds and he knew.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
The reason he was saying dribbling was better is because
he heard he had seen other attempts to try to
bring movement to the game. He said players would lose
possession of the ball voluntarily, by which means they dropped
it and they would roll it somewhere.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
That's kind of boring to watch.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Dribbling was a much more sophisticated version of this tactic,
and later people like philosopher doctor Sean Klein would call
it a subversion. Dribbling as a subversion. They were adhering
to the rules the yelites, but they were subverting the
expectations of how those rules.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Would be followed.
Speaker 4 (24:58):
Hey, Klein, stay in your lane. Stick to talking about
play nerds. Yeah, you know, what do you know about sport? Yeah,
you can't dribble, nietzschee bro it's a subversion that does
sound like something professor of philosophy.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
You you guys saw that fantastic show Kunk on Earth.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
I have heard of it, and I know it's related
to a really great British guy who wrote Black Black.
Speaker 5 (25:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
I read it like a bunch of Charlie Brooker. Yeah,
that's you. You especially on Netflix now.
Speaker 4 (25:27):
And I thank you for reminding me because lately I
have been running dry in that phase where you just
scroll for forty five minutes and you have subscriptions to everything,
but yet there's nothing for you.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
And it's very disheartening.
Speaker 4 (25:41):
We're in an age of oversaturation that yet feels like
we have no options at all.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
I feel it somehow a mean statement about my intelligence.
If I look on Criterion channel, I'm like, I don't
feel like watching any of these.
Speaker 4 (25:54):
I do love Criteria. I love it recently. Why there's
a great collection on there. I think you'd like, Ben.
It's a Roger Korman and directed all of these Edgar
Allan Poe adaptations, because I guess it was just like
free intellectual property, you know, because it was like in
the public domain. And some of them like share the
same sets, like Pitt in the Pendulum and follow the
House of Usher clearly reuse some of the same spooky
(26:17):
skeletons in the Crypt, but they're like really well done.
And you know, Roger Corman, of course was a super
important creature feature kind of director. He gave a lot
of the best, biggest, you know, blockbuster directors their start,
like James Cameron, I think worked on The Cruise with
him and stuff, and you know, he was real scrappy
and kind of figured out how to make use of
what he had. But those Poe adaptations are great, and
(26:39):
there's like ten of them, and the Vincent Price is
in almost every one of them.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
All. I really appreciate that.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
No, I'm going to check those out, and when you
check out Kunk on Earth, I don't want to split up.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
I've been meaning to, and thank you for the reminder.
I'll give you a heads up. Could you like this?
Speaker 1 (26:52):
So Kunk talks to a lot of top notch experts
on history of very specific aspects.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Kunk has sort of like an explica. She's like Steve
Colbert when he's doing the Cobert Rapport.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
Okay, but it's sort of like a blank slate, kind
of like figuring things out, like kind of like taking
the stock of what this earth is all about.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
There, kind of.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Aggressive with the profound confidence of the unshakeably stupid. There
you got is the best way to describe Kunk as
a character.
Speaker 5 (27:19):
I got it.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
But anyway, there's this one guy's a philosopher that she
talks to who is not enjoying the conversation, and he's hilarious.
That's what I think of whenever I hear about a
philosopher now, oh gosh, okay, just text me when you
watch it.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
I will so well.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
For some time, when you were saying kunk on Earth,
I pictured it like a Morgan Mindy kind of situation
where it's sort of like an alien taking in like
this absurd planet. But it does not seem like it's
that at all, but it sounds amazing. So this idea
of dribbling being kind of not popular to some right.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
They're always going to be you know, some quote unquote
traditionalist or people who say, hey, that's again the rules,
and they're right, it is kind of against the rules.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
But if I describe this amorl though, like this philosopher
guy Klin, he's like, you referred to the a moral
underpinnings of dribbling, right.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Right, Yeah, And then and then says later says, despite this,
you know, more than a century after the invention of dribbling,
it's safe to say basketball is better thanks to it,
and points this out, which we see in so many things.
Client says, in the creation of any game, there are gaps.
The players discover, these ambiguities and vagueness and the rules.
(28:34):
It's the way that the game evolves, which I think
is a fair point. Now it is, and I was
mischaracterizing Clin. He wasn't saying that he was against it.
He was just describing kind of.
Speaker 4 (28:42):
The evolution of this and how yeah, it technically was
changing the rules, but it was, like he said, more
flipping them a little bit and making it a little
more interesting.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
I'm still thinking about Clin now. I like the idea
of this being Klein's Mary mission in life is to
stop drippling, because it's.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
To end dribbling. This shall not stand.
Speaker 4 (29:08):
Only classic basketball is Professor Natesmith intended exactly only with
peach baskets.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
And they're like, all right, doctor, let's get your back
to the bus.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Let's get Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
So originally to let's talk about the ball. Originally the
soccer ball, right, yeah, it was a soccer ball, and
later Naismith asked a former baseball pitcher named A. G.
Spaulding to create a ball specifically for basketball.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
I've heard of him, You have at least heard of
the name.
Speaker 4 (29:39):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
It looked way different than the modern basketball today. It
had uh suutures on it, you know, yeah, Frank.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Like a medicine ball.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Yeah yeah, yeah, very that's a great comparison. And because
this stitched up scar basically running down the middle of it,
it affected how the ball moved, so you had to
try to bounce it.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
On the flat part, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (30:11):
And it's funny though, because the modern basketball still does
have those kind of visual seams, like I don't know
if they're actually doing anything.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
It's obviously all molded, you know, and all of that.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
There's a pattern to it because it is consistently around
the you know, it's spread in a consistent design around
the ball. But to your point, it does remind me
of when you go to a fast food place and
you can tell they put fake grill marks on the thing.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
That's right. It feels like fake grill marks. That's so funny, man. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (30:40):
And and I bet to your point, Ben, if you
did dribble it on one of those seams, it probably
would fly off willy nilly, you know. Yeah, it wouldn't
be consistent, so that would probably be a little more tricky.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
And that's where that is, apparently, where trick dribbling comes
around the stuff you were talking about earlier.
Speaker 4 (30:57):
You can make it kind of put a little english
on it on a sideway.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
So we did say that. Nasmith came around to dribbling,
he became a dribbling fanboy. But make no mistake, he
didn't love all the changes into his sport. After he
stopped coaching, he watched a contest in nineteen ten between
Kansas and Missouri and he freaked out. He freaked out.
He said, they're killing my game. He said, the referees
(31:25):
are need to be more authoritative. He said, you know,
this game is full of fouls. I made rules for
there not to be fouls. And he was irritated with it.
And then to your point about corporate America. Just one
year later, in nineteen eleven, he published an editorial talking
(31:47):
about the problem of quote commercialization in sports.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Oof. Yeah, I think that ship has sailed.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
Brou Yeah even then, like what we were talking about
earlier with Max, Like you know, now it's just they're
just squishing the game.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Talk about making the.
Speaker 4 (32:01):
Rules malleable for the wrong reasons, you know, to like
fit in more advertisements. I mean, this is definitely the
early stages of the utter corporatization and commercialization of sports.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Yeah, he said, look, you need to keep money out
of college basketball. I hate the idea of quote, the
worship of the dollar in the field of athletics. And
then he gets a little high faluting here. I'm on
his side, but he gets high faluting. He says he's
invented his game to be a quote, a laboratory in
which the great moral lessons of fair play and the
(32:36):
square deal are taught.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Again, cool, cool idea, but weird some truth to that.
It isn't good, you know.
Speaker 4 (32:44):
It is certainly if you're young and you're learning to
play basketball. It's a community building thing. It's a way
of making friends, you know, if you're playing in college
or in high school, even like you'll you're in you're
in the trenches with these people. You're learning how to
think of others, you know, and not just yourself. And
saying what he's saying, though, is more about the I
(33:04):
don't know, I guess kind of the idealistic.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Version of what the sport is kind of drink in
his own flavoring.
Speaker 4 (33:11):
He definitely is no question about it, and he's going
to go on to drink some even more oddly flavored
as we're to get to that for sure. But again,
that ship has sailed. This guy and is out of
his hands now like truly he is. He is passed
the ball Ah there it is, whether by choice or
(33:31):
just again, it's just it's just what happens. An idea
is you can't really own it at the end of
the day. Especially you can own you can, but you
can say I created this, or like I made this.
But it's like with the work of art, you know,
once people are interpreting it and looking at it and
then enjoying it and making it part of their lives,
then it's no longer even it doesn't even belong to
the artist anymore.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
And if it's a good idea, then should it not
belong to everyone?
Speaker 2 (33:55):
And should you not be able to improve it?
Speaker 4 (33:57):
That's another thing though, that makes a different than say
Van Go going back and touching up his paintings. Like
this is an idea and it's a little bit fluid.
But then you start to get into these debates whether
it's like, you know, strict constructionist kind of views of sports.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
It's funny you say that because I was I went
to the Prato, you know, when I's traveling a while
back and they've got a bunch of Picasso stuff, and
I heard this amazing, amazing conversation from two people. I'm
still trying to figure out what exactly their relationship was,
but it's like it was this older guy and this kid,
(34:35):
and the kid is pretty young, maybe eight or ten.
I don't think the older guy was his father from
the way they talk to each other because the dad.
They're staring at the huge the huge Picasso painting, which
is the bull fight thing. Yeah, I can't remember Guernica
that yeah, yeah, I think right, the big one.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
Yeah yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. So they're staring at it.
Speaker 1 (34:57):
It's kind of slow because we're there on a weekday morning,
and uh in Spanish. The older guy is saying, what's
the big deal about this? It's impressive, you know, as
a matter of fact, I could do this. And then
they right, and then the kid looks up without missing
your beat, and he goes, yeah, but you didn't. You
won't and you never will. And I was like, I
(35:17):
don't think that's your dad.
Speaker 5 (35:19):
Game set match.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
How does that go?
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Yeah, that's like no one can well knock you out.
Speaker 5 (35:25):
That's good.
Speaker 4 (35:27):
Yeah, cool, I know I know from sports thee love
it makes a super who super who.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
I was thinking of the interstate gas station, which is
a cool one. Yeah, it's it's no BUCkies. It's no BUCkies.
But who is nothing.
Speaker 4 (35:41):
Sadder than a love's across the street from a BUCkies.
It's like, y'all just is not going.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
To go up.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Yeah, so the sport was going to undergo this kind
of transformation as soon as it got popular. Dribbling probably
saved basketball, to be honest with you.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
No question.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
And this goes to something that you were you were
talking about at the very beginning when we started this
series this week, Basketball is something that is continuing to evolve.
Colleen Macklin. In conversation with author Nick Greed, Colleen Macklin
says games are a democratic art form. The beauty of
(36:21):
a physical game is that you don't have to be
a programmer or an artist to make changes. The rules
are modified and tweaked and then played by regular humans.
So it's kind of like crowdsourcing.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
That's exactly right.
Speaker 6 (36:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (36:32):
Then again, the art comparison, it's a tricky one because
you know, you sure art belongs to the public, but
also you're not going to go back and change a
work of art like that would be considered black unless
you're like George Lucas, in which you shouldn't do that point.
But with basketball or any sport, or like hell, the Constitution,
(36:53):
it's designed to be somewhat fluid and living so that
it can change with the times, you know what I mean,
varying degrees of success. But I would argue and agree
with you that dribbling was an incredibly important innovation in
the sport.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
And that's where it verges into something poetic, because Nick
Green says basketball is the only major sport that can
be traced to a single person. But that person's most
important contribution was that he relinquished control of his invention,
and so he built the car and he let other
(37:29):
people drive it and decide where it would go, you know,
And there's there's something poetic to that. It's still work
in progress, as you said, and it's gone far beyond
just keeping a bunch of rowdy kids from beating the
stuft out of each other.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
You know.
Speaker 4 (37:45):
Sometimes we save these these tangents and trivia bits for
like our new kind of clip show concept, and we're
starting to do, but I think that some of these
would be a great way to wrap this one up.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
Yeah, just we we've kind of been hinting at some
of nath Smith's.
Speaker 4 (37:58):
Sort of let's do it otter proclivities, and also the
fact that despite having invented the game, he only ever.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Played it twice.
Speaker 4 (38:06):
Yeah. Yeah, and like, you know, some of the images
of him in the early days are hilarious.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
And there's one where it's like him and this like
old like kind of washer woman.
Speaker 4 (38:15):
Looking type figure Kobe, and he's holding the basket up
and she's just got this like really it's like it's
again a soccer ball, really really funny.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
But yeah, only played it twice.
Speaker 4 (38:27):
His team in one of those games, the teachers at
the YMCA lost five to one, so he did. He
played in that original game, that's the five to one
game that we were talking about, the one that was
first for public consumption, and the one point for his
team that was scored in that game was by his pal,
a guy named AA Stagg, who was kind of the
inventor of American football.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
And uh yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
And it's it's interesting how these stories coincide because Nay Smith,
along with his spouse Bodney Smith, they invented an early
version of the football helmet to help out Stag and
their early version was flannel.
Speaker 4 (39:08):
It makes me think of like the Pete and Pete hat,
you know, like the kind of what do they call
that a deer stalker hats or whatever, but like the
flannel classic red and black, you know, checkered kind of pattern.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (39:19):
It was made to prevent something called cauliflower ear, which
is a condition that happens and he get bashed in
the ear and repeatedly and it starts to kind of
swell up and then stays that way.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Yeah, and this is this is strange because he also
he also had beef with coaches, even though he himself
was a coach at University of Kansas for a while.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
He thought terrible coach.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Yeah, he had a bad losing record because he thought
coaches basically shouldn't do their job.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
He said, if you're a coach who micro manages your
players by telling them what to do while they're on
the court.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
It's like cheating your tantamount. Huh, you're evil? WHOA? So
he was. He was way worse than evil.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
He was way more like I think a ted where
he's like, come on, guys, you know basketball, it's a
lot like falling in love.
Speaker 4 (40:04):
Following it's like going on a magical journey with your
best friend and being a goldfish.
Speaker 6 (40:10):
Shall you just get out there? You'd be a dog
with peanut, but you have a good old uh No.
But that all that tracks though, doesn't it. It's philosophically,
he's still stuck in the gym trying to get these
horny teenagers to chill out.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
You know.
Speaker 4 (40:23):
All of this other stuff is sort of against his
whole philosophy of the game. And I was saying earlier
it almost sounds like he thought telling them what to
do was cheating or something. It was like depriving them
of the part that actually matters, where they figure it
out themselves.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Ah. Yes, And that is a good point. It is
an aesthetic philosophical point. We also know and maybe this
is our maybe this is our rap, because I know
we're all three excited about this. What happened to Nasmith
after basketball? After coaching? If you look at Rob Raine's
biography of our buddy James, you find that he spent
(41:01):
his years after coaching working on medical experiments. This is
a true story.
Speaker 4 (41:06):
Look at John Harvey Kellogg type figure. You get deep
into this. Yeah, Betty was really into enemas. But you know,
he invented or was developing, something called a sobriety tester,
which I imagine must have been some early form of breathalyzer,
right kind of. I mean, they didn't really go any
further than that. He also had all of these notions
(41:27):
about what testing people to see if they add natural
athletic abilities, and the test that he developed is boggers.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
Oh yeah, so he would he was okay, is true
story Again, He would blindfold his students or his patients, right,
his subjects, he will clog up their ears. He would
put them in the driver's seat of a car and
see if they could sustain a speed of thirty five
miles an hour. Doesn't that just mean that they're like
(41:59):
loose can and kind of insane. What does that have
to do with anything? It doesn't even involve coordination.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
He can't sell you.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
He says, if you do that, you've got a great
canesthetic sense. And it's like, thank you, I'm glad no
one died.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
No joke.
Speaker 4 (42:15):
Hopefully they were doing it in like a park and
abandoned parking lot or some sort of test track.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
But again, he was not a rich man. I'm not
sure where he would have conducted.
Speaker 5 (42:24):
He wasn't even a good driver.
Speaker 4 (42:25):
No, he hated driving, that's right. And then the last one,
I think, which is maybe what we've been hitting at.
He invented this like stretcher machinet machine for children to
like help them grow taller.
Speaker 2 (42:42):
Well, you know, for anybody.
Speaker 4 (42:43):
Didn't have to be for children, just for short kings
and queens out there. And he was was interviewed about
this device by a school newspaper and he said that
babies between the ages of five months in one year
should be given a good stretching oh tight. But there
was something that he was a little concerned about. He
did have something that he hadn't quite figured out yet.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
My torture rack is so effective that the children may
never stop growing.
Speaker 5 (43:10):
And definitely these.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
String being giants have ruined basketball. Yeah, yeah, the playing
field has no longer been leveled. The very playing field
has been leveled. The other kind destroyed this device. But
what a guy, man.
Speaker 4 (43:25):
I'm really such an interesting story despite all of the
inherent racism.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
Obviously that we I wouldn't say we glossed over. I
think we just what a what a week? Two? And
we're not even done because we may come back to this.
Speaker 4 (43:36):
I think there's more because again we haven't even gotten
into the modern era and all of the you know,
again we've we've hinted at it, but at the tie
ins to fashion and music and I mean.
Speaker 2 (43:45):
Just the the level.
Speaker 4 (43:48):
Of stardom that is achieved by you know, some of
these individuals. It's almost like for it's to me. I
don't know about you, but doesn't it feel like basketball
is kind of the stars sports, star maker sport more
so even than baseball household more, household amy kind of.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
Thing for us.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
Yet in pop culture, basketball, like very very well known
athletes achieve a level of fame that transcends the sport.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
That's what I'm getting at, and you nailed it.
Speaker 3 (44:20):
I would say, of the sports, basketball is the one
where one person can take over the game a lot
more and baseball you could go like four for four
with three home runs and your team loses. Football, you
like a quarterback can be really good. But like you know,
Michael Jordan, Lebron James, star.
Speaker 4 (44:36):
Maker, like on the by the nature of the very
nature of the sport right.
Speaker 3 (44:40):
How it's played too, is in a lot of systems,
like you know, our local team in a lot of
Hawks is the offense goes through Trey Young and he
runs it, so that person can sometimes get because they're kind.
Speaker 5 (44:52):
Of like, you know, the point guard.
Speaker 3 (44:53):
They're running the whole thing, so they get the attention
focused on them, which you.
Speaker 4 (44:56):
Know, doesn't That also mean though that it could be
more conducive to fixing games and chiefs and if you
have inside information that a player is not going to
be there or something like that, or you could make
bets accordingly, I mean early two thousands.
Speaker 3 (45:11):
I forget forgetting his name the top my head. My
buddy Kevin would be very disappointed. But there was an
NBA ref who yet we talked about.
Speaker 4 (45:19):
Him, and it was easy to do because he'd kind
of do it like death by a thousand cuts, like
little little inaccurate, and that nobody could even notice.
Speaker 2 (45:27):
Those are so subjective. Also, I want to Scott Foster.
Speaker 3 (45:30):
I don't think christ Paul has ever won a playoff
game with this guy.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
Shout out to Brian Towey. That's right, that was the
guy about. You know, he believes all.
Speaker 1 (45:41):
Sorts and uh and also gather ye Spaldings, while you may,
I posit to you the basketball is in its heyday
until sumo wrestling becomes more normal.
Speaker 2 (45:56):
That is a hot take back. No, I can't wait
to see sumo arrests. Still, it's very popular in Japan.
I mean like it's also a.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
Huge organized crime element to it totally, because you know,
it's fixing sports, right.
Speaker 4 (46:09):
I always really liked i Honda in Street Fighter too. Yeah,
he always fought in like the weird Japanese bathhouse, you know,
and he had the cool torpedo move and uh and
the slap.
Speaker 2 (46:20):
He did a yeah, good, good animation on that.
Speaker 1 (46:24):
I I was so disappointed because I thought I was
going to go see a sumo match. But they're really expensive. Really,
they're really expensive. And then I thought I was talking
to a friend and was like, what are we paying
for here? For equipment or something like that, and he goes, man,
it might just be for you know, the upkeep of.
Speaker 4 (46:43):
The yeah, massages and stuff, you know, and barley.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
I mean, because they might look like they might like
look like they're not in shape.
Speaker 4 (46:52):
Oh no, it's a different kind of in shape, right. Yeah,
it's like competitive eaters.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
You know. I bet you too, I mean maybe you
saw this.
Speaker 4 (46:59):
I bet you that there are like sumo stars, just
like there are basketball stars.
Speaker 2 (47:04):
Yeah, and then they're just an individual kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
Like go into business, like how Shock owns the Krispy
Kreme here in town.
Speaker 2 (47:11):
They own stuff.
Speaker 1 (47:13):
You know, You'll be walking by a restaurant and then
you'll see a picture of a sumo guy who's just.
Speaker 5 (47:17):
Like some you know.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
Boom, I'm into noodles now.
Speaker 1 (47:22):
But that's but so we we hope we delivered, folks
on what we're saying in part one of this series,
which is that even if you yourself don't tune into
every basketball game, there's a lot to learn.
Speaker 4 (47:34):
Oh man, No, the history of it is so interesting
and uh, you know it also being one of only
two uniquely American sports, you know, which.
Speaker 2 (47:44):
Is kind of a big deal. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:47):
And speaking of big deals, we want to thank you
for tuning in, folks. We also want to thank some
of the big deals on our show, our research associate
doc Z of course, super producer Max Williams. And I
don't know if he deserves it, but I'm still gonna
thank Jonathan Strickland, aka the Quister, even though he high
(48:08):
roaded the heck out of us in me he's in
the office right.
Speaker 2 (48:11):
Now you think I didn't see him.
Speaker 3 (48:12):
He's using the biggest and nice studios just for himself.
Speaker 4 (48:16):
I caught a glint out of the corner of my
eye and it was the light reflecting off his bald head.
Speaker 5 (48:20):
He's also in the studio that does not have blinds.
Speaker 2 (48:22):
Yet it never can stare at he did that.
Speaker 5 (48:27):
We're in the one with the best ac.
Speaker 4 (48:29):
Speaking of the zoo, if anyone's gonna be in Vegas
next week for the iHeart Music Festival, your boy's been
bowling and Noel Brown will be podcasting in something of
a human zoo type scenario.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (48:43):
I mean there's like a booth of some sort that
we will be housed in. I hope there's snacks. I
think there's air conditioning. But it is as part of
like a a Bose promotion of some kind, which I
love and not getting paid to say that I love
their products. But you can come and put on headphones
that observe us like like reptiles in a reptile house
(49:07):
or something.
Speaker 2 (49:08):
You know.
Speaker 1 (49:08):
Yeah, I don't word is still out on whether or
not you can feed us, but.
Speaker 2 (49:14):
You know, be the change, just like James NS exactly.
Speaker 4 (49:18):
But we'll be there on Friday doing ridiculous history and
then also stuff that I don't want you to know,
in addition to several other podcasts that are in our
kind of og stuff, kind of network family.
Speaker 2 (49:33):
You know who else is going to be there to Jonathan, Yeah,
that's right.
Speaker 4 (49:36):
You know who else is else is going to be there,
Lenny Kravitz, Oh yeah, Cheryl Crow, Little Wayne, Yeah, yeah, lots,
Travis Scott, who's apparently got quite popular. Yeah, I'm stoked
about Cheryl Crow. I'm actually genuinely kind of dig Chryl.
Speaker 2 (49:52):
Didn't we have a fake beef with Cheryl Crow back
in the day. She knows what she did. Okay, fair,
Maybe we can address it. We can squash the beef
for set it on fire. She just pushes people. We'll
see you next time, folks.
Speaker 4 (50:12):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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