6.6 — Everything Else, and the Records

The sports that did not fit anywhere else, the ones invented by accident, and the records that are unlikely ever to be broken.

Invented on purpose

Which major sports were invented in a single afternoon?

Basketball, in December 1891. James Naismith, a physical education instructor in Springfield, Massachusetts, was given two weeks to devise an indoor game to keep a class occupied through a New England winter without the injuries of football. He wrote thirteen rules, nailed two peach baskets to the balcony rails at either end of the gym, and had the class play.

The baskets had bottoms. Somebody had to climb a ladder to retrieve the ball after every score, and it took several years before anyone thought to cut them out. Dribbling was not in the original rules — the ball could only be passed — and was added later.

Volleyball, in 1895, by William Morgan four years later and 15 kilometres away, deliberately as a gentler alternative to basketball for older members of his gym. He called it mintonette.

Badminton developed from an older children's game and was formalised by British officers in India, taking its name from Badminton House in Gloucestershire where a version was played. The Indian city of Pune has a claim too, since the game was known there as poona.

Which sports were invented by accident or misunderstanding?

Rugby's origin story — that a schoolboy named William Webb Ellis picked up the ball and ran with it at Rugby School in 1823 — is almost certainly a myth, invented decades later by a committee looking for a founding moment. The World Cup trophy is named after him anyway.

American football diverged from rugby through a series of rule changes driven by one man, Walter Camp, in the 1880s: the line of scrimmage, a set number of attempts to advance a set distance, and the snap. The forward pass was legalised in 1906 after a crisis in which eighteen players died in a single season and the President intervened, demanding the game be made less lethal.

Frisbee takes its name from the Frisbie Pie Company of Connecticut, whose empty tins students in New England threw at each other. A plastic version was designed independently and the manufacturer adopted a variant of the pie company's name.

Why do some sports have such odd measurements?

Because the units were fixed before anyone standardised, and changing them would invalidate the records.

A cricket pitch is 22 yards because that is one chain, an old surveying unit of exactly 22 yards, used for laying out fields. Ten square chains make an acre.

A marathon is 42.195 km because of a royal nursery window, in 6.3.

A basketball hoop is 10 feet because that is the height of the balcony rail Naismith nailed the peach baskets to.

A golf hole is 4.25 inches because the first hole-cutting tool at St Andrews in 1829 was made from a piece of drainage pipe that happened to be that diameter.

The strange rules

What is the strangest rule in a major sport?

Several candidates, each of which sounds invented.

Sumo has 82 winning techniques and a wrestler can win by his opponent's belt coming undone. The ring is swept and salted between bouts as a Shinto purification. A wrestler stepping out or touching the ground with anything other than the soles of his feet loses, which is why bouts often last under ten seconds.

Curling has the free guard zone rule and a convention called good curling, under which players call their own fouls including ones nobody else saw. Teams frequently concede when they judge the position lost, and it is considered poor manners not to.

Baseball's infield fly rule exists solely to stop a fielder deliberately dropping an easy catch to create a double play. It is the standard example given in law schools of a rule written to prevent the exploitation of another rule.

Cricket's timed out and obstructing the field are covered in 6.1.

And Australian rules football has an umpire who bounces the ball vertically to restart play, on a surface that makes the bounce unpredictable, deliberately.

Which sports have no clock?

Cricket, baseball, tennis, golf, volleyball and squash all end when a condition is met rather than when time expires. That produces a distinctive property: a team can never run out the clock, and no lead is safe by definition.

Basketball, football and hockey are the opposite, and they generate a whole strategic layer — time-wasting, fouling deliberately to stop the clock, the last-minute goalkeeper substitution in ice hockey — that clockless sports simply do not have.

Tennis has recently added clocks around the game rather than in it: a shot clock between points, to stop players taking two minutes to serve. The tiebreak, introduced in 1970, was itself a response to the sport's unboundedness — before it, sets continued until somebody led by two games, and the 2010 Wimbledon match between Isner and Mahut ran to 70-68 in the final set over eleven hours across three days.

Records that will not fall

Which sporting records are effectively permanent?

Don Bradman's 99.94 Test batting average, discussed in 6.1.

Wilt Chamberlain's 100 points in a single NBA game in 1962, and his season averaging 50.4 points per game. The modern game's pace and defensive rules make both unapproachable.

Jack Nicklaus's 18 major golf championships stood as unbreakable until Tiger Woods reached 15, and then injury intervened; it is now likely to stand.

Byron Nelson's 11 consecutive golf tournament wins in 1945.

Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak in baseball, 1941. The next longest in the modern era is 44. Statisticians have modelled it repeatedly and the probability of any player achieving it in a career is very small.

Martina Navratilova's 74 consecutive match wins in tennis in 1984, and Esther Vergeer's 470 consecutive wins in wheelchair tennis over a decade, which is the most extreme winning streak in any professional sport.

Usain Bolt's 9.58 and 19.19 have stood since 2009 and nobody has come within a tenth.

Which records are held by countries rather than people?

Brazil, five football World Cups. India, eight consecutive Olympic hockey golds in a period spanning 1928 to 1956, discussed in 6.3. The United States, the most Olympic medals overall by a wide margin. Norway, the most Winter Olympic medals, from a population of five million.

Hungary in water polo, Kenya and Ethiopia in distance running, Cuba in boxing, China in table tennis and diving — each is a case where a small country or a specific system dominates one sport far out of proportion, and in every case the explanation is concentrated investment plus a dense local competitive structure rather than anything innate.

Sports you may not know

What are the traditional Indian sports?

Kabaddi is a contact team sport with no equipment at all, in which a raider crosses into the opposing half, tries to touch defenders and return, all while continuously chanting "kabaddi" to prove they have not taken a breath. It is thousands of years old, is played across South Asia, and was professionalised into a major television league in 2014.

Kho kho is a pursuit game of extraordinary speed, played by two teams of twelve with chasers seated in a line who tag in by touch.

Mallakhamb is gymnastics performed on a vertical wooden pole or a hanging rope, developed as physical training for wrestlers in Maharashtra. It is spectacular and almost unknown outside India.

Kalaripayattu in Kerala is among the oldest surviving martial arts, and includes weapons work and a body of knowledge about pressure points that fed into local massage and medicine traditions. Silambam in Tamil Nadu is staff fighting. Gatka in Punjab is the Sikh martial tradition.

What are the strangest world championships?

They exist and they are genuine competitions with rules and titles.

Wife carrying in Finland, where the prize is traditionally the wife's weight in beer, and where a specific carrying position is named after the Estonian competitors who introduced it. Bog snorkelling in Wales. Cheese rolling at Cooper's Hill in Gloucestershire, where competitors chase a wheel of cheese down a slope so steep that ambulances are stationed at the bottom as a matter of routine. Extreme ironing, where competitors iron a shirt in improbable locations.

Chess boxing alternates rounds of chess and boxing, and is won by checkmate or knockout. It is not a joke: there is a governing body, and it is genuinely difficult to play accurate chess with a concussion developing.

These are worth knowing for a serious reason. They demonstrate that a sport is simply an agreed set of arbitrary constraints that people find it satisfying to compete within, and that the difference between cheese rolling and the 100 metres is institutional rather than fundamental.

The bits people argue about

What is the difference between a sport and a game?

There is no settled definition, and the argument tells you what people value.

The usual proposed criteria are physical exertion, skill, competition, and institutional structure. Every criterion admits something people want to exclude and excludes something people want to admit. Physical exertion rules out chess and darts. Skill admits video games. Competition rules out mountaineering.

The Olympic movement has repeatedly had to decide, and its decisions are political rather than principled: chess and bridge are recognised by the IOC as sports without being in the games; breakdancing was added for 2024; competitive video gaming has been discussed for a decade without resolution.

The honest position is that "sport" is a family resemblance term — the members share overlapping features without any single feature common to all — which is exactly the example Wittgenstein used to make that point about the word game in the first place.

Why do home teams win more often?

The effect is real, measured across essentially every team sport, and typically worth somewhere between 55 and 60 per cent of results in most leagues, higher in some.

The proposed causes, in rough order of evidential support: referee bias under crowd pressure, which is the best-documented — studies of added time in football found referees adding more when the home team is behind, and the effect shrinks in empty stadiums. Familiarity with the specific venue, which matters more in sports with variable playing surfaces. Travel fatigue for the away team. And crowd effect on the players themselves, which is the most commonly assumed and the least supported.

The pandemic provided an accidental experiment. Matches played in empty stadiums showed a measurable reduction in home advantage across several leagues, and the reduction was largest in the refereeing-related measures — fouls and cards given — which is the strongest evidence available that the crowd's main effect is on the officials.

What comes next

The next Part leaves sport for the other thing the world watches together — how cinema was invented by people who thought it had no future, and how it became the largest storytelling industry that has ever existed.