(See Cover) These are the golden years for baseball, football and basketball, the big three of U.S. professional sport. Major-league baseball, expanded from coast to coast, has at last become national. Pro football, unequaled in its combination of violence and cunning, plays in stadiums that have been sold out for weeks in advance. Basketball, pro and amateur, is booming as never before.
Baseball has changed little since Babe Ruth first started swatting home runs over fences; football has been largely content to find new uses for old techniques of the pass and the T formation. But basketball, that peculiarly American sport, has undergone a dramatic transformation.
Within recent memory, basketball was a game of pattern plays as formal as any cotillion, of two-handed set shots that were lovely to watch but easy to block, of rules that set officials' whistles to shrilling at the flick of physical contact, and of defensive systems that held most scores well below the 60 mark. By those standards, today's game is absolutely unrecognizable in the professional National Basketball Association, which inevitably sets the style for college, high school and playground basketball.
Fast Break, Screen & Jump. As played by the pros, basketball is a rushing, bruising battle that leaves its gigantic players gasping for breath long after each game. Forcing the pace is a rule that requires a team to take a shot within 24 seconds of getting the ball. This means that at least 75% of the action develops from the kaleidoscopic swirl of the instant, and that play is dominated by:
The fast break, which sends three attackers sprinting down the floor against two defenders, or two against one.
The screen play, in which a player gives a teammate the necessary split second to shoot by planting himself between the shooter and his assigned defensive man.
The one-handed jump shot, which is almost impossible to stop without fouling the shooter.
Gone Goon. Basketball's offensive revolution has sent scores skyrocketing, until it now requires an average of 122 points to win an N.B.A. game. As the game has changed, so have the players. Teams once depended on three or four scorers; now every man on the floor can go over 20 points a game, the old yardstick of success. Says Los Angeles Lakers' Coach Fred Schaus, himself a pro only a few years ago: "It's incredible, but it's true that today's N.B.A. man, an average man, would have been a great star six, seven or eight years ago. Maybe now he's just a fourth or fifth man instead of a star."
Gone is the day of the glandular goon who could do little more than stand beneath the basket and stuff in rebounds. Philadelphia's Wilt ("The Stilt") Chamberlain, who leads the N.B.A. in scoring with an average 37.8, stands 7 ft. 2 in., but has the speed and agility to be a marvel were he half a foot shorter. St. Louis' Bob Pettit (6 ft. 9 in.) is quick and graceful, Boston's Bill Russell (6 ft. 10 in.) is a defensive and rebounding genius, Los Angeles' Elgin Baylor (6 ft. 5 in.) combines the brute strength of a pro football tackle with the supple coordination of an Olympic gymnast, and even at the advanced age of 32 Boston's Bob Cousy (dwarfish at 6 ft. 1 in.) remains the playmaking wizard of the game.