In my Denton, Texas high school years, not belonging to an actual sports team, I had to endure, along with the other losers, something called “Physical Education,” taught by an instructor who was burdened with the task as a condition of their real job, coaching football. In my sophomore year that instructor was the beloved Coach Collins, for whom a high-school football stadium was later named. This would have been the 1974-1975 school year.

There was a physical aspect to Physical Education. On any given day we might be issued a badminton racket, or directed to run around a field. But I would say the educational element was basically absent.

But one day we were instructed to “write a report” on some sport. I don’t know why. It was probably a state requirement. What this meant in practice was that you went to the school library, looked up the entry for, say, “basketball” in the World Book Encyclopedia (which was basically the same as the Encyclopedia Britannica, except for idiots), and copied a page or so of text by hand onto a sheet of paper. Then on the appointed date you’d stand up in front of the other kids and read “your” “report.”

But it occurred to me that this was all a charade. No one was really interested in whether or not we actually did research, or in learning something. So I decided to just make something up, and have some fun with it.

And going through a box of old letters and scribblings some fifty years later, I found my “report” (thanks, Mom!). Here it is, in its entirety.

Basketball was started in 1897 by William Johnson, son of a cantaloupe plantation owner. While tossing one of his father’s fruit [sic] into a wastepaper basket, suddenly the idea of what is now basketball popped into his head. Although he was soon punished by an angry father, his friends started a now popular game. Five years later a plastic ball was substituted for the cantaloupe, because constant dribbling made it rather soggy and hard to handle, and also made it taste bad. It was also rather expensive, as that particular species of fruit was fairly rare at that time. Two years later, in 1904, a basket, with no bottom, was substituted for the wastebasket, thus freeing the latter for trash.

But the really basic origins of basketballs go back much further than this. Descriptions on walls of ancient Mayan temples reveal a ball-through loop rite for fertility. It had many sexual implications, and one historian hints that “It was a sort of primitive girlie show.”[1] [Yes, I included an actual (bogus) footnote.] The basketball itself (which was not named a “basketball” until its incorporation into that sport in 1902) has had many other earlier uses. Many prominent historians contend that it was not a pumpkin that Cinderella’s famed fairy godmother changed into a coach (despite popular belief) but what is now called a basketball. The coach she rode in she thus named a basketball coach. The social gathering she went to was also called a basket-ball, as the fashions of the time dictated that all dancers dance veiled in fine, net-like baskets.

[1] Nightclubs through the ages, vol. 1 pg. [illegible] by John Sorcy.

I did in fact get up in front of the class and read the above. I made no outward indication that it was satirical. I think I was a little nervous. No one laughed, no one cracked a smile. I don’t think anyone was really listening. I was the egghead of the class, it was totally expected that I would actually go to the trouble of doing serious research and come up with a long (or at least longer than necessary) paper. In fact, I think I heard another kid who hadn’t even bothered to consult World Book quote my report in his completely improvised lecture later on in the hour. I was a trusted source, after all.

Coach Collins was in the audience too, of course. What did he think? Well, you can see from the photo the grade he assigned it. If he thought anything funny was going on…he never let on.