QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (21 page)

England.

Baseball (originally base ball) was invented in England and first named and described in 1744 in
A Little Pretty Pocket Book
. The book was very popular in England and was reprinted in America in 1762.

Baseball is not based on rounders, the first description of which didn’t appear in print until 1828, in the second edition of
The Boy’s Own Book
. The first US mention of rounders is in 1834 in
The Book of Sports
by Robin Carver. He credited
The Boy’s Own Book
as his source, but called the game ‘base ball’ or ‘goal ball’.

In the first chapter of
Northanger Abbey
, written in 1796, the young heroine Catherine Morland is described as preferring
‘cricket, baseball, riding on horseback and running about the country to books’.

The baseball authorities were so paranoid about the non-American origin of the game that in 1907 they carried out a shameless fraud. In a report into the game’s origins commissioned by the major league’s executive board, they advanced the story that the game was invented by the Civil War general and hero Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839.

A legend was born. Despite the evidence of numerous bat-and-ball games being played all over early Puritan America, and the fact that Doubleday never visited Cooperstown, or ever mentioned baseball in his diaries, it stuck firm in the American psyche. As one wag put it, ‘Abner Doubleday didn’t invent baseball, baseball invented Abner Doubleday.’

If any one person should be credited with inventing the modern US game, it is Alexander Cartwright, a Manhattan bookseller. He had been a volunteer fireman and in 1842 founded the Knickerbocker Baseball Club (after the Knickerbocker Fire Engine Company).

He and other firemen played on a field at 47th and 27th Streets. The rules of the modern game are based on their by-laws and Cartwight was the first to draw a diagram of the diamond-shaped field.

He was finally inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1938.

According to the irrepressible old folk tale, rugby football was invented at Rugby School in November 1823, when seventeen-year-old player William Webb Ellis – ‘with a fine
disregard for the rules’ – first picked up a ball and ran with it.

Even at Rugby they don’t believe this. It’s been acknowledged as a myth since 1895, when an investigation by the Old Rugbeian Society admitted that the only source for the story was an 1876 article in the school magazine by an old boy who had barely known Ellis and had left the school three years before the ‘famous’ incident. Other contemporaries had no memory of Ellis as either a rebel or a particularly gifted footballer (he became a low-Church evangelical Anglican priest). What they did confirm was that the rules at the school were complicated and that, while running with the ball in hand was definitely forbidden at the time, it did happen. In the unlikely event that Ellis did run with the ball, he certainly wasn’t the first.

Games similar to rugby, involving the kicking and catching of balls, have been played throughout history, all over the world. The ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese and Mayans all had their own versions of the running-with-a-ball game. Closer to home was caid in Ireland, criapan in Wales and the various English versions of Shrovetide football, where vast crowds of players hacked at and tripped up one another at will. Henry IV, Henry VIII (despite being a keen player himself), Elizabeth I, James I and Charles II all had it banned.

Nevertheless, by the early nineteenth century, some version of the game was being played at most major public schools. Handling the ball was common in many of them. What made Rugby stand out was that a group of boys produced a printed set of rules in 1845, the first written rules for any game of football.

This formed the basis for the code adopted by the Rugby Football Union, founded at the Pall Mall Restaurant in London in 1871. Eight years earlier, the Football Association had been established, using a largely hands-free version played at Cambridge University. This marked the formal split
between the two sets of rules, which evolved into the modern sports of soccer and rugby union. (Rugby league split from rugby union in 1895.)

From time immemorial, all balls for such games had been made from inflated pig’s bladders, so they were always more egg-shaped than spherical. But, in 1862, Richard Lindon, a local Rugby shoemaker, whose wife had died from lung cancer caused by blowing up hundreds of diseased pig’s bladders, was inspired to develop a leather version with a rubber inner tube and so produced the world’s first round football. A request from Rugby School for an oval alternative (whose shape made it easier to catch and throw) meant that Lindon also gets the credit for the first proper rugby ball. Its distinctive shape was formalised in 1892.

Unfortunately, Lindon didn’t patent his invention, although through it he had rather more influence on rugby’s development than William Webb Ellis, who died in obscurity in France in 1872, completely unaware that, four years later, he would be immortalised as the ‘father of rugby’.

Basketball.

And although it was invented in the United States, it was actually devised by a Canadian, James Naismith, in 1891 – the same year that ping-pong was invented.

Naismith was a PE instructor at Springfield College (then the YMCA training school) in Springfield, Massachusetts, from 1890 to 1895. He was asked to create a sport that could be played indoors without special new equipment. He is
supposed to have thought of the idea as he screwed up sketch after sketch of ideas for games and aimed the balls of paper at his waste-paper basket across the room.

Initially, players dribbled a soccer ball up and down any old indoor space. Points were earned by landing the ball in a peach basket nailed to a balcony or high on a wall. It was twenty-one years before anyone got round to putting a hole in the bottom of the basket. Until 1912, after every score, someone had to climb a ladder up to the basket or poke the ball out with a long pole.

In 1959, twenty years after his death, James Naismith was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame (now called the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame).

One of the apocryphal reasons given for the success of VHS in becoming the world standard videocassette is that the original Sony Betamax was slightly too short to record an entire basketball game.

Not American, that really irritates the Canadians.

In fact there is no agreed right answer. In the UK, the use of ‘US’ as an adjective is common in media and government house-styles. In Spanish
americano
tends to refer to any resident of the Americas; English spoken in Latin America often makes this distinction as well. In the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994), the Canadian French word for an American is given as
étatsunien
; in Spanish it is
estadounidense
. This is clumsy in English. US-American is better and that’s what the Germans tend to use (
US-Amerikaner
).

Some (not all serious) suggestions for a specific English word meaning ‘citizen of the US’ have included: Americanite; Colonican; Columbard; Columbian; Fredonian; Statesider; Uessian; United Statesian; United Statesman; USen; Vespuccino; Washingtonian. And Merkin – from the way Americans pronounce ‘American’.

The likely source for Yankee is the Dutch name Janke, meaning ‘little Jan’ or ‘little John,’ dating from the 1680s when the Dutch ran New York. During the Civil War, ‘yankee’ referred only to those loyal to the Union. Now the term carries less emotion – except of course for baseball fans. The word
gringo
is widely used in Latin America to mean a US citizen, particularly in Mexico, though not necessarily in a pejorative way. It’s thought to come from the Spanish
griego
, ‘Greek’ – hence any foreigner (as in English ‘it’s all Greek to me’).

Billy the Kid was born Henry McCarty in New York City. William H. Bonney was just one of his aliases, the one he was
using when he was sentenced to death.

Born in New York City, his mother Catherine was a widow who resettled with Henry and his brother Joe in Wichita, Kansas in 1870. It was a wild place, the centre of the cattle trade. ‘In Wichita’, according to a contemporary newspaper, ‘pistols are as thick as blackberries.’

By November 1870, the town had 175 buildings and a population of nearly 800. Mrs McCarty was well known in town for the hand laundry she ran on North Main Street. The family later moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Billy’s mother was married to William Antrim, a homesteader.

It was in the deserts of New Mexico that Billy began to rustle cattle and make a name for himself as a gunslinger. By 1879, with perhaps seventeen deaths to his name, he was offered an amnesty by the Governor of New Mexico, Lew Wallace, best remembered today as the author of
Ben Hur
, the best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century.

Billy turned himself in, then had second thoughts and broke jail. He was pursued and finally killed by Pat Garrett in 1881, but not before he had sent a series of letters imploring Wallace to honour his promise of an amnesty. They went unacknowledged.

Despite the official death warrant, there were persistent stories that the Kid had survived. In 1903, Wallace’s successor as Governor of New Mexico had the case reopened to establish whether he had really died and whether he deserved to be pardoned. The investigation was never concluded.

In 1950, a member of Buffalo Bill the bison-killer’s Wild West Show known as ‘Brushy Bill Roberts’ died claiming that he was in fact Billy the Kid.

Billy the Kid is said to be the real-life person who has been most depicted in films; he’s portrayed in at least forty-six movies.

Carty/Antrim/Bonney didn’t become known as Billy the Kid
until the end of the last full year of his life. Until then, he was known, simply, as ‘the Kid’.