In which sport would you perform a slam dunk?

Basketball, which is one of very few major sports with a documented inventor and date. James Naismith, a Canadian PE instructor in Massachusetts, was told in December 1891 to devise an indoor game to keep a class occupied through winter without the injuries of indoor football. He wrote thirteen rules in about an hour and nailed a peach basket to the balcony rail.

The basket had a bottom in it. Someone had to fetch a ladder after every score, and it took years before anyone thought to cut it out. Dribbling was not in the original rules either - the ball could only be passed - and the game emerged from teams working out what the rules did not forbid.

The dunk was banned in American college basketball from 1967 to 1976, a rule widely understood at the time to be aimed at Lew Alcindor, later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who was dominating with it at UCLA. He responded by developing the skyhook, an unblockable shot that made him the leading scorer in NBA history for nearly forty years. Banning his best move produced a better one.