What was it like to be at an NBA basketball game before 1955? Kind of like waiting in a dentist’s lobby, only without the excitement:
In one notorious example… the final score was 19-18. The Pistons coach, Murray Mendenhall, had decided not to run the ball but simply to hold it and wait until the end of the game to score the winning point. He succeeded, but fans were reading newspapers in the stands; some walked out and demanded their money back, others swore never to buy another ticket to a professional basketball game.
But then, somebody thought up the 24-second shot clock, and the rest is history.
The NCAA held out for many years after that; I remember listening to an ACC game on the radio (Duke and North Carolina, I think) that wound up something like 12-8. Imagine the poor shlub at the microphone trying to fill up the dead air.