The Christmas of the NBA, born on the radio and has become a worldwide ritual

Don’t trust appearances, rhetoric and TV commercials, which live on rhetoric: Americans don’t give a damn about the traditional and familiar meaning of Christmas and Thanksgiving Day. If this were not the case, almost a century ago they would not have created diversions to make the presence of relatives and various infiltrators less unbearable. In football, with Thursday Thanksgiving games, since 1920 and continuously since 1934. In professional basketball, with theNBA Christmas Day, born in 1947 and therefore now in its 75th anniversary, even if in reality there were no games in 1998 as the championship had yet to start due to the dispute between owners and players. While in 2011, still due to a lockout, the Christmas races even represented the first day of the season. And be careful, it is not, as often happens in America, an invention for the use and consumption of the media, as instead happened for the NFL from 1934, and the medium was the radio: in the case of basketball, only in 1967 did the diffusion of the images on a national scale, thanks to an agreement between ABC and the NBA for the Californian challenge between the Los Angeles Lakers and the San Diego Rockets, the team that then moved to Houston where – because of the space center – the nickname ‘Razzi’ seemed more suitable than the place of origin, where it had also wanted to symbolize the rise of the city and also the local company that designed rockets, not initially for space but to carry nuclear warheads.