Basketball
Basketball has risen as a competitive alternative to football and rugby, and the Uruguayan Basketball Federation boasts a proud early history. The Uruguay national basketball team was placed 6th in the first Olympic Games (Berlin in 1936), 5th in London in 1948, 3rd in Helsinki in 1952, 3rd in Melbourne in 1956, 8th in Rome in 1960, and 8th in Tokyo in 1964. After this successful run, the team did not qualify as finalists in any Olympic tournament, until the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, in which they earned 6th place. Uruguay has also won 12 South American championships, and participated in many Pan-American and World Championships. Uruguay was the host for the 1967 FIBA World Championship.
The Liga Uruguaya (Uruguay's top league) attracts many players from Argentina and Brazil. In the NBA, Esteban Batista is the only Uruguayan player to play in the league when he played for the Boston Celtics.
Read more about this topic: Sport In Uruguay
Famous quotes containing the word basketball:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)