Meet the Irish man who invented basketball’s jump shot

The man who changed the way basketball was played died on January 30, aged 95.

There was just one witness to the moment Kenny Sailors helped revolutionise basketball — his brother, Bud — but by all accounts, no one has ever doubted their story.

The moment came on a hot May day in 1934. The two were battling, one on one, under an iron rim nailed to the side of the family’s windmill, a wood-shingled, big-bladed landmark their neighbours on the Wyoming high plains recognised for miles around, the way sailors of the usual kind know a lighthouse from miles out at sea.