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Students once played a sport with a ball taller than they were

Pushball used a 70-pound ball six feet three inches across. One hay-stuffed knockoff swelled to 500 pounds.

Popkin
Aug 03, 2026
∙ Paid
pushball — Library of Congress / no known restrictions (via The Public Domain Review)
pushball — Library of Congress / no known restrictions (via The Public Domain Review)

Pushball is a sport that uses a ball six feet three inches across. The Massachusetts inventor Moses G. Crane came up with it in the 1890s because he couldn't follow American football, a small brown ball moving across a mostly brown field. So he made the ball enormous. "…

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