It was not as patriotic as baseball, but it seemed to make a lot more sense. Basketball consisted of throwing the large inflated ball through a metal hoop horizontally fastened to a wooden backboard hung vertically high above their heads. The team that threw the ball through the hoop more often was the team that won. All the team won, though, was the same old thrill of winning, and that didn’t make so much sense. Playing basketball made a lot more sense than playing baseball, because throwing the ball through the hoop was not quite as indecorous as running around a bunch of bases and required much less teamwork.

This little bit of sports commentary comes from a “lost” chapter of Catch 22 which did not make it into the book when it was originally published in 1961. The chapter was later published in Playboy, circa 1987, under the title “Yossarian Survives.” In a note he wrote to accompany the Playboy publication, Joseph Heller said that a couple of U.S. Air Force Academy officers contacted him around the time of Catch 22’s 25th anniversary to ask why he had omitted the chapter. “My reactions of surprise were contradictory,” Heller wrote. “I had forgotten I had written in; I was positive I had left it in. ‘Do you mean it’s not there?’ I exclaimed!”

A musical side note: Did you know there’s a ska band out of Jersey named Catch 22?