All-american sport. Present simple tense

Although the sport began as amateur competition, the Australian Football League is an elite professional league and has been for nearly 80 years since its initial formation as the Victorian Football Association and then the Victorian Football League in 1897. The league changed its name to the Australian Football League (AFL) in 1990 amid the increasing professionalism and national expansion of the game.
The game was invented in the United States in the 1890s, in Springfield, Massachusetts. The first professional basketball leagues emerged in the 1920s in the United States. Prominent among these were the American Basketball League, which formed in 1925, and the National Basketball League, which was launched in 1937 by General Electric, Firestone and Goodyear as a way to improve their national profile. In 1946 the Basketball Association of America was founded by the owners of major sports arenas, particularly the Madison Square Garden. The BAA later merged with the NBL in 1949 to become the National Basketball Association, the preeminent league in the world with 29 teams in the United States and one in Canada. The American Basketball Association, founded in 1967, subsequently joined the NBA in the 1976 ABA-NBA merger.
The second-oldest professional basketball league in the world is the Philippine Basketball Association. The PBA was long considered to be the best league in Asia, but the Chinese Basketball Association has grown tremendously in recent years. The league was born on April 9, 1975, at the Araneta Coliseum, Cubao, Quezon City, Philippines.
Outside of the NBA, the top professional leagues in the world are those of FIBA Europe. According to the official league rankings produced by Euroleague Basketball, the body that conducts the continent-wide Euroleague, the top five national domestic leagues on the continent (from 1 to 5) are those Liga ACB (Spain), the Russian Professional Basketball League, the Greek Basket League, Lega Basket Serie A (Italy), and the Turkish Basketball League.
European basketball is also characterized by its long established and well-developed transnational club competitions, most notably the Euroleague, which features top clubs from as many as 18 different domestic leagues. Two other continental club competitions, the ULEB Eurocup and EuroChallenge, are also conducted annually. Europe also has transnational regional leagues, such as the Liga ABA (Adriatic League, formerly Yugoslavian League), and Baltic Basketball League (originally limited to the Baltic states, now also including Kazakhstan).
Cricket at the highest level has developed into a fully professional international sport from which leading players can earn a large income. However professionalism has a long history in English cricket. The first professionals had appeared by the first half of the eighteenth century, when heavy gambling on the game encouraged wealthy patrons to draft the best players into their teams. They would often offer these players full-time employment as gardeners or gamekeepers on their estates. In the second half of the century, the famous Hambledon Club paid its players match fees.[citation needed]
In the middle of the nineteenth century William Clarke's All-England Eleven was a highly successful all-professional venture which did much to popularise the game. The earliest overseas tours were also all-professional affairs.
In the early 21st century cricket is as lucrative as some other sports, and domestic cricketers typically earn several times the average salary in their country. Regular members of the English cricket team earn several hundred thousand pounds a year. However, the highest paid cricketers in the world are the star members of the Australian cricket team or the Indian cricket team who make most of their income from endorsement contracts. Players in T20 leagues such as the Indian Premier League make significant sums of money without having to play international cricket.
The 81-member[4] governing body is the International Ice Hockey Federation, (IIHF). Ice hockey has been played at the Winter Olympics since 1924, and was in the 1920 Summer Olympics. North America's National Hockey League is the strongest professional ice hockey league, drawing top ice hockey players from around the globe. The NHL rules are slightly different from those used in Olympic hockey.
Ice hockey sticks are long L-shaped sticks made of wood, graphite, or composites with a blade at the bottom that can lie flat on the playing surface when the stick is held upright and can curve either way as to help a left- or right-handed player gain an advantage.
There are early representations and reports of hockey-type games being played on ice in the Netherlands, and reports from Canada from the beginning of the nineteenth century, but the modern game was initially organized by students at McGill University, Montreal in 1875 and, by two years later, codified the first set of ice hockey rules and organized the first teams.