Before color television and high-definition end zone cameras, dropping a dime had nothing to do with athletic prowess. It was criminal street slang.
In the mid-20th century, a standard coin-operated public payphone cost exactly ten cents per local call. When a criminal informant or civilian decided to notify the police about illegal activity, they dropped a dime into the rotary payphone slot to place an anonymous tip. To "drop a dime" meant to snitch. The phrase saturated black-and-white noir films, detective novels, and municipal court reporting throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
The idiom shifted during the late 1970s and 1980s inside urban basketball gyms. Playmakers who dished effortless, unselfish assists to teammates began using the phrase as slang: dishing the ball was like passing off an easy favor. Over time, that basketball idiom collided with the literal physical size of the coin.
If an athlete could deliver an object to a target area no larger than a 0.705-inch disc, they were operating at the absolute ceiling of human motor control.
