If you’re enjoying the US basketball season, you might want to celebrate the inventor’s birthday today — James Naismith was born November 6, 1861 in the Province of Canada. He moved to Springfield, Massachusetts in the US in about 1890 to study at the YMCA International Training School. From there he became a physical education instructor at Springfield College. He had been a physical education teacher at McGill University prior to moving to the US, and had the idea while there that there should be a team sport that could be played indoors during bad winter weather.
It was at Springfield College that he got an assignment from the head of the physical education program that fit with his existing ideas; he was told to create an indoor game that would provide “an athletic distraction,” wouldn’t take up too much room, and would help track athletes keep in shape during the winter. And, Naismith was told, “make it fair for all players and not too rough.”
Naismith approached his assignment by first analyzing the types of balls available, and thought the soccer ball was the safest because it was big and soft. Next he considered physical danger, and noticed that in existing sports, players got hurt when running with the ball. He concluded that there would be no running with the ball; you’d have to pass it to another player right away. Then he thought about the goal — that was another point at which players got hurt, so he decided to make it impossible (or at least very difficult) to guard the goals by putting them up high.
“Basketball” was very nearly “boxball” — to put his game together Naismith asked a janitor to find two boxes to be the goals. But the janitor brought two fruit baskets instead, and Naismith had the name for his new game. He wrote thirteen basic rules, and introduced the game to one of his classes in December, 1891. The students, reportedly, did not think much of it. For one thing, they ignored Naismith’s rules about no physical contact, and the first game ended up in a brawl resulting in black eyes, a separated shoulder, and one player was knocked unconscious. Naismith modified some of the rules and kept going.
The first public basketball game was played on March 12, 1892. The teams were the students versus the faculty, and the students won, five to one. Basketball games in those days were low scoring, partly because once the ball landed in a basket, somebody had to get a ladder to retrieve the ball. The bottoms hadn’t yet been removed from the baskets.
The game was getting pretty popular by 1892, and was beginning to appear in newspaper stories. There were calls to name it “Naismith ball,” but Naismith refused to allow it. The sports equipment company Spalding saw an opportunity, and contracted with Naismith to develop the official basketball rule book, which they began publishing in 1893.
Naismith himself left Springfield College in 1898 and moved to Lawrence, Kansas to become an instructor in physical education at the University of Kansas, as well as enrolling in their medical program. He became a physician and a full faculty member — but he’s most remembered there for being the school’s very first basketball coach. His record is 55 wins and 60 losses, which makes him the only losing basketball coach in the history of that school.
Naismith’s original 13 rules document survived and was auctioned in 2010. The University of Kansas made an appeal to their wealthier alumni, and one of them won the auction with a bid of over $4 million — and donated the rules to the University. You can visit the rules at the Debruce Center at the University of Kansas; it opened in 2016.
Naismith is memorialized all over the place, including the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, on several US and Canadian postage stamps, on Toronto’s Walk of Fame, and more recently, by a Google Doodle.
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