Introduction

A New Game

You fellows have put me in a class with Abner Doubleday, who invented baseball. If basketball filled a need in the winter sports picture, I am glad, but I had nothing to do with making it grow. Honestly, I never believed that it ever would be played outside of that gymnasium in Springfield.

—JAMES NAISMITH

The year 1941 was a milestone for the game of basketball. It marked the fiftieth anniversary of the game. Celebrations were scheduled around the country with the proceeds raised to benefit a memorial to be built in Springfield, Massachusetts, the game’s birthplace. Proponents of the game felt strongly about basketball’s place in the country’s sporting landscape. “Take basketball out of the sport picture today and you would have an empty spot that nothing could fill. It is part and parcel of American life. It exudes the wholesome, healthy, free and fair competitive spirit that is one of the features of the American way of life. And it helps definitely and immeasurably in building better men and women.”1 The goal of the Golden Jubilee of Basketball was to raise funds to support a “Temple of Basketball” that “will bear the same relationship to the court game as baseball’s Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York, bears to the diamond pastime. And it will have the same commemorative significance in regard to the founder of the game as the Walter Camp Memorial at New Haven has for the father of American football.”2

The “Temple of Basketball,” as it was known, was to include a Hall of Fame, a historical museum, and a basketball court. The Naismith Memorial Committee envisioned “a permanent monument to Dr. Naismith, but in its archives will be perpetuated the names and accomplishments of the game’s foremost players, past, present and future. Deposited and safeguarded in the Temple of Basketball will be documents, curios, souvenirs and records of the sport. And enshrined each year in a suitable manner will be the names of the annual All-American basketball teams.”3

As Grantland Rice, America’s preeminent sportswriter, wrote, “No better time could exist than right now to pay homage to one who brought so much joy into the hearts of Americans without worldly benefit to himself, while elsewhere about us other men are exploiting humanity for their own selfish gains. Dr. James Naismith has taken his place among the Immortals of Sports and the idea of perpetuating his memory and his vital contributions to the American scene in the Naismith Memorial at Springfield should receive the wholehearted support of every red-blooded player and fan in the country.”4

The joy Grantland Rice associated with James Naismith and the game of basketball, however, almost did not happen.

As December 1891 approached, students and faculty at the International Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, were preparing for end-of-term examinations and making arrangements to travel home for the holiday season. Another semester was coming to a close as a typical New England winter descended on the region. Most campus-wide activities were winding down. Students and faculty alike were preparing for some time away from the demands of an academic semester.

One room above the gymnasium, however, was bright with activity. James Naismith, a thirty-year-old faculty member, who the previous year was a student, was obsessed with finishing an assignment for his boss, Luther Gulick, head of the school’s physical education department. The task before him was to create a new indoor game “that would be interesting, easy to learn, and easy to play in the winter and by artificial light.”5

This assignment had formed the basis of a new course in psychology that Gulick offered for the first time in the fall of 1891. This seminar on psychology discussed a number of topics related to physical education. The class was composed of faculty members who also taught the regular student body, including the class of YMCA secretaries that was the subject of Naismith’s assignment. Of particular importance was the need to find a new game that these students could engage in during the winter months. Winter sports in the 1880s were largely confined to gymnastics. The Swedish, German, and French variations of gymnastics had all been tried but more often had left the students bored and unsatisfied. The monotony of gymnastic work could not compare to the high energy of football, lacrosse, and baseball, all of which the students played with great enthusiasm the rest of the year. Gulick’s class began tackling the problem of finding a new game to be played by the students in the winter. This particular issue engaged everyone and quickly became the central focus of the class. Midway through the semester, one class period centered on the theme of inventions, and Gulick challenged his class when he said, “There is nothing new under the sun. All so-called things are recombinations of factors of things that are now in existence.”6

The comment piqued the interest of the students, particularly Naismith, who replied, “Doctor, if that is so, we can invent a new game that will meet our needs. All that we have to do is to take the factors of our known game and recombine them, and we will have the game we are looking for.”7 Naismith’s response spurred Gulick’s thinking, and he asked his students, all of whom were on the faculty—F. N. Seerley, Robert A. Clark, A. T. Halstead, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and Naismith—to each come up with an idea for a new game by the next class.

When the class reconvened the following week, however, not one new idea was forthcoming. Busy with their teaching assignments, none of the faculty members had any time to think of a new game. With the winter sports season soon approaching, Gulick realized that this problem needed to be addressed quickly so he assigned Halstead to the class of secretaries, the one class that had expressed its dislike for the current makeup of the winter sports activities. An expert in marching and calisthenics, Halstead focused on these activities with the class. After one week, he was completely discouraged by the students’ response and requested a new class.

Gulick then assigned Clark to the task, hoping that he could find a more successful way to inspire the students with some form of physical activity. A gymnast by training and according to Naismith the best athlete on the faculty, Clark discarded the marching and calisthenics championed by Halstead and focused on apparatus work, his specialty. Again, the class was less than enthused. In reporting back to his colleagues the next week, he observed, “The difficulty is, with that particular group of men what we want is recreative work; something that will please them and something they will want to do.”8 Reflecting on this many years later, Naismith wrote, “Try as hard as he could, he [Clark] could arouse little enthusiasm for this kind of work.”9

In class the following week, a despondent group of faculty members sat trying to figure out a solution. Looking again to spur discussion, Naismith said, “The trouble is not with the men but with the system we are using. The kind of work for this particular class should be of a recreative nature, something that would appeal to their play instincts.”10

Naismith’s comments challenged his colleagues, who sat quietly until Gulick broke the silence. Quickly, he turned and said, “Naismith, I want you to take that class and see what you can do with it.”11 Naismith was speechless. His comments were meant to encourage his classmates to find a solution, not to be an invitation for a new assignment. Naismith was disheartened by the turn of events, and in a speech given in 1932 at Springfield College, he vividly recalled that fateful day when the responsibility of that class fell to him.

“If I ever tried to back out of anything, I did then. I did not want to do it. I had charge of a group interested in boxing, wrestling, fencing, and swimming and I was perfectly satisfied with my work. Dr. Gulick said he wanted me to do it. I had to do it or get out and I felt pretty sore about it. I thought Dr. Gulick had imposed on me by giving me something I did not want to do and compelling me to do it. As we walked down along the hall, talking about it, he said, ‘Naismith, this would be a good time for you to invent that new game you said you could.’ I closed my fist, and looked at Dr. Gulick’s face for a spot to plant my fist, but I saw a peculiar twinkle in his eye which seemed to say ‘put up or shut up.’”12

Faced with this new challenge and two weeks to solve the problem, Naismith retreated to his office above the gymnasium. He reflected back on his childhood in Canada, and the games he played as a youth.

A common misconception has developed over the years that an American invented basketball. To the contrary, Naismith was Canadian, born in Almonte, Ontario, on November 6, 1861. The second of three children, he lived with his family on Grand Calumet Island on the banks of the Ottawa River, where his father owned a sawmill. Tragedy struck in 1870 as a typhoid epidemic claimed the lives of his parents. His father died first, and three weeks later his mother passed away on his ninth birthday. Orphaned, Naismith; his sister, Annie; and their brother, Robert, moved into the home of their grandmother and their uncle Pete in a farm area between Bennie’s Corner and Almonte.

Growing up, Naismith was known for his strength and spent much of his time outdoors, working in the wilderness, shocking grain, and riding horses. As his grandson Stuart recalled in a 2000 interview, “One time the Mississippi River was frozen over and he thought the ice was strong enough to cross. It was not and the horse foundered and went through the ice. He worked and finally got the horse out of the water. When he was finished, he saw his Uncle Pete watching, who said, ‘He got himself into that pickle and he will have to get himself out.’ And he did. That was the type of childhood my grandfather had.”13

Midway through high school, Naismith dropped out to help support his uncle and siblings. He worked for several years but eventually returned to school to complete his education. After high school Naismith enrolled at McGill University in Montreal, where he studied for the ministry. Studious about his professional pursuit, he spent all his time studying until one day a fellow classmate approached him to comment, “Naismith, we have been watching you for some time, and we see that you never take part in any of the activities. You spend too much time with your books.”14

Soon enough Naismith was in the gymnasium, playing tumbling, soccer, lacrosse, and fencing. He also joined the football team. One day during practice the guard next to Naismith encountered a difficult situation and started swearing. Recognizing that Naismith was next to him, he stopped and said, “I beg your pardon, Jim; I forgot you were there.”15 Startled, Naismith continued practicing, but the exchange was not far from his mind. As his grandson Stuart noted, “He realized that sportsmanship was not isolated from a Godly life and decided that he was going to do both.”16 This incident, as Naismith correctly noted, changed his “career from the profession of the ministry to that of athletics.”17 It was this duality of academics and athletics, sports and clean living that eventually became the primary intellectual pursuit in his life. For the next fifty years, physical education became the central tenet of his life’s work.

Naismith graduated from McGill in 1887 but elected to stay on as a physical instructor. He began studying theology at nearby Presbyterian College, where he received his degree in 1890. Although he enjoyed studying religion, Naismith was becoming more interested in finding a way to merge physical education and Christianity, convinced that the two could coexist.

At the time the only school in North America to offer a program that trained physical education instructors was the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts. In the fall of 1890 Naismith traveled to Springfield to begin his studies. Upon his arrival, he met his professor, Luther Halsey Gulick, a man who would have a profound impact on his life as well as on the emerging physical education movement in this country.

Born to Congregationalist missionaries in Honolulu, Hawaii, on December 4, 1865, a few months after the conclusion of the Civil War, Luther was the fifth of seven children. For the first fifteen years of his life, he and his siblings lived in Hawaii, Spain, Italy, and Japan. His life on the move would come to characterize his own professional development and the rapidly changing fabric of the country.

After returning to the United States with his family in 1880, Gulick began his formal education. For the next two years, he was enrolled in the preparatory department at Oberlin College in Ohio. He later attended Hanover High School in Hanover, New Hampshire, and then returned to Oberlin, where he entered college to study physical education, a subject that he would have an immense influence on in the years to come. He left school a little more than a year later due to illness and eventually matriculated at the Sargent School of Physical Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After a brief stay there, he was again on the move and left to pursue a medical degree at the City College of New York, where he graduated in 1889.

Since he first studied physical education as a college student, the subject, though still in its infancy, had continued to fascinate him. As a medical student, he took a job as the director of physical education of the YMCA in Jackson, Michigan. He joined the Young Men’s Christian Association Training School in 1887 as head of the gymnastics department.

When Gulick arrived at Springfield, the School for Christian Workers, as it was known then, was in its second year. Prior to opening in 1885, the school had issued a statement declaring its purpose, which said in part, “There has been developed a pressing and growing demand for men qualified to enter the various fields of Christian work now open to laymen. The demand is especially pressing for men fitted to be secretaries of Young Men’s Christian Associations, superintendents of Sunday-schools, and helpers of pastors in mission work and in the general work of the church.”18

With this charge of training future YMCA secretaries, the faculty developed a course of study designed to meet this challenge. Among the courses offered were The Bible, The Outlines of Evangelical Theology, The History of Evangelical Christianity, Christian Ethics, and The Lives of Eminent Christians.19 The YMCA became the primary vehicle for training men to uphold and pass along these values.

The YMCA was founded in England in 1844 and eventually was transplanted to the United States in the years prior to the Civil War. Its original purpose rested in providing spiritual guidance and physical help to the burgeoning group of young men who relocated to the industrial cities in the Northeast and the Midwest. After the Civil War a fundamental shift occurred in the YMCA. Rather than providing a haven for newly arrived young men, it began offering programs in physical activity such as gymnastics and calisthenics. Young men who worked in business or clerical positions joined their local YMCA and during lunch breaks or after work took classes in “physical culture.” The not-so-subtle message was to encourage a more “muscular Christianity.”

In the post–Civil War era American Protestants believed that society was becoming too feminine, steeped in Victorian values of humility and weakness. In its place this group of evangelical Protestants advocated a form of Christianity that viewed Jesus as an athlete and a fighter. The “strenuous life,” later championed by Theodore Roosevelt, was promoted by these Christians, who believed in a new Christianity that stressed physical activity, character building, and a new manliness. The concept that sports can build a good Christian character became a central premise of muscular Christianity.

By the 1890s the YMCA had become the foremost proponent of muscular Christianity in America. The Progressive Era, which lasted from 1880 to 1920, witnessed one of the largest upsurges in recreation and emphasis on physical activity that the country had ever witnessed. Due to the increasingly sedentary nature of work, Americans sought more physical activities. Gymnastics, bicycling, and other forms of outdoor activity became hugely popular.

With Gulick at the helm, the YMCA Training School in Springfield was at the forefront of responding to this change. Believing that a person’s spiritual life develops equally from the mind and the body, Gulick invented the YMCA emblem, the inverted triangle, still in use today, that symbolizes the spiritual supported by the mental and the physical. In an article Gulick wrote about physical education at the YMCA, he made a strong case for the importance of activity to other aspects of a healthy life. “The object of our organization is to develop perfect men and we hold that the perfect man is one with his physical nature, healthy, strong, evenly developed and well disciplined; his spiritual nature strong, well balanced and trained. Either quality absent in either nature renders the individual less of a man. Each nature is an essential part of the man himself. Thus we believe that physical education is important not merely because it is necessary in order to perfect intellectual and spiritual manhood, but because the physical is in itself a part of the essential ‘ego.’” He later concluded, “Our endeavor is for true symmetry, not merely symmetry of body, symmetry of mind, symmetry of soul, but symmetry of these symmetries, a symmetry of body with mind with soul.”20

Gulick introduced sports into the YMCA, and his focus on play and activities ushered in the largest boys’ sports movement the country had ever seen. His pioneering course on the psychology of play that challenged his faculty to invent new games to be played indoors reinforced this effort. The first faculty member to understand and successfully respond to this challenge was James Naismith.

With two weeks before him, Naismith set out to solve the problem of this “class of incorrigibles,” as this group of YMCA secretary students was deemed by the faculty. The class was tough, and though they had already been through two instructors, Naismith certainly sympathized with them. “I felt that if I were in their place, I would probably have done all I could to get rid of the obnoxious requirements.” “No problems arose so long as we could get out of doors for exercise, but when Winter came, my worries began.”21 As he recalled in January 1939, “Those boys simply would not play drop the handkerchief.”22 Putting aside any reservations he may have had, Naismith forged ahead with his task.

Immediately, he laid aside the heavy gymnastic equipment and tried popular games of the era such as Three Deep and Sailor’s Tag. Both games he soon discovered appealed for ten to fifteen minutes but could not sustain interest for an entire class period. He then turned to some recently introduced games including Battle-Ball and two games developed by Gulick, “one a modification of ante-over with a medicine ball and the other a modification of cricket.”23 These, too, proved unsuccessful.

Modifying a few of the popular outdoor games became his next course of action. He started with football and attempted to eliminate as much of the roughness as possible. He asked his students to alter the tackling style from below to above the hips. From the outset, this proved a disaster; as Naismith noted years later, “To ask these men to handle their opponents gently was to make their favorite sport a laughing stock, and they would have nothing of it.”24 Next up for Naismith was soccer. He thought that playing soccer indoors with soft-soled shoes would force the students to “use caution in kicking the ball.”25 Nothing was further from the truth, for students were accustomed to hitting the ball as hard as they could. Naismith recalled, “As a result of this, many of them went limping off the floor; instead of an indoor soccer game, we had a practical lesson in first aid. I had pinned my hopes on these two games, and when they failed me, there seemed little chance of success. Each attempt was becoming more difficult.”26

Finally, Naismith considered lacrosse, another popular game of the day and one in which he starred for the semiprofessional Montreal Shamrocks while a student at McGill. His hope was to modify the lacrosse stick, but as he wrote years later, this too was an abject failure. “In the group there were seven Canadians; and when these men put into practice some of the tricks they had been taught in the outdoor game, football and soccer appeared tame in comparison. No bones were broken in the game, but faces were scarred and hands were hacked. Those who had never played the game were unfortunate, for it was these men to whom the flying crosses did the most damage. The beginners were injured and the experts were disgusted; another game went into the discard.”27

After trying all he could to engage the class in some form of athletic activity, Naismith was left without any answers. No new ideas. No popular game that he could modify. Nothing. Instead of trying something new, he left the students to their own devices, letting them do whatever they wanted. He stood off to the side, discouraged that none of his ideas and good intentions had worked. As the class period ended, Naismith watched as the class went to change in the locker room. He felt as if he had failed.

He later described the aftermath of that class: “With weary footsteps I mounted the flight of narrow stairs that led to my office directly over the locker room. I slumped down in my chair, my head in my hands and my elbows on the desk. I was a thoroughly disheartened and discouraged young instructor. Below me, I could hear the boys in the locker room having a good time; they were giving expression to the very spirit that I had tried so hard to evoke.”28

Despite this discouragement, Naismith was willing to give it one more try. That night he sat at his desk and methodically analyzed each game. He thought back to the comment he had made in the seminar months earlier: “All that we have to do is to take the factors of our known game and recombine them, and we will have the game we are looking for.”29 Slowly tapping his pencil to the paper, Naismith let his mind wonder back through all the games played and tested over the past two weeks. “As I sat there at my desk, I began to study games from the philosophical side. I had been taking one game at a time and had failed to find what I was looking for. This time I would take games as a whole and study them.”30

Using a holistic approach, Naismith soon found the answers he was looking for. First, he asked himself, what do all team sports have? He realized that all of them incorporated a ball, either a small one or a large one. Small balls used in games like baseball, lacrosse, and hockey needed some form of an implement such as a bat or stick. He thought this would be too much of an obstacle for indoor play, so instead he thought of games that used a large ball.

American rugby, the most popular game of the Gilded Age, was one that Naismith was quite familiar with. He asked himself why this game was not played indoors. The answer: it was too rough. The only way to stop a player running with the ball was to tackle him. “If he can’t run with the ball, we don’t have to tackle; and if we don’t have to tackle, the roughness will be eliminated,” Naismith mused. “I can still recall how I snapped my fingers and shouted I’ve got it!”31

Eliminating the tackling was Naismith’s first big revelation. He had the outlines of the first part of the game: “In my mind, I was still sticking to the traditions of the older games, especially football. In this new game, however, the player with the ball could not advance. So far, I had a game that was played with a large light ball; the players could not run with the ball, but must pass it or bat it with the hands; and the pass could be in any direction.”32

His final task was to create an objective. For this, he harkened back to his youth in Bennie’s Corner and a game, Duck on the Rock, that he played there. As Naismith described it, “We found a rock two feet high and two feet across. Each one took a stone about the size of his fist. One put his stone on the rock and the rest of us got behind a line and tried to knock it off. We would throw stones as hard as we could at his and if we happened to hit it, it was all right, but if we missed it, we went way down. Once in a while we threw the ball in such a way that it would knock [the other player’s] off and come back again and we would walk up and get it.”33 Naismith, in remembering his childhood game, had found the answer: a game in which players tossed a ball at a vertical goal, based on accuracy and not roughness.

The next day Naismith, hoping that this new game would be the answer, entered the gym several hours before the class arrived. He carried with him a soccer ball but realized that he still needed two goals for the students to toss the ball at.

“As I walked down the hall, I met Mr. Stebbins the superintendent of buildings,” Naismith wrote years later in Basketball: Its Origin and Development. “I asked him if he had two boxes about eighteen inches square. Stebbins thought a minute, and then said: “‘No, I haven’t any boxes, but I’ll tell you what I do have. I have two old peach baskets down in the store room, if they will do you any good.’”

Naismith took him up on the offer. “I told him to bring them up, and a few minutes later he appeared with the two baskets tucked under his arm. They were round and somewhat larger at the top than at the bottom. I found a hammer and some nails and tacked the baskets to the lower rail of the balcony, one at either end of the gym.”34

Once this task was completed, Naismith retreated briefly to his office to write the rules. After about an hour, he came back downstairs and handed them to Mrs. Lyons, the secretary, to type up and post outside for the students. The original thirteen rules state:

1. The ball may be thrown in any direction with one or both hands.

2. The ball may be batted in any direction with one or both hands (never with a fist).

3. A player cannot run with the ball. The player must throw it from the spot on which he catches it, allowance to be made for a man who catches the ball when running if he tries to stop it.

4. The ball must be held by the hands. The arms or the body must not be used for holding it.

5. No shouldering, holding, pushing, tripping, or striking in any way the person of an opponent shall be allowed; the first infringement of this rule by any player shall count as a foul, the second shall disqualify him until the next goal is made, or, if there was evident intent to injure the person, for the whole of the game, no substitute allowed.

6. A foul is striking at the ball with the fist, violation of Rules 3, 4, and such as described in Rule 5.

7. If either side makes three consecutive fouls it shall count as a goal for the opponents (consecutive means without the opponents in the meantime making a foul).

8. A goal shall be made when the ball is thrown or batted from the grounds into the basket and stays there, providing those defending the goal do not touch or disturb the goal. If the ball rests on the edges and the opponent moves the basket, it shall count as a goal.

9. When the ball goes out of bounds, it shall be thrown into the field of play by the person first touching it. He has a right to hold it unmolested for five seconds. In case of a dispute the umpire shall throw it straight into the field. The thrower-in is allowed five seconds; if he holds it longer it shall go to the opponent. If any side persists in delaying the game the umpire shall call a foul on that side.

10. The umpire shall be the judge of the men and shall note the fouls and notify the referee when three consecutive fouls have been made. He shall have the power to disqualify men according to Rule 5.

11. The referee shall be the judge of the ball and shall decide when the ball is in play, in bounds, to which side it belongs, and shall keep the time. He shall decide when a goal has been made and keep accounts of the goals, with any other duties that are usually performed by a referee.

12. The time shall be two fifteen-minute halves, with five minutes rest between.

13. The side making the most goals in that time shall be declared the winner. In the case of a draw the game may, by agreement of the captains, be continued until another goal is made.

Once the rules were posted and the two peach baskets affixed on the top of the balcony of the running track, Naismith took the soccer ball and went inside the gym. He nervously awaited the students’ arrival and hoped that this game would finally end the trouble with this class. This was his last idea. If the class did not take to this game, he would be forced to tell Gulick that his ideas had not worked.

At 11:30 that morning, shortly before the lunch hour, the class arrived wearing the standard gray pants and matching sweatshirts typical of physical education classes at the time. As they viewed the two baskets and read the rules, grumbles passed among the students. “Huh! Another new game!”35 “Just try this one game,” Naismith pleaded. “If you don’t like it, I promise I won’t try to invent another one.” Without any further delays, the first game began.

“There were 18 in the class,” Naismith wrote years later. “I selected two captains and had them choose sides. I placed the men on the floor. There were three forwards, three centers, and three backs on each team. I chose two of the center men to jump, then threw the ball between them. It was the start of the first basketball game and the finish of trouble with that class.”36

The class played the entire period, and by all accounts everyone enjoyed the new activity. William R. Chase, of New Bedford, Massachusetts, made the first and only basket. The final score was 1–0.

That first game was a crude predecessor of the game as it is played today. Rough and awkward, it more resembled a game of keep away than it did basketball. Ernest Hildner was a member of that first class. In December 1966, nearly seventy-five years after that first game, Hildner gave the most complete and possibly only interview that has survived regarding that historic game. The interview, which was taped on cassette, has been stored in a box at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, in Springfield, undisturbed for more than twenty years until I listened to it. Although the years may have dimmed his memory, Hildner’s recollections offer insight into the primitive nature of the game and a testament to the appeal generated by this new activity.

“Jimmy picked the sides, and he said there are so many people and we’ll divide the class in half,” Hildner recalled in the interview.

He said the object of the game is to pass the ball and get it in the other fellow’s basket. We began playing basketball, and there were about fourteen fellows on each side, and the gym was so small it would not hold them all. So he threw out the ball and said go to it fellows. And that was it.

Fig. 1. James Naismith and the first team played the first game of basketball in December 1891 at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts. Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

There was no time in the game. Nothing. If you could just understand how absolutely everything was gathered around how one side was shoving the ball one way and the other side was shoving the ball the other way. There was so many men that they could not operate. The gym was too small. They couldn’t find a place to land.

We passed the ball back and forth. That is all there was for a while. We played this game of one side throwing the other side and the other side throwing the other side. It wasn’t very pleasant.

It was just one side against the other side and smash in to the other guy. The other guy would try to pass it, and he would get caught and someone would grab him. It was just a game of throwing that ball so as to get it in the other fellow’s basket.37

One of Hildner’s classmates that first day was Ray Kaighn, a Philadelphia native, who sixty-eight years after that first game, also recalled some of the details in an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer. “We used a soccer ball. Just as the players of today, the players then all wanted to shoot. We were all tired of Swedish calisthenics. We wanted a winter sport with the excitement of football but without its danger.”38 It appeared that they had found what they were looking for.

After the invention of basketball, Naismith and Gulick worked together for a few more years before Naismith moved to Colorado. Gulick, meanwhile, stayed at Springfield until 1903. During those years, he continued as the head of the gymnastics department, while also serving as an international secretary for the physical training department at the YMCA. He also acted as the secretary for the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education.

When he departed Springfield in 1903, Gulick entered a period of his life that contributed greatly to his legacy, one in which he further developed his ideas of play and physical education. He moved to New York City, where he became the first director of physical education for the city public schools. He became involved in many related issues, including chairing the Physical Education Training Lecture Committee of the St. Louis Exposition in 1904 and serving as a member of the U.S. Olympic Committee for 1906 (Athens) and 1908 (London). He taught, lectured, consulted, and wrote a number of books, many of which became required reading for students of physical education and hygiene.

Gulick was a founding member of the Boys Scouts of America and, together with his wife, founded the Campfire Girls. In the later years of his life, he was quite active and founded a number of other organizations, including the American Folk Dance Society and the Playground Association. In 1918, toward the end of World War I, he served as chairman of the YMCA’s International Committee on Physical Recreation of the War Work Council. In that capacity he traveled to France and interviewed serviceman about sex hygiene and their moral and physical well-being. He died later that year at the age of fifty-three.

From the moment Naismith threw up the first ball, basketball’s newness earned it an expanding group of admirers. Its popularity spread so fast that within weeks the game was played in YMCAs across the country. Naismith’s first game, the one he introduced to his students, is often credited with being on December 21, 1891, days before the Christmas break. Armed with this new indoor game and a growing sense of curiosity, the “eighteen incorrigibles” brought it with them to their hometown YMCAs. Writing an article in The Rotarian in January 1939, less than a year before his death, Naismith noted, “The prospective leaders of youth, in schools at Springfield, found this game interesting, and they took it with them as they spread their tasks as YMCA secretaries through the United States, or became missionaries in other lands.”39

The first official game occurred in March 1892, between “the teachers of the International Young Men’s Christian Association training school and the students.” More than two hundred spectators watched that game. They included Naismith, Gulick, and Stagg among others. “The teachers worked hard and performed wonders of agility and strength, but were not ‘in it’ with the students, who had the advantage in science, and the score at the end was 5–1 in favor of the latter.”40 The most noteworthy figure was Amos Alonzo Stagg. “The most conspicuous figure on the floor was Stagg, in the blue Yale uniform, who managed to have a hand in every scrimmage. His football training hampered him, and he was perpetually making fouls by shoving his opponents. He managed, however, to score the only goal that the instructors made.”41

By April 1892, this new game of basketball had made its way into the New York Times. On April 26, 1892, the Times wrote a four-paragraph article under the header “A New Game of Ball: A Substitute for Football without Its Rough Features.” The articles notes, “The game is played with an ordinary association football, and the object of each team is to get the ball into its opponent’s goal. The top of the basket is about nine feet above the ground, and a ladder is necessary to take the ball out after a goal has been made. When a player gets the ball he is not allowed to run with it, but must stand and pass it to some other member of his own team within fifteen seconds after he touches it.”42 The Times observed that “a match was played between the Twenty-third Street Branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association and a team composed of members of the Students’ Club. The students won by a score of 1 to 0.”43

In October 1892, ten months after the game’s inauspicious beginnings, a friend of Naismith’s wrote, “It is doubtful whether a gymnastic game has ever spread so rapidly over the continent as has ‘basketball.’ It is played from New York to San Francisco and from Maine to Texas, by hundreds of teams in associations, athletic clubs, and schools.”44 Indeed, the game’s instant popularity has been unmatched in the history of sport.

Within a few years many colleges across the country supported basketball teams that competed against YMCAs and other college squads. Naismith’s fellow instructor and friend, Amos Alonzo Stagg, left the International YMCA Training School in 1892 to become the first athletic director at the University of Chicago. Naturally, he brought the game with him, and shortly thereafter basketball was added to the athletic schedule.

Charles O. Bemies, a student at Springfield, was captivated by the game. In 1892 he left Springfield and became the athletic director and football coach at Geneva College, in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. When he arrived in western Pennsylvania, so too did the game of basketball. In April 1893 Geneva played its first game against the New Brighton YMCA. In the team’s only game that year, it defeated New Brighton 3–0.

In 1893, less than two years after Naismith invented the game, YMCAs across the country had formed basketball leagues. Colleges started introducing the game at roughly the same time as the YMCA. The University of Iowa began playing in 1893, and Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, played its first game against the Minneapolis YMCA that same year. Played in the basement of the Science Building at Hamline with nine-foot ceilings, the local YMCA defeated Hamline 13–12. Also that year Vanderbilt University defeated a team from the Nashville YMCA 9–6. As the middle of the decade approached, the game was becoming more widespread in the collegiate ranks. On February 9, 1895, the Minneapolis State College of Agriculture defeated Hamline 9–3 in what is believed to be the first intercollegiate game.

By the end of the nineteenth century, basketball was being played in fifteen different countries. YMCA students who were sent to foreign YMCAs introduced the game, helping to introduce basketball to China, Japan, and India as well as to Canada and other countries. What started as a class assignment was now a popular new game spreading to all parts of the globe.

While the game was being introduced to all parts of the globe, it was gaining popularity in the states. A mere seven years after the game was invented, a professional basketball league was founded that paid players to play the game. The National Basketball League debuted in 1898–99, and although the moniker suggests it encompassed teams nationwide, that was hardly the case. Early professional basketball had its strongest roots in the Trenton-Philadelphia corridor. Many of the early professional leagues were based in that general vicinity, and the National Basketball League of 1898–99 was no different. That first league had six teams—three based in Trenton, Millville, and Camden, New Jersey, and three in Philadelphia and Germantown. The Philadelphia Clover Wheelman, the Germantown Nationals, and the Hancock AA all dropped out, leaving the first official professional title to be contested among the three New Jersey teams. The Trenton Nationals claimed the inaugural championship, sporting an 18-2-1 record.

Despite the uncertainty of the three teams dropping out, the National Basketball League returned for its sophomore season and continued play for five seasons until the 1902–3 season concluded. In Philadelphia the Philadelphia Basketball League replaced the National Basketball League and lasted for six seasons, from 1902–3 to 1908–9. After that the Eastern League became the most successful of the early professional basketball leagues, enjoying the longest tenure among them. From 1909–10 to 1932–33 the Eastern League became the most stable league of the game’s early years.

Professional basketball, though, was not confined to the Trenton-Philadelphia corridor. Soon the game spread through New England and New York State. Leagues such as the New England Basketball League, the Western Massachusetts Basketball League, the New England Basketball Association, the Western Pennsylvania Basketball League, the Central Basketball League, the New York State League, the Pennsylvania State League, the Interstate League, the Metropolitan Basketball League, and the Connecticut State League all came and went, helping to spread the game’s emerging popularity. Many of the early pioneers of the game and future members of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, including Ed Watcher, Barney Sedran, and Max Friedman, all made a name for themselves in these early leagues.

It was not until 1925–26, though, that the first major attempt to create a national basketball league was attempted. The American Basketball League (ABL) lasted six seasons from 1925–26 to 1930–31 before the effects of the Great Depression caused the commissioner, John J. O’Brien, to suspend operations. Prior to that, however, the league was successful, and franchises stretched from the East Coast to Chicago. Teams were located in Philadelphia, Chicago, Rochester, Brooklyn, Washington DC, Cleveland, Detroit, Fort Wayne, and Toledo. The league made an impact, including forcing all players to sign exclusive contracts. As Robert Peterson, author of Cages to Jump Shots: Pro Basketball’s Early Years, notes, “The advent of the American Basketball League spelled doom for the old professional basketball game because the new league adopted AAU rules almost in toto. Cages and the double dribble were outlawed in the ABL. Henceforth the professional game would gradually become faster and depend less on bulk and strength and more on speed, agility, and cleverness.”45 The league enjoyed success, including the participation of the Original Celtics, the game’s first great professional team. The league, however, could not withstand the effects of the Great Depression, and after the conclusion of the 1930–31 season, it suspended operation.

When the league resumed in 1933–34, it was no longer national in scope but rather a regional league concentrated in the New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania area. Teams that first season were located in Trenton, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Newark, Hoboken, and New Britain. During the 1930s the ABL was the premier professional basketball league in the country. The Philadelphia SPHAS, an all-Jewish squad, dominated league play and captured seven titles in thirteen seasons. Soon the ABL would have competition from the National Basketball League (NBL), which began as the Midwest Basketball Conference in 1935–36. By 1937–38, the NBL was poised as a strong midwestern circuit, with teams in Akron, Buffalo, Oshkosh, Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, and Dayton. The NBL eventually overtook the ABL in prestige and popularity, but until then basketball had two professional circuits as the 1930s came to a close.

At the start of the 1939–40 basketball season, the game lost its founder. On November 28, 1939, with the Thanksgiving holiday past and the 1939–40 season just under way, newspapers and radios across the country reported that James Naismith, the game’s founder, had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was seventy-eight years old. The New York Times, in its obituary, noted that more than twenty million people were now playing the game worldwide. “The fast, sprightly, colorful basketball of today, enjoyed in many lands by the young of both sexes in college, school, club, association and society gymnasiums and on professional courts, bears at least the same resemblance to the early game as that of a modern airliner to the Wright brothers’ first ‘flying machine.’ The father of basketball had the distinction of originating the only major sport created in the United States.”46

After inventing the game of basketball in December 1891, Naismith had continued to teach at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield until 1895. Initially, he stayed involved with the game, printing its rules, first in 1892 with Rules for Basket Ball. Gulick joined Naismith, and the two collaborated on printing the rules for two years before Naismith left Springfield. After he left, he had virtually no contact with the game, its development, or advancing the rules and regulations. His sole interest was in collecting foreign editions of the printed rules of the game.

Seeking to tackle another challenge in his life, Naismith, his wife, Maude, and their young family left Western Massachusetts and headed for Denver, where he enrolled at Gross Medical College. While earning his medical degree, the father of basketball continued his association with the YMCA movement, serving as physical education director at the Denver YMCA. “While in Denver, he experienced a terrible tragedy,” his grandson Stuart Naismith recounted. “He was spotting a young lad in gymnastics, and the child fell and broke his neck and later died. My grandfather was heartbroken. It was one of the great tragedies of his life.”47

In 1898 Naismith joined the faculty at the University of Kansas in Lawrence as a professor of physical education and university chaplain, but he never practiced medicine. He would remain there until his death in 1939. As one would expect, Naismith became the school’s first basketball coach. He compiled a 55-60 career record, the only coach in school history to have a losing record. As the game spread and grew in popularity in the ensuing decades after it was invented, Naismith seemed to have little interest in the game. He played it twice, once in 1892 shortly after inventing it and then in 1898 after arriving at Kansas. By his own admission, he “just didn’t get around to playing.”48 The two times he did play, he remembered committing a number of fouls. “I guess my early training in wrestling, boxing and football was too much for me,” he later reflected. “My reflexes made me hold my opponents. Once I even used a grapevine wrestling clamp on a man who was too big for me to handle.”49

He was humble about the recognition he received and often remarked that he did not deserve all the attention that had been bestowed on him. “You fellows have put me in a class with Abner Doubleday, who invented baseball. If basketball filled a need in the winter sports picture, I am glad, but I had nothing to do with making it grow. Honestly, I never believed that it ever would be played outside of that gymnasium in Springfield.”50

Basketball to him was just one episode in a long series of career choices designed to improve how people lived their lives, physically and socially. His sole interest lay in counseling students. When one of his students, Forrest “Phog” Allen, told Naismith he was going to accept a job coaching basketball at Baker University, also in Kansas, Naismith quipped, “Why, you can’t coach basketball, you just play it.”51 Allen later became one of the most successful coaches in college basketball history.

As Naismith’s grandson, Stuart, recalled, “He looked upon basketball as a game to play, get physical exercise and to gain skills.”52 During his long-tenured career in Lawrence, Naismith counseled many students on life lessons and never strayed far from his Springfield teachings of “a sound mind is a sound body.” John McLendon, one his students at Kansas and later a pioneer African American Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame coach, summed up Naismith’s philosophy: “Naismith believed you can do as much toward helping people become better people, teaching them the lessons of life through athletics than you can through preaching.”53

Despite the passing of Naismith, the game was healthy as it embarked on its next fifty years. The American Basketball League and the National Basketball League both vied for the game’s best collegiate talent. Basketball was played in the 1936 Olympics, and the United States was victorious. In a span of two years (1938–39), the National Invitation Tournament (NIT), the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournament, and the World Professional Basketball Tournament in Chicago were all founded. These three tournaments brought together teams from across the country and soon spread the game’s popularity. As the 1941–42 season loomed on the horizon, basketball had much to look forward to.