Basketball is a popular sport. According to recent figures, it has over 825 million fans worldwide. That’s not as many as soccer, which has a fan base of four billion! Still, 825 million is a large number and famous basketball teams make huge amounts of money every year. The New York Knicks, for example, made US$472 million in the year before COVID arrived! Given the huge sums of money and the number of fans, it is hard to believe that basketball had humble beginnings.
James Naismith was born in Canada in 1861. He moved to the U.S.A. when he was 30 years old and began working at Springfield Young Men’s Christian Association in Massachusetts. During the cold winter of his first year, he was asked to think of an activity that was interesting and easy to learn and could be played in a gym. He first thought about adapting popular sports like rugby, baseball, or soccer but found it difficult to work out how to play any of these indoors.
In December 1891, he came up with a new idea. He took a football and then found two fruit baskets. He nailed each basket three metres high at either end of the school gym. He wrote down 13 rules, which he pinned to a school noticeboard for everyone to see. Two teams of nine players took part in the first game on 21 December 1891. There were two halves of 15 minutes each. The final score was 9:30. James Naismith called his new activity ‘basket ball’.
To begin with, players were not allowed to dribble the ball. That came later. To speed the game up and make sure the play was not interrupted, it was soon decided to cut holes in the bottom of the fruit baskets. The number of players was also reduced from nine to five per side.
The word about basketball began to spread to other schools, and it was not long before a league was formed. Within 12 months, journalists started to write about basketball in their newspapers. By 1899, the first university team was created at the University of Texas.
There can be no doubt that James Naismith was proud of his creation. However, he said later that he thought wrestling and gymnastics provided a much better physical education for boys. He never made any money from ‘basket ball’ – which later became ‘basketball’ – and he continued to work in education for the rest of his life. He died in 1939, three years after he saw basketball become an official sport in the 1936 Olympic Games.
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VIDEO: James Naismith and the Invention of Basketball
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