History of Basketball

James Naismith: invention and early development of Basketball.
James Naismith left many diaries and interviews that explain clearly how and when he created this sport. Massachusetts had cold winters, and people wanted a game that could be played inside. Naismith was a Canadian teacher, born in Almonte, Ontario on the 16th November, 1861. Naismith was an orphan from early in his life, and his uncle led him to study Hebraism and philosophy, to train to become a priest. He graduated from McGill University, Montreal, in 1887 (it was the first graduation of eleven), but at the college he discovered sports: he played in the American football team for eight years, even when he studied at the Presbyterian College in Montreal. But he dropped out in 1890, to become a teacher at the International Young Men’s Christian Association Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts.
There, Luther Hasley Gulick, the creator of the local “Physicians Education” course, asked him to invent a new indoor game, which could be played during the cold winter. He also made it for a physical education class to play. He started work on it in December 1891. He wrote that he took some idea from other sports: when he was young, he played with his friends some kind of game in which most of the group joined. In their favorite game, “Duck on the Rock”, one boy guarded his “duck” from the stones of the others; and the fun began as the boys gathered their stray shots. It was this game that was later to play such an important part in the origin of basketball.
Naismith also knew a couple of ancient religious traditions: the Mayan po-ta-pok and the Aztec tchlatchli. Po-ta-pok was played using a full inside ball made by rubber and a ring, placed on a pole, as in the modern basketball, but vertically. Inside the ring usually there were religious symbols, and in Chichén Itzá, there is the typical image of Quetzalcoatl, one of their Gods. Dozens of players could take part. During po-ta-pok matches, injuries and even deaths were common, due to the ball's heaviness and the violence of the game. Sometimes, the losing team was supposed to be sacrificed to God. Tchlatchli was more or less the same. There is a famous anecdote about a match between the teams of Nezahualpilli, tlatoani of Texcoco, and Moctezuma II, tlatoani of Tenochtitlan (tlatoani means “ruler”). They organised the match because they didn’t agree on a prophecy about the conquest of their kingdoms by a foreign country: Nezahualpilli agreed, Moctezuma didn’t. The first one won three matches out of five, and in the same year, the Spanish army conquered their kingdoms.
On December 21, 1891, James Naismith defined a new game using five base ideas and thirteen rules. That day, he asked his class to play a match in the Armory Street court: 9 versus 9, using a soccer ball and two peach baskets. Frank Mahan, one of his students, wasn’t so happy. He just said: "Huh. Another new game". However, Naismith was the inventor of the new name: someone proposed to call it “Naismith Game”, but he suggested "We have a ball and a basket: why don’t we call it basket ball" The first eighteen players were: John J. Thompson, Eugene S. Libby, Edwin P. Ruggles, William R. Chase, T. Duncan Patton, Frank Mahan, Finlay G. MacDonald, William H. Davis and Leyman Archibald defeated George Weller, Wilbert Carey, Ernest Hildner, Raymond Kaighn, Genzabaro Ishikawa, Benjamin S. French, Franklin Barnes, George Day and Henry Gelan 1-0. The first goal was scored by Chase. There were other differences between Naismith’s first idea and the game played today. The peach baskets were closed, and balls had to be retrieved manually (using a stair). Later they cut a small hole in the bottom of the peach basket and poked the ball out using a stick. Only in 1906 were metal hoops, nets and boards introduced. Moreover, earlier the soccer ball was replaced by a Spalding ball, similar to the one used today. Finally, the players couldn’t move: they had just to pass the ball, without dribbling around or past the opponents, as is common today.
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