Naismith Invents Basketball: The Game That Changed Sports

A physical education instructor needed to keep rowdy students active during a brutal Massachusetts winter, so he nailed a peach basket to the elevated running track at each end of the gymnasium and invented the most popular indoor sport on Earth. James Naismith, a 30-year-old Canadian teaching at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, had been given two weeks to create an indoor game that would hold the attention of a class described by colleagues as "incorrigible." Naismith drew up thirteen original rules, typed them on two pages, and tacked them to the gymnasium bulletin board on December 21, 1891. The first game featured nine players per side using a soccer ball, with the janitor climbing a ladder to retrieve the ball from the peach basket after every successful goal. Among the original rules: no running with the ball, no shouldering or holding opponents, and the referee served as sole judge of the ball. The first score in basketball history was made by William R. Chase with a midcourt shot in a game that ended 1-0. The YMCA network proved to be the perfect distribution system for the new sport. Within months, training school graduates carried basketball to YMCAs across the United States and then internationally. By 1893, the game had reached France, England, and China. The peach baskets gave way to iron hoops with net bags by 1893, though referees still had to poke the ball out with a long dowel until someone thought to cut the bottom of the net in 1906. Basketball today generates over $90 billion annually worldwide, with the NBA alone valued at roughly $100 billion. More than 450 million people play the sport globally. Naismith lived long enough to see basketball become an Olympic sport at the 1936 Berlin Games, where he tossed the opening tip.