The Afternoon Basketball Was Invented

Sometime in December of eighteen ninety-one, a Canadian-born physical education instructor named James Naismith sat in his office at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield and stared at a problem his supervisor had given him fourteen days to solve. Winter had arrived. His class of eighteen young men, future YMCA secretaries, most of them, had exhausted every indoor drill available.

They were bored, and when young men in a gymnasium are bored, they become difficult. Naismith had been told to invent a game. It needed to be athletic.

It needed to be fair. It needed to work indoors. And it could not involve the physical contact that made football dangerous in a confined space.

He thought about the games he had played as a boy in Ontario, the way a well-thrown stone could arc toward a target, the satisfaction of an accurate lob. He nailed two peach baskets to the gallery railing at either end of the gym, ten feet above the floor, and wrote out thirteen rules in two hours. On December twenty-first, eighteen ninety-one, his class played the first game of basketball in recorded history.

Nine on each side. The first goal was scored by William Chase with a mid-range throw. The final score, by most accounts, was one to zero.

The game spread through the YMCA network so quickly it reached twelve countries within two years of its invention. Today the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame stands on the bank of the Connecticut River a few miles from where those first peach baskets hung. The sport it celebrates was born in this city, on a winter afternoon, because a teacher needed to keep his students busy.