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James Naismith (November 6, 1861 – November 28, 1939) was a Canadian-born Presbyterian minister who is best known for inventing the game of basketball at a Springfield, Massachusetts YMCA in 1891. This interview of him is from a radio program called "We the People" and was aired on Jan. 31, 1939.
Audio has been restored and optimized for maximum clarity.
By 1892, basketball had grown so popular on campus that Dennis Horkenbach (editor-in-chief of The Triangle, the Springfield college newspaper) featured it in an article called "A New Game",and there were calls to call this new game "Naismith Ball", but Naismith refused. By 1893, basketball was introduced internationally by the YMCA movement. From Springfield, Naismith went to Denver, where he acquired a medical degree, and in 1898, he joined the University of Kansas faculty at Lawrence.
This video is made for educational purposes for fair use under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976.
Tomorrow night, 15,000 cheering fans will pack Madison Square Garden in New York City to witness
a giant basketball doubleheader. In that cheering crowd, sitting in row C, seat 11, will be a modest
77-year-old man. Those fans won't know that he made possible the game they're watching,
but you're going to meet him now. Sanger Coffee has brought him here tonight all the way from
Lawrence, Kansas. Dr. James A. Naismith, the inventor of basketball. Dr. Naismith, how did
you happen to invent basketball? Well, Mr. Heater, it was in the winter of 1891 when I was physical
instructor at Springfield College in Massachusetts. We had a real New England blizzard. For days,
the students couldn't go outdoors, so they began roughhousing in the halls. We tried everything
to keep them quiet. We tried playing a modified form of football in the gymnasium, but they got
bored with that. Something had to be done. One day, I had an idea. I called the boys to the gym,
divided them up into teams of nine, and gave them an old soccer ball. I showed them two peach baskets
I'd nailed up at each end of the gym, and I told them the idea was to throw the ball
into the opposing team's peach basket. I blew a whistle, and the first game of basketball began.
And what rules did you have for your new game, Dr. Naismith? Well, I didn't have enough, and that's
where I made my big mistake. The boys began tackling, kicking, and punching in the clinches.
They ended up in a free-for-all in the middle of the gym floor. Before I could pull them apart,
one boy was knocked out, several of them had black eyes, and one had a dislocated shoulder.
It certainly was murder. Well, after that first match, I was afraid they'd kill each other,
but they kept nagging me to let them play again, so I made up some more rules. The most important
one was that there should be no running with the ball. That stopped tackling and slugging.
We tried out the game with those rules, and we didn't have one casualty. We had a fine,
clean sport. Ten years later, basketball was being played all over the country,
and in 1936, I saw it played for the first time at the Olympic Games. And the whole thing
started with a couple of peach baskets I put up in a little gym 48 years ago.
I guess it just goes to show what you can do if you have to.
Indeed it does.
