Black eyes and dislocated body parts aren’t usually associated with the sport of basketball, but those were just some of the injuries sustained during the first game ever played.
In a recently-discovered radio interview from 1939 with a 77-year-old Dr. James Naismith, the inventor of basketball talked about how he first came up with the idea of the sport and how that first game unfolded.
“It was the winter of 1891 when I was physical instructor of Springfield College in Massachusetts,” Naismith said in what is believed to be the only known audio recording of him. “We had a real New England blizzard. For days the students couldn’t go outdoors, so they began rough-housing 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 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.”
During that first game, Naismith quickly discovered how violent the game was turning, so he needed to make some adjustments.
“Well I didn’t have enough [rules] and that’s where I made my big mistake,” he said. “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 sure 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.”
Naismith was born in what is now Almonte, Ontario and was a physical education instructor for most of his life, including at his alma mater, McGill University, a fact that a well-known “Canadian Heritage Minute” reinforced.
He has been immortalized by a bronze sculpture in Almonte, as well as in Springfield with the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame taking residence in the small Massachusetts town.
Naismith passed away at the age of 78 on November 28, 1939.
