The Origins of Basketball: The Christian Gift for Everyone

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American Stories. Up next, the story from Paul Puttz, who was the assistant director of Truett Seminary’s Faith and Sports Institute at Baylor University. He’s also the author of The Spirit of the Game, American Christianity, and Big Time Sports. Here he is with the unusual origin story of basketball.

00:00:34
Speaker 2: I want to take you back to that very first game of basketball. It happened in 1891 on a December day in Springfield, Massachusetts. At 11:30 a.m. that day, 18 grown men, most of them 25 years old, walked into the gym at the International Young Men’s Christian…

00:00:54
Speaker 3: …Association Training School, where they were students.

00:00:59
Speaker 2: They would have noticed two peach baskets tacked to banisters on opposite sides of the gym 10 feet off the ground. There was a soccer ball, too, and a list of 13 rules for a new game that their instructor, James Naismith, explained to them. The students divided into two teams of nine, and the game commenced. There was no dribbling, no jump shots, no dunking. Instead, the men passed the soccer ball back and forth, trying to keep it away from their opponents while angling for a chance to throw it into the basket.

00:01:32
Speaker 3: With no template for what…

00:01:34
Speaker 2: …a shot was supposed to look like, the students would position the ball at the top of their head, prepping themselves to toss it toward the basket, only to find that just when they were ready to throw the ball in, a defender would swoop in and grab it away, leaving the player to turn around in surprise. If you’ve ever tried to coach second-graders like I have, it was probably a scene like that, except with big players with beers. By the time that the class in the game had ended, just one person made a shot. The final score of the first basketball game was 1 to 0. To the students who played the game and to Naismith, however, it was a success. The students loved the thrill and challenge and creative possibilities of the game. Naismith loved those parts too, but there was something else about it that he loved. For him, it represented the very reason he was at the YMCA Training School in the first place. He enrolled in the new college out of a belief that sports and physical education could be a place for spiritual formation. On his application to the school, he was asked to describe the role that he would be training for, and he described it this way: to win men for the Master through the gym. When Naismith created basketball, then the game was part of this much larger vision inspired by his Christian faith, nurtured out of a Christian college, shaped by Christian ideas, and distributed around the world through a global Christian network. When Naismith wrote on his application that he wanted to win men for the Master through the gym, he didn’t have a vision of platform evangelism or using celebrity athletes to promote Jesus. His idea of Christian witness was about forming and shaping people to exhibit the character of Christ in their everyday lives. In sports like basketball, he thought, could be a place where that could happen. In Naismith’s day, this understanding of sport was relatively new. Naismith grew up in rural Canada. His parents both died of an illness when he was 9 years old, and so his Uncle Peter, a deeply religious Presbyterian, took him in. Peter made sure that Naismith was connected and involved with the Presbyterian Church, but when Naismith was 15, he opted out of high school. He spent some time as a lumberjack, returned to high school at age 20, and entered into college with the goal, inspired by his Uncle Peter, of becoming a Christian minister. In Naismith’s experience in the Presbyterian Church growing up, most Christians saw sports as a diversion or as a tool of the devil. They were people who read First Timothy 4:8: “for physical training is of some value, but godliness has value in all things.” And they saw in that passage mutually exclusive domains, one physical and one spiritual. The truly committed Christians in their minds would focus on spiritual tasks and vocations. After Naismith started playing football while he was a seminary student, a group of his Christian friends began meeting together to pray for his soul. But Naismith was also coming of age during a time when a new movement was taking shape in England and North America, a movement scholars have labeled muscular Christianity. There’s a lot that can be said about this complex movement. The main point I want to make today is that muscular Christians pushed back against a dualistic understanding of the world, one that pitted sacred against secular, that elevated the unseen spiritual world over the physical and the material. Muscular Christians suggested that we should see the sacred value of our physical bodies, that we should see human beings in a holistic way: mind, body, and soul intertwined. Muscular Christians could look at a verse like First Timothy 4:8, and instead of seeing mutually exclusive activities, physical training or spiritual training, they saw the potential that all things, including physical training, could provide an opportunity for training in godliness.

00:05:49
Speaker 3: It was not either-or.

00:05:52
Speaker 2: This came home for Naismith in a story he pointed to as his epiphany. It happened while he was a seminary student playing football, perhaps at the very moment that his friends were praying for his soul. During one game, in the middle of an intense moment of action, the guard to Naismith’s left lost his temper and let out a stream of curse words. At a break in action, the guard sheepishly turned to Naismith.

00:06:18
Speaker 3: “I beg your pardon. I forgot you were there,” he said.

00:06:22
Speaker 2: Naismith was surprised at first; he had never spoken out against profanity. He never mentioned it. He had been a lumberjack. He was used to coarse language. It took him some time to reflect, and then a light bulb went off. His teammate felt compelled to apologize because he respected the fact that, in Naismith’s words, “I played the game with all my might and yet held myself under control.” The teammate was responding, in other words, to the type of person Naismith was in ordinary everyday life, to the consistency and integrity of Naismith’s character displayed on and off the field. Soon after that encounter, Naismith heard about the YMCA Training School in Springfield, a new college that would train leaders who could connect sports and physical activity with Christian formation. He submitted his application, and away he went to the United States, where he created basketball, a game that Naismith hoped would provide opportunities for players to grow and develop as whole people. “The aim of basketball,” Naismith said, “is to develop the man.” Naismith believed strongly in individual expression, the freedom to try new things. He wanted basketball players to have the space to create, to be able to take the initiative. He gloried in the inventive new moves, the improvisations that players developed, like the dribble and the hook shot. He often expressed awe and wonder as he witnessed the ever advancing skill of basketball players. Over the course of his life, Naismith’s appreciation for players led him to take a more skeptical view of coaches. He understood the value of the coach, but he worried that they tended to overcoach, that they pursued victory at the expense of developing people. A coach could drill his players or her players to follow orders and win plenty of games, but this created dependence rather than independence. It turned players, Naismith warned, into cogs in a machine rather than broad and independent young men and women. As Naismith wrote in his autobiography, “Why should the play of a group of young men be entirely spoiled to further the ambitions of some coach?”

00:08:44
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Paul Puttz tell the story of basketball and its roots. And that first basketball game that Puttz described: just a lot of passing, a lot of, well, a lot of movement and running, and, for one, as and only to try and put the ball in the hoop. And how many times did it happen? Just once? The score of the first basketball game, a mere 1 to nothing. Why did he do this? What was his reasoning? Naismith said, “to win men for the Master through the gym.” He loved being at the YMCA and training young people and their bodies in a holistic way, part of what Puttz described as the muscular Christianity movement. And my goodness, that example of him on the court—who he is, who he was, and how he carried himself—compelled a fellow player to apologize for cursing on the court, and that, of course, was the point: had a best-model behavior that represented Christ. When we come back, more of this remarkable story, the story of basketball and its origins, here on our American Stories. And we continue with our American Stories and the origin story of basketball, which, of course, includes Naismith. But my goodness, we’re learning about the motivations behind Naismith’s invention, and we’re listening to Paul Puttz tell the story. Let’s pick up where he last left off.

00:10:29
Speaker 2: Naismith didn’t want to simply roll out the ball and set up a free-for-all. His favorite role in the game of basketball was not the player, certainly not the coach.

00:10:39
Speaker 3: It was the referee.

00:10:41
Speaker 2: To Naismith, the referee was the central figure creating the conditions in which moral development could occur.

00:10:47
Speaker 3: “Games,” he wrote,

00:10:49
Speaker 2: “have been called the laboratory for the development of moral attributes. But they will not in and of themselves accomplish this purpose. They must be properly conducted by competent individuals.” Few things are worse in a basketball game than a referee who makes the game about themselves. If you start paying attention to a referee, chances are something has gone wrong. The best referees are those who operate in a quiet way, whose presence is barely felt, whose service gives them no special privileges except the knowledge that they helped to create an environment in which players could experience the joy of the game and develop their potential more fully. This was especially important because Naismith designed basketball to provide intense competition without brute force. “Basketball,” Naismith said, “is personal combat without personal contact.” This requires a high degree of discipline. Players on both teams can move anywhere on the floor at any time.

00:11:51
Speaker 3: They can literally get nose to nose with…

00:11:53
Speaker 2: …their opponent, but they cannot overpower them with physical contact. The only way to enforce this is through consistent application of the rules. A well-regulated game sets the players up for both the joy of playing and the possibility of moral development. To give another example, in the 1930s, while Naismith was a professor at the University of Kansas, a student named John McLendon enrolled at the school. McLendon was an African American. He wanted to join the basketball team. He could not because at the time Kansas did not allow Black players to participate in sports. Naismith was not the basketball coach, but he was a physical education professor, and so he took McLendon under his wing.

00:12:37
Speaker 3: He mentored the young coaching prodigy.

00:12:41
Speaker 2: John McLendon would go on to become one of the most accomplished and important basketball coaches of the 20th century, thanks in part to Naismith’s mentorship. But Naismith is not the hero of this particular aspect of basketball’s story. The important thing to know is that it was never just a Christian game developed by Naismith. It was always also, from the beginning, a game influenced and shaped by a variety of people from different backgrounds in different identities. It crossed gendered lines. In 1892, a woman named Senda Berenson, serving as an instructor at a women’s college in Massachusetts, heard about this new game.

00:13:23
Speaker 3: She went to check it out.

00:13:25
Speaker 2: At the time, there was essentially no team sport deemed acceptable for women. Their opportunities to compete and play in any sport were severely limited, but Berenson saw in basketball a chance to change that. She brought the game back to her college. She developed new rules, and thanks to her efforts and many other women, it quickly became the most popular and important women’s team sport in the 20th century. As a woman, Senda Berenson was already moving the game beyond its muscular Christian origins, but she was also Jewish, and basketball quickly became a favorite sport for the Jewish community, providing the game with many of its early stars and innovators. Other faith traditions embraced basketball as well: Catholics and Latter-day Saints. Basketball crossed racial and ethnic lines too. At the time that Naismith created basketball, the YMCA was racially segregated. There were some Black YMCA chapters, but they often lacked the resources to build gym spaces where basketball could be played. With little help from the white Christians who developed basketball, African Americans had to create their own spaces to play, and they did. In New York City, Black churches played a central role in this development. They provided the gym space and sponsored some of the earliest teams, helping to build a thriving culture of Black basketball that shaped New York City and beyond. In Washington, D.C., another hub of Black basketball, Edwin E. B. Henderson, who was the key figure later nicknamed the Grandfather of Black Basketball. Henderson decided to create a Black basketball league after he was kicked out of a whites-only YMCA. Naismith supported and cheered on the efforts of Berenson, Henderson, and others.

00:15:19
Speaker 3: But he was not actively involved.

00:15:22
Speaker 2: Naismith remained a Presbyterian throughout his life, committed to the Christian faith. Basketball would not be the game we know and love today if it had not been embraced by a multitude of people across a variety of faith traditions. It is a gift released into the world for all to enjoy.

00:15:41
Speaker 3: Later in his…

00:15:42
Speaker 2: …life, when he was asked to discuss basketball’s origins, Naismith reflected on his mission in life, and here’s what he said about his life’s mission. “Way back in my college days, I was lying in bed one Sunday, in thought: ‘What is this all about? What is life about? What are you going to do? What are you going to be? What model will you hold up before you?’ I put on my wall, not in writing but in my mind, this thought: ‘I want to leave the world a little better than I found it.’ That is the motto I had then, and it is the motto I have today. That has been a mighty fine…”

00:16:22
Speaker 3: “…thing for me.”

00:16:24
Speaker 2: I’d like to close with one more story about Naismith, and this is one of my favorites.

00:16:31
Speaker 3: It happened in the 1920s, more than…

00:16:33
Speaker 2: …three decades after basketball’s creation, when Naismith stopped by a small college in Iowa. He dropped into a gym anonymously and quietly to pass the time. Two teams were set to play a pickup game, and they decided a referee was needed. One player ran over to Naismith, sitting in the bleachers, and asked if he would officiate, but before Naismith could reply, a second player interrupted, “That old man! He doesn’t know anything about basketball. Let’s get someone else.”

00:17:10
Speaker 3: “Off.”

00:17:10
Speaker 2: The players went to find a different referee. Well, Naismith smiled with a twinkle in his eye. He didn’t need people to recognize him.

00:17:20
Speaker 3: He just loved that the game was being played and enjoyed.

00:17:25
Speaker 1: And a terrific job by the production and editing by our own Greg Hengler, and his special thanks to Paul Puttz, who is the assistant director of Truett Seminary’s Faith and Sports Institute at Baylor University. He’s also the author of The Spirit of the Game, American Christianity, and Big Time Sports. And I’m a big-time hoops fan. Loved the sport. Dad coached the sport. My brother and I both were captains of our high school basketball teams. And this is so true about the nature of the sport and Naismith’s nature himself, that he gave this gift to the world. His game allowed it to be developed by many collaborators, all these ethnic groups, all the different racial composition, giving the game its own life, its own styles. Very popular with the Jews, Mormons, Blacks, whites, women, and men. It brought people together, and this was the essential Presbyterian nature of the man, the essential Christian nature of the man, and the pluralism of the sport itself. Its development hinged on that, and in the end hinged on that idea of America itself. E pluribus unum: From the many, one. And I love that closing line about his mission. “I want to leave the world a little better than I found it.” And indeed, he did. The story of basketball, its Christian roots, here on our American Stories.

00:19:21
Speaker 2: At