IN a modern world where all that is solid melts into air, there’s something intriguing about a cultural invention that persists for nearly a century and half, currently at the peak of its popularity.
Even more intriguing, for a sport so closely identified with black America and diverse participation, is to consider who devised it, and why.
This is the story of James Naismith, inventor of the game of basketball in a Massachusetts Young Man’s Christian Association (YMCA) hall, on December 21, 1891. Canadian-born, but utterly shaped by his Scottish roots and the émigré culture of his upbringing.
That’s the claim made this week by a young scholar, and former Scotland national team player, Stirling University’s Ross Walker. His paper – James Naismith: The Creation Of Basketball And The Scottish Connection – painstakingly evidences Naismith’s powerful Scots identity.
But Walker also links that to the “muscular Christianity” and “rational recreations” invented by reformers in the mid-to-late 19th century in the UK, the US and Europe.
How many of our major sports were originally training grounds for the exercise of empire – whether to improve the performance of elites, or regulate the unruly passions of the masses?
Naismith’s own account of inventing basketball sits right at the heart of these queries. You can hear his Scots vowels breaking through (“uh-posing teem”) on a 1939 radio interview, easily available on the web.
In 1891, Naismith was running a YMCA training centre in Springfield, Massachusetts and failing to expend his students’ pent-up energies during a snow-in. He summoned up the memory of a game from his youth in Ontario’s Lanark County called “duck on a rock”, which combined tag with throwing. Procuring two peach baskets and a soccer ball, Naismith then established the basic game of basketball – compete with the other team to get the thing in the containers.
What’s interesting is how disastrous it was, at first go. “The boys began tackling, kicking and punching in the clinches,” Naismith said. “They ended up in a free-for-all in the middle of the gym floor. The injuries were some black eyes, a separated shoulder and a player knocked unconscious. It certainly was murder.”
“The most important change we made was that there should be no running with the ball”, Naismith continues. “That stopped tackling and slugging. We tried out the game with those rules, and we didn’t have one casualty.”
This quite beautifully conjoins Naismith’s obsession with competitive athleticism to his Presbyterian ethics.
He attempted most challenges available at his local Highland Games in Almonte, and took up athletics, boxing, football, gymnastics, lacrosse, rugby, soccer and tumbling while at McGill University in Montreal (as well as joining a ceremonial Scots regiment).
Naismith wrote later of his yearning for a “clean athletics”. One that “could be used to set a high standard of living for a young person”, while instilling confidence, respect and preparing them for adulthood, as Walker cites.
This is the opposite of a repressive, “chain-up-the-swings” Presbyterianism.
Instead, Naismith reengineered and redesigned the swings. He tweaked the rules of his game until it met the magical balance required – the point where careful constrictions are the very challenges that make a game enjoyable.
Yet Naismith’s origin story of basketball indicates how much transcendence of violence takes place in the standard sporting game. In truth, that’s the function of games for our species. But this function especially flourishes during the high-water mark of the British Empire.
Walker doesn’t mention it, but Scottish private and middle-class schools promulgated a “games ethic” (as historian James Mangan phrases it) in the second half of the 19th century.
The luminaries of Edinburgh’s Loretto school serve up the juiciest quotes, many from its principal, the baroquely named Hely Hutchinson Almond. For his pupils, he preferred examples of “vigorous manhood, full of courage, to the languid, lisping babbler about art.”
Principal Almond focused on a “Sparto-Christian ideal”, produced by “a regimen of all-weather exercise, cleanliness, comfortably informal dress and fresh air.” (Gordonstoun, founded after this heyday in 1934, is an extreme example of this model, inflicted on both the Duke of Edinburgh and Prince Charles.) Ready to rule! Yet basketball’s speedy spread across America in the first half of the 20th century, and its embrace by black Americans in the second half, obviously takes it beyond its origins in building character for Western dominance.
Many historians note parallels between the expansion of basketball in the US, and that of soccer (our football) in the UK and Europe. Economic class, and the way that determines access, is obviously a factor.
Basketball courts are small enough to be set up at the heart of neighbourhoods (though given the need for two high-fitted baskets, they’re not quite as bottom-up as four jackets, a football and a patch of ground).
That material ease of access is regularly cited as the core reason for the dominance of black Americans in basketball, given their relatively poorer economic status.
Some writers are particularly rhapsodic about what’s called the “pick-up” basketball game. It’s where there’s sometimes only one basket, often less than five players on each side, and the rules are customisable on the day, As the academic Thomas McLaughlin writes in his study of pick-up games, Give And Go: “Pick-up ball is not bureaucratized; it is organized and disciplined only by the players present at the moment of play. Goal-oriented rationality is foreign to its spirit.
“Pick-up ball really is play rather than organised sport”, continues McLaughlin. “Its players engage in a rough cultural democracy, creating their own practice right there on the court.
“In a disciplined, hierarchical society, pick-up ball offers a real alternative – not a radical rejection of modern structures of authority but at least a momentary evasion”, McLaughlin concludes. “These [are] tactics by which power can be faked out, set aside for the moment of play.”
To me, that’s what we need more of in sport – more play than game, that is. How much are those original, imperial norms of behaviour just perpetuated in the relationship between team and fan?
Take football punters, usually with hardly a pot to piss in, railing at the lack of money from moguls or autocrat regimes, to superfund their beloved team. Or the teams themselves – stretching towards near god-like levels of fitness and skill, they crack and crock themselves under a relentless schedule of competitions.
“War minus the shooting”, Orwell once sneered at organised sport. Now that actual war drums are being beaten daily, should we accept that our modern versions of “the games ethic” hardly increase the peace?
In my curator role for Nesta’s FutureFest in London, I once was introduced to “freestyle football” – ball-juggling, in other words. The creatives’ proposal was to create a “smart” ball, an object making lights and noises that would test the dexterity of the freestylers – and maybe make a new sport from it.
The project fell at the last hurdle. But it was amazing to be in the company of these wizards. I found out that many of them had fallen off the brutal development path that heads towards joining a major club.
They had redirected their skills “towards sheer enjoyment”, as one of them told me. “Playing with a ball. Just for the fun of it.”
I’m more in that mood towards my sport at the moment. I don’t think we need any more pseudo-versions of “muscular Christianity” than the ones being actually and politically foisted on us at the moment.
Naismith – in his basic creative impulses and despite his handlebar moustache – in fact, shows us the playful way.
