The history of basketball is much easier to trace than that of other sports. It is clear that Dr. James Naismith is credited with creating basketball and much of basketball history. Dr. Naismith, born in 1861 in Ontario, Canada, first came up with the concept of basketball during his youth school days in the area where he played a game that involved knocking a stone off an object while trying to throw another stone at it. . The game obviously evolved from there and the history of basketball began.
Mr. Naismith taught at the YMCA School in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1891, where the sport of basketball was created. He was faced with the problem of finding a sport that could be played indoors during the harsh Massachusetts winters. He needed to come up with a game that could be played indoors and outdoors and that would embrace a sense of skill, not just strength. He first developed the game involving a football and two peach baskets, who would have thought that basketball history could come from a football.
In addition to creating basketball, Dr. Naismith became a physician with a focus on sports science and was a minister. Naismith saw his sport grow into one of the most popular sports in the world that saw his entry into the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin and carved out a place for himself in basketball history.
The history of basketball began with teams of five and was the sporting standard in 1897. The sport became popular for both men and women and began to spread throughout Canada and the US. The US military took the sport overseas with them in World War II and basketball history went global.
American universities accepted the game and began to have it as a standard college sport. College basketball history took off in the late 1890s with the first college game kicking off in New York’s Madison Square Garden.
The history of professional basketball began when the National Basketball League was created in the late 19th century around 1898. However, the league did not last and disbanded after 5 years, providing a rocky start for basketball history. The break alone led to the formation of several random leagues in the early 1900s and each was very loosely organized. Ironically, the first super team was the Celtics, but they were from New York City, not Boston. The famous Harlem Globetrotters were also founded around this time in 1927 and hold a place in basketball history as the most entertaining basketball team.
It wasn’t until 1949 that two professional basketball leagues, the NBL and the BAA, merged to create what we all now know as the National Basketball Association, or the NBA. The Boston Celtics dominated the NBA from the late 1950s through the 1960s. By the 1960s, professional teams had been formed all over the United States, and basketball was a major power. Players like Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russel and Kareem Abdul-Jabar became household names drawing millions to watch them play as they all found a place in basketball history.
The National Basketball Association fell off the charts and was surpassed by football in popularity during the 1970s and then re-emerged from the popular era of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. Michael Jordan led the league through the 1980s and 1990s and the torch was passed to Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant and Lebron James. The history of basketball has never been so fascinating and it’s all thanks to Dr. James Naismith.
