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10 feet up
In the 1840s, young men flooded into London from farms and villages across England. The Industrial Revolution transformed the country, and factory jobs beckoned.
But all work and no play makes Johnny a bit psychotic, and after 12-hour shifts in textile mills and drapery shops, really the only places for all these young workers to go were taverns and brothels.
George Williams was one of these workers. At age 20 he’d left the family farm for a textile job in London, and he was troubled by what he saw.
So, in 1844, he gathered 11 fellow workers and formed the Young Men’s Christian Association—a place for men to practice what was known as Muscular Christianity: discipline, selflessness, and the moral strength found through sports.
The YMCA idea was a hit. Within a few decades there were YMCAs in 45 countries with hundreds of thousands of members.
Like any growing organization, there was a new problem: Who would run all these YMCAs?
Springfield, Massachusetts
In 1885, supporters opened the School for Christian Workers in Springfield, Massachusetts—a two-year program that would teach them to run gymnasiums, lead Bible studies, and guide young men in America’s rapidly growing cities.
Imagine a mini-West Point for future YMCA leaders, which is how James Naismith comes into the story.
Raised by his uncle in rural Ontario after his parents died, Naismith was an athlete-slash-theologian who’d excelled at McGill University in Montreal. He’d earned a physical education degree and a theology degree even before enrolling at the School for Christian Workers in 1890. He was committed to the cause.
After completing the program, he was hired as faculty in 1891. One of his first tasks was deceptively tricky: Invent an indoor sport that would be interesting, easy to learn, and safe enough to play on wooden gymnasium floors.
Naismith had two weeks. Indoor football or soccer? Beginners got hurt too easily. Indoor lacrosse? Somehow, 80-mile-an-hour shots in a compressed indoor field with no safety equipment seemed like a bad idea.
“I slumped down in my chair, my head in my hands,” Naismith later wrote. “I was a thoroughly disheartened and discouraged young instructor.”
‘Duck on a rock’
Then he remembered a childhood game called “duck on a rock.” Kids would put a small stone—the “duck”—on top of a large rock, then try to knock it off by throwing stones from 10 or 15 feet away. The trick: Throwing straight and hard didn’t work. You had to arc your throw high in the air.
What if he organized a team sport with an elevated goal? On December 21, 1891, he found the school janitor, Pop Stebbins, and asked for two boxes.
Stebbins didn’t have boxes, but he found two old peach baskets. Naismith nailed them to the lower rail of the gymnasium balcony, one at each end, exactly 10 feet off the ground.
He wrote out 13 rules and posted them on a bulletin board.
“I called the boys to the gym,” Naismith recalled in a 1939 radio interview, “divided them up into teams of nine and gave them a little soccer ball. I showed them two peach baskets ... and I told them the idea was to throw the ball into the opposing team’s peach basket. I blew the whistle, and the first game of basketball began.”
The first game was chaos. “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.”
But something clicked.
‘Not an accident’
When students left for Christmas break just days later, they went to YMCAs across the country where they’d soon be working, and they taught basketball. Within a year, the game had spread throughout YMCA networks across America.
By 1893, it was international. The first collegiate game was played in 1895. The first professional league formed in 1898.
And since then—let’s just say the game has caught on.
“The invention of basketball was not an accident,” Naismith later said. “It was developed to meet a need.”
Naismith became a Presbyterian minister, earned a medical degree, and served in World War I improving the welfare of American troops.
His greatest thrill came in 1936, when he was 75 years old and basketball became an official Olympic sport at the Games in Berlin. Naismith performed the ceremonial tipoff and presented medals to the players.
He died three years later, having watched his winter distraction transform into something far beyond.
Today, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame stands in Springfield. His original handwritten rules sold at auction in 2010 for $4.3 million—a sports memorabilia record.
“I am sure that no man can derive more pleasure from money or power,” Naismith once said, “than I do from seeing a pair of basketball goals in some out of the way place.”
7 optimistic moments from history this week
Sunday, December 12: “The greatest dam in the world will soon be under construction... bringing power to millions and demonstrating engineering’s ability to harness nature for human progress.” — President Calvin Coolidge signed the Boulder Canyon Project Act on December 21, 1928, authorizing construction of what would become Hoover Dam, one of the greatest civil engineering achievements in American history.
Monday, December 22: “Freedom and unity for all Germans!” — Celebration cry as the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin reopened on December 22, 1989, after 28 years of being blocked by the Berlin Wall, symbolizing the reunification of East and West Germany.
Tuesday, December 23: “A magnificent Christmas present.” — William Shockley describing the December 23, 1947, demonstration of the point-contact transistor to Bell Labs executives by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. This tiny device—made of gold foil on germanium—replaced bulky vacuum tubes and launched the Information Age, making possible everything from hearing aids to computers.
Wednesday, December 24: “Oh my God, look at that picture over there! There’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!” — William Anders of Apollo 8, who captured the iconic “Earthrise” photograph on December 24, 1968, showing Earth rising above the lunar horizon—one of the most influential environmental photographs ever taken.
Thursday, December 25: “Victory or Death.” — Password given to Continental Army soldiers by General George Washington as he led 2,400 troops across the ice-choked Delaware River on Christmas night 1776 in a howling nor’easter, surprising and defeating Hessian forces at Trenton the next morning and reviving the American cause after months of devastating defeats.
Friday, December 26: “Good King Wenceslas looked out, on the Feast of Stephen...” — Opening of the Christmas carol celebrating St. Stephen’s Day, also known as Boxing Day, celebrated on December 26 across Britain and the Commonwealth as a day for charitable giving, traditionally when wealthy families boxed up leftovers and gifts for their servants and tradespeople.
Saturday, December 27: “I am going to send home a shipload of geological specimens.” — Charles Darwin, age 22, who set sail from Plymouth, England, aboard HMS Beagle on December 27, 1831, beginning a five-year voyage that would provide the observations leading to his theory of evolution by natural selection.
Thanks for reading—and thanks again for responding as people did to Life Story Magic. See you in the comments!
YMCA’s have changed over the years.
And nice to see the invention of basketball properly credited to a Canadian.
Fantastic piece on Naismith. What really gets me is how that two-week deadline forced creative constraint thinking, not just letting him tinker forever. Sometimes the best innovations come from having to ship something quickly rather than perfecting it. I've noticed similar patterns in tech startups where tight deadlines end up producing more elegant solutions tahn open-ended timelines.