James Naismith

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Bronze statue by James Naismith
James Naismith (far right) coaching the University of Kansas team, 1899

James Naismith ( November 6, 1861 in Almonte , Ontario – November 28, 1939 in Lawrence , Kansas ) was a Canadian physician and educator and inventor of the sport of basketball .

Life

Raised by relatives as an orphan from the age of nine, Naismith was already working as a lumberjack at the age of ten. He worked in the forests of Canada until he was 19, before graduating from high school in 1883 .

On December 7, 1891, Luther Gulick , director of physical education at the YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts , commissioned Naismith to design a new indoor sport for a young student group. Since there were often fights and injuries when playing football indoors in winter, the new game should get by with little physical contact. Not particularly enthusiastic about the task at first, Naismith wrote down 13 rules, loosely based on his childhood game of Duck on a rock, sixty minutes before PE class.

Naismith's basketball game started in December 1891 with thirteen rules, which he published in January 1892.

Naismith realized that what made games like football so violent was that everything happened on one level. So, in order to avoid the foreseeable scramble near the “gate”, he simply untied it from the ground. He had two peach baskets attached to the gallery of the sports hall, which at the same time became the "goal" and gave the sport its name: basketball , or initially basket ball .

Basketball was supposed to be a pure passing and throwing game; he therefore forbade running with the ball (the so-called traveling ). The ball should often be played back and forth until a teammate was in a promising position for the "goal".

Naismith did not specify the number of players per team, but preferred nine (versus the usual five today). In 1891, for example, the first basketball game was played with nine players per team, and the result was 1-0 after two 15-minute games. A student named William Chase scored the basket success.

Not only details of the sport have changed over the years. The number of players was limited, dribbling was not only allowed but became an important part of the game, the throwing technique changed from two-handed underhand to one-handed jump shot, and time limits were introduced.

Naismith became a physical education teacher at the University of Kansas in 1898 . On February 3, 1899, he coached the university's first basketball team. One of his students, Forrest "Phog" Allen , went on to become the coach of the basketball team called the Jayhawks and one of college basketball's first legends. Allen became a mentor to several other college coaches, including Adolph Rupp and Dean Smith .

1894 Naismith invented the football helmet and he supported the following year William G. Morgan in the invention of volleyball -Vorgängers Mintonette .

Posthumous Honors

A stamp commemorating Naismith was issued in 1961. Since February 17, 1968, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame (founded as an institution in 1959) has been in Springfield , of which he is also a ( posthumously elected) founding member. Since 1969, the Naismith Player of the Year Award has been presented to America's top college player. In 2006 and 2007, he was also posthumously inducted into the newly formed National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame and the FIBA Hall of Fame . In 2021 he was honored in a "Doodle" by Google.

memberships

In 1894 James Naismith became a member of the Masonic League , his mother lodge being the Roswell Lee Lodge in Springfield (Massachusetts) . From 1927 to 1928 he held the office of Lodge Master at Lawrence Lodge No. 6 in Lawrence, Kansas .

literature

  • Sven Simon: Interview with Ian Naismith . In: Five 31 (2006), pp. 84–87.

See also

web links

Commons : James Naismith  - Collection of images

itemizations

  1. ↑ Connie Kirchberg, Hoop Lore: A History of the National Basketball Association . McFarland, Jefferson 2007, ISBN 978-0-7864-2673-7 , p7.
  2. ↑ Connie Kirchberg, Hoop Lore: A History of the National Basketball Association . McFarland, Jefferson 2007, ISBN 978-0-7864-2673-7 , p. 15
  3. ↑ Ronald L. Mendell: Who's who in basketball . New Rochelle, Arlington House 1973, p. 242.
  4. ↑ In honor of Dr. James Naismith. Retrieved 20 July 2021 .
  5. ↑ Famous Freemasons Dr. James Naismith , Homepage: Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon (Accessed 25 April 2012, archive link )
personal data
SURNAME Naismith, James
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian physician and educator and inventor of the sport of basketball
BIRTH DATE Nov. 6, 1861
PLACE OF BIRTH Almonte, Ontario
DATE OF DEATH November 28, 1939
PLACE OF DEATH Lawrence (Kansas)