Basketball is a recreational and competitive sports with
widespread appeal across age, gender, class, regional,
and national lines, which reflects the game’s broadly
based origins and early development. The game is
played by two teams of five players, who attempt to
score points by throwing a ball through an elevated
hoop attached to a pole.
Basketball was made in the United States, but by a
Canadian. Devised by and for young white Protestant
male competitors, it was quickly adopted by Catholics,
Jews, African Americans, and females. Originally designed for exercise and the inculcation of moral values,
it soon became a commercial pastime celebrated the
world over.
Whatever the global appeal of soccer (association
football), basketball is the game most played and most
watched by people around the world. Hoops rattle
throughout Asia, as well as Africa and South America.
Professional leagues thrive in Europe,and even in distant
Australia. In the United States, basketball attracts more
participants and spectators than do football and baseball
combined.In all,basketball is played by an estimated 200
million people on all continents. No other sport has enjoyed such recent increases in popularity, both in terms
of those who play and the number of spectators.
Some of basketball’s appeal can be explained by its
unique status as a team game that is relatively simple,
inexpensive, and easy to produce. People happily play
one-on-one. In its organized form, the game requires
only five players at a time, half as many as a baseball or
football team. Compared to most team sports, basketball needs little space and minimal equipment to play,
and it leaves participants with few bruises and broken
limbs. It can be played, and enjoyed, by female youths
on a playground court or by an over-the-hill gang of
businessmen on lunch break as well as by seasoned
collegians and professionals.
The International Federation of Amateur Basketball
has governed international play since the 1930s; the
Olympics are the principal forum for competition. The
United States, Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia have dominated international hoops since the 1950s. In recent
years, televised competition has enhanced both the
scope of basketball’s global appeal and the quality of
play.
History
Basketball was literally created overnight, the result of
an assignment posed by a physical education teacher in
December 1891 at a Young Men’s Christian Association
(YMCA) training college in Springfield, Massachusetts.
A Canadian student, James Naismith (1861–1939), rose
to the challenge of constructing an active indoor winter game that would prove attractive to young men. He
typed up a rudimentary set of rules, had a janitor nail
up peach baskets along the railing at each end of the
Springfield gym, and invited his colleagues to toss a
soccer ball into one of the two baskets.
The first game consisted of two 15-minute halves,
with 5 minutes’ rest between. Naismith’s physical education class numbered 18, so 9 men played on each
team. Players had to pass the ball; no dribbling was allowed at first. That inaugural game was hardly a spectacle that anyone would recognize today.
Within its first decade basketball changed dramatically. Dribbling quickly became an acceptable means of
moving the ball around the court. Standard team size
was readjusted to seven, and finally set at five. The
value of a field goal, originally set at three points, was
changed to two points; foul shots, too, counted three at
first, but were soon changed to one. Equipment also
changed. By 1895 the old soccer ball was replaced by a
slightly larger leather-covered basketball; peach baskets gave way to mesh-wire baskets with strings and
pulleys that released the ball, and finally to a bottomless cord net fixed to an iron rim. Metal screens also made an early appearance behind baskets, in order to
keep balcony spectators from guiding or deflecting
shots.As more solid substance provided greater consistency for angled shots, wooden backboards became
standard by the turn of the century.
In 1895, Naismith left Springfield for medical
school and a YMCA job in Denver, largely leaving the
supervision of basketball to his old Springfield colleague, Luther Gulick (1861–1918). Within the following year, Gulick and the YMCA passed the mantle of
guardianship over to the Amateur Athletic Union
(AAU). Committed to amateur (“gentlemanly”) sport,
the AAU required players and teams to pay a fee and
“register” their intention to comply with the amateur
code and to compete only against other registered
teams.
This policy played havoc with the many teams
sponsored by local YMCAs, athletic clubs, settlement
houses, churches, schools, and colleges who not only
competed with each other but also indiscriminately
played against whatever local or touring professional
teams they could schedule. Professional squads made
their presence felt early in the history of basketball. In
November 1896, a team in Trenton, New Jersey, rented
the Masonic Temple, charged 25 cents for admission,
and shared the profits after paying expenses. They also
introduced a distinctive piece of equipment. A 12-foothigh mesh-wire fence, presumably designed to keep
the ball in play, separated players from spectators. For
more than two decades, professionals played within a
cage of mesh-wire or net, causing basketball to be
called the “cage” game.
Never did the AAU register a majority of the basketball teams in the United States. In 1905 seven coaches
of powerful college teams drew up their own set of
rules. Three years later the newly formed National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) assumed responsibility for the rules governing college basketball. Finally,
in 1915 the NCAA, AAU, and YMCA joined forces in establishing a single rules committee to oversee any further changes in basketball throughout North America.
While refining its form and governance, Naismith’s
new game expanded rapidly. Nearby colleges and athletic clubs embraced it as a competitive antidote to
onerous gym exercises during New England’s frigid
winters. One of the first converts to the game was
Senda Berenson (1861–1954), a gymnastics instructor
at Smith College. Early in 1892 she introduced the game
to her female students, but divided the court into three
equal sections and kept players confined to a single
section in order to avoid exhaustion.Within the following year this distinctive form of “women’s basket ball”
was being played not only at neighboring Mt. Holyoke
College but also at distant Sophie Newcomb College in
New Orleans, Louisiana, and at the University of California in Berkeley.
For a time, though, basketball remained primarily a
YMCA commodity. Its place of origin—an aggressive
new training college for YMCA leaders—ensured immediate widespread exposure. Copies of Springfield’s
campus weekly, the Triangle, were mailed out regularly
to every YMCA in North America. In the January 1892
issue of the Triangle, Naismith described his new game
and heartily recommended it to YMCA leaders everywhere. Those leaders, in turn, wrote to the editor of the
Triangle with news about the popularity of basketball
as it was introduced to more than 200 YMCA gyms in
the United States and Canada.
Many of those YMCA chapters and gyms were set
on college campuses, especially in the Midwest and Pacific coast regions. Moreover, Springfield graduates—
Naismith’s old classmates and fellow athletes—found
teaching and coaching jobs in college programs, where
they eagerly introduced basketball.
High schools especially responded to that gospel,
for the game proved useful for physical education
classes and interscholastic competition. The women’s
game was played with great passion, particularly in
Iowa, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Texas high schools. By
1900 high school championship tournaments were
held in conjunction with commercial exhibitions in
Boston, Buffalo, and Chicago. In 1903 Gulick created a
Public School Athletic League for New York City and supervised the construction of basketball courts in both
elementary and high schools throughout the city.
Within a decade, more than a dozen of the major cities
in the United States sponsored similar city-wide
leagues for public school athletes.
Basketball also thrived in rural and small-town
schools. Hoops not only fed rural school and town
pride; it also provided entertainment sorely lacking in
remote places. After 1909, when the agricultural colleges of Iowa and Montana produced the first high
school state basketball tournaments, land-grant institutions from Maine State College to Washington State
College fulfilled their public service purposes by providing space and publicity for annual high school
championship playoffs. In the 1920s national tournaments for public and parochial (Catholic) high schools
began; by 1925 more than 30 state championship
teams were competing at the National Interscholastic
Tournament at the University of Chicago.
Early professional leagues also held tournaments to
close out their seasons, but barnstorming proved to be
the more lucrative route. Around the turn of the century, the Buffalo “Germans” and the New York “Wanderers” emerged as the premier professional teams that
traveled afar competing with the best local talent available in armories, dance halls, and high school gyms.
Their successors included the Troy Trojans and “Globe
Trotters” from upstate New York, but the most successful of all the early touring teams was the Original
Celtics. Founded in Manhattan in 1914, the Original
Celtics capitalized on the use of the automobile as a
popular means of transportation.At their barnstorming
pinnacle in the 1920s, they often appeared in southern
and western towns previously unreached by the railway.
The loosely structured, theatrical character of professional basketball made the game uniquely attractive
to ambitious first-generation Americans. Heroes of the
cage game had names like Dehnert, Holman, Lapchick,
Friedman, Borgmann, Husta, and Chismadia. All were
of East European or Irish heritage; most were Catholic
or Jewish. African Americans, too, laid early claims on
professional basketball as a means of fun and success.
Founded in 1922, the all-black Harlem Renaissance
Five quickly became the strongest opposition to the
dominance of the Original Celtics.
Most spectator sports took a beating during the
economic troubles that began in 1929, but the Depression worked to the advantage of high school and college basketball in the United States. As unemployment
mounted, families found themselves unable to spend
freely on commercialized amusements, causing social
life in the local college and school to take on more importance. Basketball became a weekly social events. At
the end of the decade of the 1930s, no less than 95 percent of all U.S. high schools sponsored varsity basketball teams.
A newly formed program, the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO), also made much of basketball’s sociable and socially healthy potential. Begun in 1930 as an
antidote to juvenile delinquency in Chicago, the CYO
was the Catholic equivalent to the Protestant YMCA
and the Jewish Young Men’s Hebrew Association
(YMHA). The CYO initially received most publicity for
its sponsorship of interracial boxing tournaments, but
basketball was always high on its agenda. Chicago’s
CYO and B’nai B’rith champions met annually on the
basketball court.
Basketball also went visibly international in the
1930s.At the hands of YMCA enthusiasts, the game had
been introduced all over the world shortly after its creation. By 1930, fifty nations had adopted the sport. Despite the economic hardships, representatives from
Asia and Africa as well as Europe convened in 1932 to
form the International Federation of Amateur Basketball (FIBA). Chinese and Japanese students who had
learned the game from YMCA missionaries before
World War I introduced basketball at the University of
Berlin in the mid-1930s. Nazi propagandists overlooked the game’s YMCA origins and gave it their
stamp of approval on the grounds that basketball required not only speed and stamina but also an aggressive spirit that allegedly characterized the true German. At the Berlin Games of 1936, basketball became
an official Olympic sport. Unfortunately, most of those
games were played outdoors in a downpour of rain,
with a U.S. squad beating a Canadian team, 19–8.
By the mid-1930s, American basketball was thriving at the college level, particularly in New York City
where promoter Ned Irish (1905–1982) arranged doubleheaders at Madison Square Garden featuring the
best western teams against eastern powers St. John’s
University, New York University, and Long Island University.
Building on the foundation of these intersectional
doubleheaders, the National Invitational Tournament
(NIT) was created in 1938 as the first intercollegiate
championship playoff. Some 16,000 spectators turned
out to see Temple University win the first NIT. Impressed with that successful event, college coaches in
1939 created the NCAA tournament. Their first playoffs, at Northwestern University, suffered from inadequate publicity. The NCAA tournament remained second fiddle until 1951, when scandals discredited the
NIT.
Despite the game’s growth during the 1930s, it was
perceived by the American public as a second-rate
sport. Not only did it lack the cachet of a major professional organization until the late 1940s, it had modest
national media coverage save the minuscule game
summaries of YMCA, professional barnstorming
teams, or amateur contests in local daily newspapers.
The most significant watershed in basketball’s rise to
international stature came during World War II. U.S.
servicemen introduced the game to people the world
over, and government-sponsored cultural exchange
tours fueled a steady flow of U.S. teams and coaches to
all parts of the globe.
The Post–World War II Era
The American collegiate game enjoyed the national
and international limelight until the early 1950s.
Coached by the winningest coach in basketball history—Adolph Rupp (1901–1977)—Kentucky was the
biggest winner of the period. Apart from a few tournament appearances by southern schools, basketball languished in football’s shadows in part because the region’s most talented black players were excluded from
the leading teams and national tournaments. Formidable black college teams (for example, 1950s power Tennessee A&I coached by African American John McLendon, a Naismith student from Kansas) were forced to
compete exclusively against each other in relative obscurity. Gamblers wagered millions of dollars weekly
on the major games, triggering a national controversy
in 1950–1951 when several New York City teams were
implicated in a point-shaving scandal.
By the time of this well-publicized scandal, the previously unpopular professional game was in the midst
of a fundamental transformation. The pros were
renowned for their physical, pushing, grabbing, and
defensively oriented style played by a tough, beerdrinking, ethnically diverse group of industrial workers, many of whom had served stints in the military.
Respectability came in 1946 when 11 businessmen—
skilled in hockey and entertainment promotion—organized the Basketball Association of America (BAA)
and brought a cleaner brand of basketball to a mainstream, middle-class audience. The newly formed BAA
competed with a less profit-oriented and more knowledgeable, civic-minded National Basketball League
(formed in 1937)—located in smaller midwestern, industrial cities. The two struggling leagues merged and
formed the National Basketball Association (NBA) in
1949. The number of NBA franchises shrank to eight
teams in 1954 as the well-financed, large-city franchises forced the smaller ones to relocate or fold. By the
end of its first decade, the young NBA unquestionably
showcased the best basketball in the world.
The African American Influence
The transformation of the professional game into its elegant, fast-paced, high-scoring contemporary mode
derived from an increasingly innovative style of play
centered around big men and an emergent generation
of innovative African American players. The conservative horizontal offenses of the 1940s became more daring and vertical in the 1950s when quick forwards like
“Jumping” Joe Fulks (1921–1976) and Kenny Sailors
(1922–) popularized the jumpshot, and coaches developed tall players and built teams around them. As late
as 1947, only 25 players on the 12 NBL teams were 6
feet, 6 inches (1.98 meters) tall or taller, reflecting the
popular wisdom that large players were too clumsy and
ill suited to the game’s demands. Those stereotypes were
forever shattered by George Mikan (1924–) (6 feet, 10
inches [2.08 meters]), Bob Kurland (1924–) (7 feet [2.13
meters]) and Ed Macauley (1928–) (6 feet, 8 inches
[2.03 meters]), whose dominance near the basket
prompted the young NBA to widen the free throw lane
and penalize goal tending. The most revolutionary rule
change in the professional game, however, was the introduction of the 24-second clock in 1954, which prevented
deliberate offensive stalling and thereby increased scoring by 30 percent over the following five years.
The influence of a black basketball aesthetic was
just as revolutionary. Derived from the faster, louder,
stop-and-go play of the cement, urban (particularly
Harlem) courts, young black players learned that the
game was not just about weaves and standard patterns,
but also about explosive speed, deception, and slam
dunks. Like improvisational jazz music of the 1950s,
the emergent black style of play defied the established
standards of traditional “white” performance. The
Harlem Globetrotters was the most innovative team of
the era, whose stars Reece “Goose” Tatum (1921–1967)
and Marques Haynes (1926–) integrated improvisational bits from professional comedians and circus
clowns into their performance. Organized in 1927 by a
Jewish immigrant, Chicagoan Abe Saperstein, the
barnstorming ’Trotters took their exciting court antics
to the farthest reaches of the globe.
Despite the stellar quality of black basketball, the
American professional ranks remained racially segregated until the early 1950s. Earl Lloyd (1928–), Chuck
Cooper (1926–), and Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton (1922–)
were the first African Americans to play in the NBA in
1950, but the league remained 80 percent white as late
as 1960. Though the way was opened up by the Harlem
Renaissance, Globetrotters, and several collegiate
teams, it was in the NCAA’s Division I that the African
American style burst through the locked doors of integrated national competition. Black collegians Bill Russell (1934–), Wilt Chamberlain (1936–), Elgin Baylor
(1934–), Oscar Robertson (1938–), and Connie
Hawkins (1942–) elevated the game to new levels in the
1950s and 1960s.
At the height of the civil rights movement in the
United States, two white coaches devised systems that
made black style integral to their teams’ personas and
became the two longest running dynasties in basketball history. Arnold “Red” Auerbach (1917–), a feisty
street-smart strategist born in Brooklyn to Russian
Jewish immigrants, became coach of the Boston Celtics in 1950 and assembled a superb, balanced team around
center Bill Russell. They won 11 NBA championships
between 1959 and 1969. John Wooden (1910–), a devout Muscular Christian from small-town Indiana,
built powerhouse teams at the University of California
at Los Angeles (UCLA) around stellar centers such as
Lew Alcindor (1947–) (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar)
and won nine national titles between 1964 and 1975.
Women’s Basketball
Between the late 1940s and early 1960s, U.S. women’s
basketball became a true varsity sport. Teams had six
players, and the court was divided so that the three forwards did the scoring and the three guards covered the
backcourt. In 1971 the U.S. Congress passed Title IX
legislation, which prohibited sex discrimination at federally funded academic institutions. Thereafter, teams
were reduced to five and women were freed from the
limits imposed by the halfcourt game. Increased funds
to women’s athletics attracted first-rate coaches such as
former collegian and Olympic star Pat Head Summitt
(1952–) of Tennessee, who recruited players from a
growing pool of quality high school talent. When the
NCAA took control of women’s basketball in the late
1970s the large universities with strong programs
(such as UCLA, Tennessee, Virginia, Texas, and USC)
eclipsed traditional small college powerhouses and
shifted the production of women’s basketball from New
England and the Midwest to southern and western
states. The NCAA’s prestigious Final Four tournament
conferred the truly national scope of women’s basketball in 1982 and through increased network television
coverage, expanded attendance 90 percent during the
decade by the early 1990s.
The Olympics embraced women’s basketball in the
1976 Montreal Games. The Soviets won the gold medal
in the 1976 and 1980 Games against an impressive field
that included strong Chinese and Korean teams. In the
aftermath of the 1976 Games, collegiate All-American
stars Ann Meyers (1955–) of UCLA and Nancy Lieberman (1958–) of Old Dominion dominated U.S.
women’s basketball. Both played in the 1976 Olympics,
but their influence came later when they became the
first women to be drafted by men’s professional teams,
and then led the short-lived Women’s Professional
League in 1979–1980. Four years later the United
States, led by African American stars Cheryl Miller and
Lynette Woodard (the first female member of the
Harlem Globetrotters), defeated the Soviets 83–60 in
the 1984 Games. In 1988 they repeated by defeating Yugoslavia for another gold medal, which firmly established them as the world power of women’s basketball.
In recent years, the women’s traditional “finesse” game
has increasingly come to resemble the speedier, powerful, vertical male version.
The Modern Era
The era of stalwart professional dynasties ended with
the creation of a rival professional league—the American Basketball Association (ABA)—in 1967, which
shifted the NBA’s balance of power. By 1976, when the
NBA absorbed four ABA teams, professional salaries
averaged $110,000—more than twice what baseball
and football players made. Moreover, the NBA Players’
Association won a collective-bargaining agreement,
severance pay, first-class airfare, disability, medical insurance, and pensions. Despite the improvement in
players’ salaries and overall play, however, the NBA
limped along in television ratings and profitability
throughout the 1970s. For the first time since the advent of the 24-second clock, the NBA enhanced the
drama by adopting the three-point shot (from 23 feet,
9 inches [7.23 meters]).
The American professional game continues to provide the model for global competition. A U.S. “Dream
Team” took advantage of revised FIBA eligibility rules
that permitted professional athletes’ participation in
the Olympics, to trounce all their opponents at the 1992
Barcelona Games by unprecedented margins. The
Dream Team’s success propelled the game into the
most geographically diffused and commercially lucrative phase of any sport in history. Even in places without a strong basketball tradition, like Britain, attendance for England’s National Basketball League has
soared from an early 1970s’ average of 7,500 to 330,000
in 1985. The game’s popularity since the 1970s continues untrammeled in Latin America, and now China
claims more players than the entire population of Europe. Efforts are currently under way to establish a professional league in Asia, with likely locations for teams
in Tokyo, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines.
Basketball has enjoyed even greater success on the
European continent where NBA stars are celebrated in
Italian, Spanish, and French newspapers and glossy
magazines. Since 1987, basketball has been Italy’s second most popular sport. More than half the members
of the national Spanish junior team are currently playing college ball in the United States. Moreover, of the 21
foreign players on NBA rosters in 1995, 14 had attended
U.S. universities.
The renaissance of big-time college basketball
came in the 1979 NCAA title game when two of the three dominant players of the 1980s—Earvin “Magic”
Johnson (1959–) and Larry Bird (1956–)—were pitted
against each other for the first time. The 6 foot, 9 inch
“Magic”destroyed the stereotypical notions of how size
dictated positions and, along with Bird, elevated creative passing and teamwork. Magic’s dexterity and
court vision brought the brilliance of the black aesthetic to new heights. The Magic-Bird rivalry catapulted the month-long NCAA tournament atop the
pinnacle of international sport just beneath the
Olympics and World Cup competitions. Gross receipts
for the NCAA tournament have increased from eight
million dollars in 1979 to over 184 million dollars in
1995. The rivalry also sparked unprecedented interest
in both the game and the basketball player as a marketable celebrity. Buoyed by the advertising agency’s
success in marketing athletic shoes and sportswear
(e.g., Nike, Reebok, and Converse) with superstar endorsers, basketball stars, especially Michael Jordan
(1963–), have become some of the world’s highest paid
athletes and most recognizable personalities.
The game’s hold on the American imagination is reflected in the emergence of a cadre of successful basketball films. Unlike baseball, football, and boxing, basketball was largely ignored by filmmakers until the late
1970s, but recently has become part of a pervasive
sports, media, and entertainment enterprise. Since the
1970s filmmakers have moved away from silly, frivolous scripts to ones that dramatize the contradictory
nature of basketball in contemporary society. The commercial success of White Men Can’t Jump (1991) and
the artistic recognition conferred upon the documentary Hoop Dreams (1995) illuminate the importance of
urban playgrounds as breeding grounds of big-time
talent, the centrality of the black aesthetic, and the
game’s promise of social mobility for millions of young
people throughout the world.
—WILLIAM J. BAKER AND S. W. POPE
Bibliography: George, Nelson. (1992) Elevating the Game:
Black Men and Basketball. New York: HarperCollins. Hult,
Joan S., and Marianna Trekel, eds. (1991) A Century of
Women’s Basketball: From Frailty to Final Four. Reston,VA:
National Association for Girls and Women in Sport. Neft,
David S., and Richard M. Cohen. (1991) The Sports Encyclopedia: Pro Basketball. New York: Grosset & Dunlap.