Basketball
A Short History of the Game
Since its invention in 1891 basketball has become one of the most popular games in the world. This explosive growth can be traced back to its simplicity and the need in the late Nineteenth Century for a competitive indoor game
The Beginning
In the winter of 1891 Dr. James Naismith, an instructor at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, needed a game to occupy his particularly unruly physical education class. While these young men had football in the fall and baseball in the spring and summer, they did not have an engaging, competitive indoor game. Wrestling and gymnastics just were not cutting it.
Naismith came up with a game that required teams to throw a soccer ball into peach baskets attached to the gym's balcony at a height of ten feet. Each team had its own basket. He divided the 18 student class into to two teams. They tested out the new game on December 21, 1891. William R. Chase threw the ball into the basket and his side won, 1-0.
The Game Quickly SpreadsWord of a new game got around quickly. Boys and men enjoyed the rough-and-tumble game that required some skill, but also involved a good deal of pushing and shoving. As Dr. Naismith's students graduated, many went out into the world and took up the position for which they had trained: YMCA director. They introduced a new game to YMCA members across the country and around the world.
Within a matter of years the game had spread across the country. Boys in small towns played wherever they could find some indoor space: armories, churches, field houses, auditoriums, schools and taverns. City boys formed iron hoops and nailed them to fire escapes, walls and utility poles. They used whatever ball they could find; if they could not find a ball they would wad up waste paper and wrap it with rubber bands. (To move while using a paper ball players would employ and "air dribble," tossing the ball up in the air while running.)
In April 1892 the New York YMCA sponsored a demonstration of the new game, still called "basket ball," resulting in nationwide publicity.
On February 7, 1893 a group of students from Vanderbilt College took on a team from the Nashville (Tennessee) YMCA in the first documented game involving a college team.
The Buffalo (New York) Genesee Street YMCA developed a pretty fair boys team. Formed in 1895, the team lost few games on their way to a national championship in the 1901 Pan American Exposition tournament. Now calling themselves the Buffalo Germans, they got more attention when the traveled to St. Louis, where the World's Fair coincided with the 1904 Summer Olympics. The Amateur Athletic Union held a national tournament there, to demonstrate the new sport to the world. The Germans won that tournament and began calling themselves "Olympic Champions."
African Americans Embrace the New GameBasketball caught on among all classes and races. African American formed teams, mainly in the cities of the Northeast, from New York to Washington, D.C. and out west to Pittsburgh. Howard University and Hampton Institute produced some of the earliest great black teams. In New York club teams such as St. Christopher and Smart Set traveled throughout the East, taking on the best African American squads.
In Pittsburgh Cumberland Posey organized and starred on the Loendi Big Five, which was declared "Colored Basketball World's Champions" four consecutive years from 1920 to 1923. Posey, who had played college ball at Penn State and Duquesne, eventually quit basketball to concentrate on baseball. He was eventually elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Black basketball changed dramatically in 1923 when the New York Renaissance (a.k.a. Rens, Harlem Rens, Renaissance Five) began to play in the Renaissance Casino in Harlem. They quickly became the best African American team in the country and, until the mid-1940s, probably the best team in the country, period. They competed successfully with the other great teams of the day: the Original Celtics, the Cleveland Rosenblums and the Philadelphia SPHAs. They would eventually be crowned World Champions, and that title would not be modified with any racial qualifier; they were simply "World Champions." But that was still a couple decades off.
Girls Gotta Play, Too 
Senda Berensen Abbott, a physical education instructor at Smith College, a women's school just up the road from Springfield, Mass., heard about Dr. Naismith's game and was intrigued. She drew up rules for a women's game. On March 21, 1893 Abbott supervised a game between the first-year and sophomore classes. In no time at all girls and young women were throwing balls through hoops.
Abbott adjusted the game's rules for women so that it would not be as physical as the men's game. Bear in mind that the early men's game was quite physical. Observers often described basketball as an indoor version of football, which, at that time, was still killing and maiming dozens of players annually. Abbott decreed that women would not push and shove and elbow one another. They would not steal the ball from one another. They would play a more gentle game.
Girls, it turned out, also wanted to play a competitive indoor game to break the winter doldrums. Teams sprang up everywhere.
One of the best-known early women's teams came out of the Sun River Valley in Montana. The Fort Shaw Government Indian Boarding School formed a team that could not be beat. They ran out of opponents in Montana and were invited to the World Exposition in St. Louis in 1904. Over the course of that summer the Fort Shaw School team again took on and prevailed against all comers. For their success they won world-wide accolades and a trophy declaring them "World's Fair Champions.
An International GameMany of the International YMCA Training School students became overseas missionaries upon graduation.
They naturally brought the game of "basket ball" with them to their overseas missions. As a result, young men in China, the Philippines and Japan were among the first adherents of basketball outside of North America. (Naismith and many of his students were Canadians, so the game spread there as quickly as it had in the U.S.) To this day the game remains wildly popular in China and the Philippines.
Basketball was so popular in parts of the Far East that it was included in the Far Eastern Championship Games, an Olympics-style competition that began in 1913. The Philippines dominated basketball at these games, which continued until 1934.
It took a little longer for the game to reach Europe's shores. Europeans did not get any significant exposure to basketball until the Doughboys came over in 1917. Along with jazz music, American soldiers brought basketball. Once the Great War was over,thousands of soldiers found themselves in France with little to do to keep them out of trouble. General Pershing decreed that all the Allied armies would compete in an Olympics-style tournament. The competition was called the Inter-Allied Games and they took place in Paris in the summer of 1919. Included among the games was basketball.
In preparation for the games 1.6 million American Expeditionary Forces soldiers participated in basketball games to determine the U.S. representatives to the games, according to official reports. The U.S. team bested their allies easily in the Games, defeating Italy, 55-17 and France, 93-8. But the point is that many Europeans had been exposed to the new game, and it did take root.
Professional Teams BlossomBy the late 1890s amateur teams abounded.
The Trenton (New Jersey) YMCA team was feeling some heat from Y administrators. The exact source is unknown, but the team was forced to schedule their game against the Brooklyn (New York) YMCA somewhere other than the Trenton Y. They booked the Trenton Masonic Temple and began calling themselves "The Trentons." To pay for expenses (hall rental, referees, travel for the visitors) they charged admission. Legend has it that they had enough left over that each Trenton player received $15 (a princely sum at the time). Team captain Fred Cooper, as the organizer of the game, received the odd dollar that was left over, thus becoming the first highest-paid player in professional basketball.
When other young men realized that there was money to be made playing a game, professional teams began sprouting all over. There was an outcry, of course, from those who wished to maintain the purity of the game.
The Buffalo Germans went professional sometime after their success at the St. Louis Olympics. They barnstormed throughout their region taking on all comers. They gained a good deal of notoriety when they won 111 consecutive games from 1908 to 1911. That achievement got the Germans into the Hall of Fame as a team, a rare honor.
The Original Celtics were a group of New Yorkers who had grown up playing basketball. First formed in 1916, they became the top team in the country in the 1920s. With a lineup that boasted the highest-paid basketball player in the world -- Nat Holman -- and future Hall of Famers Johnny Beckman, Dutch Dehnert, and Joe Lapchick, few teams could keep up with the Celtics.
Professional Leagues Come and GoIn 1898 the first professional league to emerged, the "National Basket Ball League." It was hardly national, since the teams initially came from Philadelphia and nearby Southern New Jersey. The Trentons joined up, winning the first two championships. Eventually the league stretched as far to the south as Wilmington, Delaware and all the way north to New York City. The league struggled through five seasons and folded in the sixth, but some pretty fair teams (The Trentons, New York Wanderers and Camden Electrics) and players (Al Cooper, Harry Hough and John "Snakes" Deal) participated over the years.
By 1903 there were five major pro leagues, all in the Northeastern states. Given the expense of travel, teams had to be relatively near one another, so leagues tended to be regional affairs. The National League and the rival Philadelphia League were centered around Philadelphia. Western New England and the Boston area had their own leagues. Western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio had a league. One thing these leagues all had in common is that they rarely lasted more than one season.
Curiously, teams in New York and northern New Jersey felt little compulsion to organize leagues. Apparently it was more lucrative to play an independent schedule, finding strong challengers that would draw big crowds, or simply to barnstorm, traveling from town to town and playing the local talent.
But this aversion to leagues changed with a fury as the 1920s approached. Leagues sprang up left and right. In the 1920s it was not uncommon for the top players in the East, men like Barney Sedran, Max Friedman, Honey Russell and Benny Borgmann to play in three leagues at once. The leagues came and went and teams frantically searched for new leagues as the old ones collapsed. The Interstate and Metropolitan leagues were some of the more prominent leagues of this era. The most stable and longest-lasting league was the Eastern Basketball League (EBL).
The Eastern League operated, in fits and starts and with some suspended seasons, from 1909 to 1936. This league's teams came mainly from New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. In the earlier years some of the more prominent teams were the Trenton Potters, Trenton Tigers and Camden Crusaders/Skeeters. In 1922 the Celtics won the championship during their one season in the ABL. In the late 1920s and early 1930s the Philadelphia SPHAs dominated the league, which began to disintegrate in 1933. (The SPHAs sometimes called themselves the Hebrews or the Warriors. SPHA was an acronym for their original sponsor: the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association.)
Throughout the Depression and into the World War II years pro teams and leagues continued to operate, but they struggled. Arguably the National Basketball League (NBL), centered in the Midwest, had the most talent. Back East, the American Basketball League (ABL), probably a close second in terms of talent, was the major basketball circuit in the largest cities. The best teams of this era, however, may have been the barnstorming teams, most prominently the New York Rens and the Harlem Globetrotters.
National Basketball LeagueFounded in 1937, the NBL consisted of teams sponsored by corporations and smaller communities. For example, two tire manufacturers in one town dominated the league in its early years. The Akron Goodyear Wingfoots and the Akron Firestone Non-Skids won the first three league championships. (Can you imagine the ferocity of that cross-town rivalry?) The Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons (today the Detroit Pistons) also won a couple championships in the 1940s. But small town pride also accounted for many teams. One might not think that Oshkosh (the All-Stars) and Sheboygan (the Red Skins), Wisconsin could support high-quality teams, but one or the other played for the championship in eleven of the twelve seasons the NBL existed; in 1941 they even played one another.
American Basketball League 
At its founding in 1927 the ABL stretched from New York to Chicago. Its founders, many of whom owned National Football League teams, intended for it to be the major professional basketball league in America. The stock market crash ended that dream. But in its heydey, 1927-1931, some of the best teams in the country vied for the championship. The Cleveland Rosenblums and the Original Celtics played some of their greatest years in the ABL.
And what better place to show off than at the World Professional Basketball Tournament? Beginning in 1939 the Chicago Herald-American newspaper invited the top pro teams in the country to play in a single-elimination tournament. For ten years a dozen or so of the best basketball in the world could be seen in Chicago playing in grueling three- or four-day tournament. The tournament was not segregated. The Rens and the Globetrotters played and won. League teams such as the Oshkosh All-Stars, Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons and Minneapolis Lakers won. These games were hotly contested, given that the prize money was considerable.
