Losing team's captain beheaded by winning captain!

By A.C. De Silva

Basketball is the only major competitive sport to have had its roots in America.

However, it has been researched that the game involved two teams passing a rubber ball. The major difference was that this ball could not be touched by hand. It had to be propelled by the use of the knees, elbows or hip, on which protectors were worn.

The object was to get the ball through the ring, which was an extremely difficult proposition.

There is however a bizarre part to the beginning as it was only one `basket' that was necessary to finish the game, upon which the losing team's captain was beheaded by the skipper of the winning team!

The end of the game was also the cue for spectators to start running for home, for the winning team was liable to receive clothes and jewellery from the spectators, for their hard work and the enormous risk they ran by playing the game in the first place!

The game was devised by a clergyman who had the revolutionary feeling that there might be more effective ways of doing good than by preaching.

Dr. James A. Naismith, a Canadian by birth, was the instructor for physical education at the International YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1891, when the thought first came to him.

Unsettled condition

At the time, American youth was in a highly unsettled condition, because of lack of proper use of leisure hours.

The sports imported from countries abroad failed to really spark off interest.

Dr. Gulick, Head of the Athletics Department, asked his tutors to devise an exciting game, which could be played by day or night, indoors or outdoors, especially in winter when basketball was impossible due to snow and the general hardness of the ground.

Naismith bent his brains to the problem. He wanted a simple, easily-learnt team game, which would have no heavy paraphernalia as in most outdoors games"; a game which would be exciting to both play and watch.

He was also keen that it should be enjoyed by the average person of either sex.

Taking a large ball, he set about devising the rules. All physical tackling was banned; the ball was to be touched by hand only.

The large, light, bouncy ball could be easily followed by the spectator eye, and it was simpler to dispossess a player because both palms of the hands could not even begin to cover its entire surface!

First match

Thus was the first ever match played at the YMCA gymnasium in December 1891. Peach-baskets were suspended from either end of the balcony, which probably gave the game its name.

The rules decreed that the team to make a maximum number of successful throws into the basket of the opposing team would be the winner.

Naismith also ruled that each team would have a maximum of five players and he devised a system of `fouls' to be awarded for players tackling roughly with their bodies.

Cupid score first

Basketball instantly became popular. Talk of the first match spread to the nearby Bukingham Grade School, where the women instructors expressed a desire to try it.

One of them, Maude by name, attracted the attention of the game's founder, with her slim grace. With months, they were married.

Thus did Cupid score his first, and a very rapid, basket! The game caught on throughout the USA, and quickly spread to the rest of the world. Naismith's original 13 rules were chopped and changed, until an international standard was issued in 1934.

Meanwhile, the peach basket had been replaced in 1906 by open hoops, fixed on a pole or board, ten feet above the ground.

This got rid of the ladder that had to be used earlier to retrieve the ball from the closed peach baskets.

And that is how basketball evolved - a game that needs alert monds and supple bodies; the game that is almost never boring because situations are changing all the time, with players side-stepping, feinting, passing.

The ball is mostly in the air, necessitating stretching and jumping, which is great for the constitution.

The game is especially recommended for adolescents, to help them gain height.

There is a postscript to the story of basketball. Or perhaps, it should have been the prelude.

There are some researchers who do not credit Naismith with the invention of the game. They say it was more likely a discovery and adaptation than an invention. Naismith probably got the elements of his game after he went into records of the Mayan and Toltec excavations in Mexico. Ball fields were dug up at the site by archaeologists.

At Chihen Itza, buried in the thick jungle, there was a playing field 480 feet long and 120 feet wide, with two long, high walls flanking it.

High up in the centre were two huge vertical stone rings - much larger than the hoops of basketball today.