NewBasketballMovie

Anything. Give me a high five. This is his house. All right, partner. Good man. All right. Uh, we sent out— there's 3 bronzes. One goes to the family, which is me. One stays in the foundation. One goes to the Hall of Fame. One goes— that one goes to him. That goes— read rule number 5. That's one that'll kill you. Look, this is for you. Rule number 5: no shouldering, holding, pushing, tripping, or striking. Yeah, we were watching you quit over here. Way to tell him. I love it. And they made the game up. The first infringement of this rule by any person should count as a foul. I'm out of here. Which one was— hey, look here. The second shall disqualify him until the next goal is made. Yeah, 107 years have been a long time. These are worth about 10 minutes out. Yeah, that's, that's the appraisal on those 10 minutes. My name is John Naismith. I was born in 1938 in Dallas, Texas. My grandfather is Dr. James Naismith, who invented the game of basketball and wrote the 13 original rules. I was the youngest grandchild, but I was the one that always asked the questions. I really had his story at heart. Now I travel the country in a big old RV I call Humpy, and what I call this is a sportsmanship tour. This RV is literally jam-packed with history of the game of basketball and the history of my grandfather. I'm known for carrying the original rules to basketball around in a gold-etched suitcase. The reason I do that— those rules weren't seen for 110 years, and we're on a mission to get people to understand what we're saying about sportsmanship and positive role modeling and dignity and respect and teamwork and education. And we use the rules as a focal point. They call it the Holy Grail of the Constitution of basketball. That's the reason we show off, to make people aware of how the game was invented, who Dr. Naismith was. To understand the game of basketball, you have to understand Dr. Naismith. Mr. James Naismith. James Naismith. James Naismith. James Naismith. Who? The public has a tendency to think Dr. Naismith was an old guy who accidentally invented a game and fell off the face of the earth, because all the pictures you see, 75 years old, he's holding a basketball. In fact, he was 30 years old. He was a young guy, and he lived with the game for 48 years. He was very proud that he invented the game. He was astounded how rapidly it grew. But what he achieved off the court as a human, that's what makes the story so fascinating. To go from an orphan at 9 years old, to a high school dropout at 15, to borderline alcoholic at 19, to come back with 2 master's degrees, 4 doctors, fought in 2 wars, been in a football helmet, Invented the game of netball, which is played in Europe and the Caribbean. Even involved in the invention of volleyball. Traveled all over the world, including the Olympics in 1936, to introduce the game. He did a lot of the early studies on the effects of alcohol on the human body. The effects of cigarettes on the human body. He turned down in excess of $200,000, which today would be equivalent to $2 or $3 million. To endorse a cigarette. Being a medical doctor, he knew that smoking was bad for kids. He's a Renaissance guy who gave his life to the world to make it a better place.

James Naismith was a man of lots of different levels. He always recognized that anything that is new is really born out of things that already exist. And I think that's a very humble point of view, and it's an important point of view. You know, the true genius that can snatch something out of nothing is maybe an Einstein, but the practical geniuses are the ones that can take a little bit of this and a little bit of that and come up with something that works.

I'm sure somebody took a little this and that and was thinking about, well, how do we get to those Romans? How do we cross this guy? Who's trying to assassinate me? I'm sure you were throwing things at little round things, but never thought about, hey, let's make this a game.

Yes, there were things done centuries before James Naismith wrote out the original 13 rules that kind of foreshadow basketball.

And there was a King Lear, wasn't there? King Lear? Yeah. Nothing can be made out of nothing. You're sitting on your throne. You're bored. I'm sure he took little things and was throwing in baskets and things. Yeah, a big turkey bone. I didn't like it. Oh, nope, throw it in there, you know. Hey, that was basketball.

There's this Incan sacrifice rite that involves a stone on the side of a wall and throwing a decapitated skull through it.

Let's give some Incas some credit, even though, man, they took your life for it. Ooh, you're talking about playing hard. Ooh!

The upshot being that there seems to be some primal human need to take something and put it in a receptacle. The challenge seems to be a universal one, and what Naismith did was codified a set of rules so we could do this recreationally, and then we kind of let the culture run with it. It's incredible that one man's vision would lead to this spectacle that now is so profoundly a part of who we are as a culture today. It's hard to imagine a world without basketball.

I think that's the best invention. You know, there was a lot of inventors out there who invented stuff, but basketball would probably be the one thing that, you know, no one can top. It's art. And for me to go out on the basketball court, everything that I do on the basketball court means a lot. You know, in the back of my mind, I'm thinking about how the game, you know, has changed and what I'm bringing to the game. And, you know, what the founders or the, you know, the people before my time brought to the game and how they paved everything out for me to be able to come out here and do what I do. You know, make the rules, you know, that suit me, that's best for me. The game is so challenging because you have to do so many different things. There's so many aspects of the game offensively that you have to be able to dribble the ball right-handed, left-handed, go right, go left. Shoot a jump shot, shoot a hook shot, use both hands in close to the basket when you're shooting, be proficient at the free throw line, learn to pass the ball various ways, learn to play hopefully decent defense from a team concept and an individual concept. So the challenges I thought were tremendous. It required a great deal of all-around skill and abilities from an athletic standpoint in order to be able to become successful at the game. I often say it's a child's game, but I also say when it's done properly, it becomes an art form. Every time down a floor, the canvas changes. The defenders are playing different. It's never the same, which from my standpoint is what made it more beautiful in terms of creating and allowing my imagination free rein. Because every time down, I never knew what I was going to do It was all predicated on what the defender did. And so when you get this kind of canvas being created for the fan with this kind of constant changing every time down the floor, the passing of the ball, the movement of the bodies without the ball, and the final, hopefully successful climax to whatever you're viewing every time down, I, as I say, I think it's nothing— there's nothing more beautiful than sports. The city of Lawrence, Kansas is very much part of the Naismith history, my grandfather's life. He was here 41 years after he invented the game of basketball. He came here in 1898. He died here in 1939. Every time I come into Lawrence, I always make sure I make one stop, and that's the Lawrence Memorial Park Cemetery where I can visit my granddad. When I visit my grandfather, I actually talk to him, and in my own mind, I know it sounds kind of stupid, but I look for guidance because I'm trying to do what he would do in the same circumstances. He helped a lot of people. Dr. Naismith touched a lot of people in his desire to leave the world a better place for him having been there. And that's some pretty big shoes. I haven't filled them yet, but I'm working at it. Do you remember when I say to understand basketball, you have to understand Dr. Naismith, understand what he stood for, what his morals were, and what his mindset was when he invented the game? A.

Smith's whole point of view was not that of a commercial businessman. It wasn't that of a P.T.

Barnum.

He wasn't an impresario who was interested in entertaining the masses. He was really somebody who wanted to change individuals' lives. And make society better.

He sort of takes his attitude of individual responsibility and adds the team concept to it to use the sport as a vehicle to better life. The first game of basketball took place December 21st, 1891, corner of State and Sherman in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the YMCA training school. He developed basketball and Soon after that, he actually left Springfield College with his doctorate in physical education and went to work for the YMCA in Denver, Colorado. In his spare time, he got a medical doctor's degree, and then after that went to the University of Kansas where he was not hired to coach basketball. He was hired as the athletic director and chaplain because he was also an ordained minister. Naismith went to University of Kansas in 1898 and was there for 41 years.

Doc Naismith was briefly the head basketball coach at Kansas. He did not have a winning record.

As a matter of fact, he was the only losing coach they've ever had at KU. I've made this joke several times. They said that about his one loss record, and I said, well, if I ever have a similar one loss record, I'll be in high company, but I won't be the coach here very long. Yeah, this is called the Naismith Burden.

So here's this game, it's been invented, people seem to enjoy it, so naturally a guy like James Naismith is gonna look for adaptations for the masses, really as a recreation and not as a competition. And I think that was that attitude that led Naismith to utter his famous comment, which was that basketball is not a game that can be coached, it can only be played. Now, as fate would have it, he winds up in Lawrence, Kansas, exposed to a man named Fog Allen, the legendary basketball coach there who probably more than any other figure created the modern college basketball coach for whom basketball really existed for no purpose other than to be coached.

Paul Gallin was probably his best friend in Kansas. Paul followed Dr. Naismith as coach at KU.

It's my understanding that the two of them, from their differing points of view, had many lively conversations and friendly arguments about that very issue. Can basketball be coached? Should it be coached?

Naismith didn't think you needed to coach basketball. He looked at it as a physical exercise. Gallin was very much a basketball coach.

Yeah, these two men, Fogg Allen and James Naismith, had this different philosophy about basketball and its purpose, but there was a real warmth and professional respect for one another that developed over the years.

They were always very close friends.

There's a famous photograph of Naismith, and Naismith signs it to Fogg Allen.

To the father of basketball coaching from the father of basketball.

I think that speaks to the warmth between the two of them. And then late in Naismith's life, in 1936, 3 years before his death, it was Allen who led a campaign to raise money to send James Naismith to the Olympics to see basketball's debut there. Even when there was a foreclosure on Naismith's house, it was the Allens that intervened.

You know, when Fogelman became coach at KU and replaced Dr. Dr. Naismith. It hurt Naismith somewhat because he had been there a long time. On the other hand, he didn't really want to coach it anyhow, and anybody knew Doc pretty well knew that. They say the Doc wasn't competitive. He was very competitive, but he just had a different mindset. It comes back to the saying that to understand the game of basketball, you got to understand Dr. Naismith.

Yeah, people today look at Naismith and associate him with Kansas, the University of Kansas, and the basketball coaches there are famous for going by his grave and paying homage to it. But it's just a coincidence, really, that he spent so much of his time there because he wasn't devoted to coaching particularly, certainly of basketball. He always kind of raised a skeptical eyebrow at packed field houses watching any sporting event. He was much more somebody who believed in recreation, for creating, actually take the word recreation, for recreating the whole person. And I think that, to me anyway, speaks to somebody who never really left his small-town roots and church and family and the things that he was exposed to as a child.

Yeah, I met him at the University of Kansas, and he was long in years then, and I just remember him I, I liked him as just a kind gentleman. That's the way I looked at him. Forget basketball. I just remember him as a kind gentleman, and just, he's the one who started the game that I love. Great players don't make great coaches. So I, you know, I can say inventors don't make great coaches, you know, but he still laid the framework for the guys that left here that became the greatest coaches in the history of college basketball. Basketball. They got it from him, no matter whether they want to admit it or not, but they did get it from Dr. Naismith, because Dr. Naismith gave it to Fogg Allen. Pretty simple. Not rocket science.

When you think of inventors, you do think of people who are willing to look at everything from a different point of view. Their worldview is slightly askew. Almost by definition, because you have to get out of that box.

I don't think I ever saw a picture without a three-piece suit, the vest, the whole nine yards. But this is the same man that would be walking down the hall of Strong Hall at the University of Kansas, and the students as a joke would say, "Hey, Dr. Naismith, walk on your hands," in a three-piece suit at 75 years old. He'd flip up his hands and walk the length of the hall. So this guy was pretty formidable. And when you have this type of physical presence, A lot of the problems go away. People accept you like you are.

He was a professor. He was really a teacher more than anything else, and we think of professors and teachers as sometimes being eccentric.

He was also a character. I mean, he was called the stupid genius by his kids because to be as brilliant as he was, which they all certainly recognized, he would stand up in his Model T and pull on the steering wheel and say, whoa. I mean, I mean, he was never a good driver. He left one time to go to a meeting in Kansas City and showed up over 2 weeks later fishing on the river in Almont, Canada. Never told anybody he was going.

He would lie down to take these naps in the oddest places at the oddest times and would have his keys in his hands. And he'd put a little tin plate on the floor right underneath his hand. And when he heard the sound of those keys clinking into the tin plate, he knew he had relaxed just enough to get up and go on with the rest of the day.

Dr. Naismith had a lot of inventions in his mind, and a few of them worked and most of them didn't.

He was a guy, when he got to Kansas, he actually believed if you fed rabbit to track athletes, they would run faster.

One invention in particular that he worked with, it has always been a joke in the family, he had a machine that would be like what we would call a rack in the medieval times, and he was convinced he could make players taller by pulling on them from both ends. That one didn't work, by the way.

He's a complete original, but that's what it takes to come up with something completely original.

I would love it if Dr. Naismith could see a team play today. I think he would be so proud. I think he'd be amazed at the athleticism, the coaching, the teamwork. I don't think he would have ever dreamt that this game could have become what it has. Well, maybe he is looking down, and you're right, must be extremely proud of where this game has gone and how it's impacted on so many millions of people now around the world. It's staggering, to be honest. It's just something that Dr. Naismith could never comprehend what was going to happen in the next 50 to 100 years. Years with it. His opinion of the game today— I get asked that question a lot, as you can well imagine. Number one, he'd be very proud. It's the fastest growing game in the world. Basketball has always been used as a hook for youth, like the YMCA uses a hook to get them in. Midnight basketball uses a hook, so it's working that way. And for years it was a way for kids to get a higher education. Now what he wouldn't like is basketball has become a way not to go to school now to get a higher education. If you're a good enough basketball player, don't go to college. The physical roughness and choking and coaching, hitting a referee— he would just— wouldn't even believe that. Or how about hitting the fans? You're going to the stands, there's no excuse to ever hit a fan. There's no excuse to ever hit a referee or another player. There is no excuse. You don't beat up the fans, you don't choke the coaches, you don't beat up the other players. Certain things are not acceptable in society. Why would they be acceptable in the game of basketball? My grandfather couldn't tolerate that, that I'll tell you. That's when he flips over in his grave. You hear that big thud, that's Doc Naismith, believe me. I think we need to really stress that sportsmanship is a big part of this. It's not a cold-blooded, competitive situation. We always have to hold up the integrity of the game and and the people involved in the game, and sportsmanship is a big part of that. It's very important, man. It's almost a custodian of the game. It's the overseer, the one that keeps the game clean. We keep teaching fanfare, notoriety, and fame, and we forget the simple thing. I cannot help but confess we have sinned. We have erred. We have strayed from that aspect of the rule. Rules, but because declaring the NBA a non-contact sport would not exactly be the virtue that Dr. Naismith would expect from us because it's not. But on the other hand, every so often we realize that we've moved a little bit too far and we bring it back, whether it's rules about fighting rules about flagrant fouls, rules about obstruction to the basket, and in a broader sense, although I don't really think of it that way when we're dealing with it day to day, we are moving back to the principles enunciated in the rules. Well, I met him at the— in his office at Robinson Gymnasium at the University of Kansas in 1933 when I was in my first attempt to enroll at the University of Kansas. My grandfather had a reputation for being colorblind. He didn't see color, and in the '30s, almost everybody saw color.

Well, I think Naismith's progressive attitudes toward race were probably a combination of his profound faith and probably his Canadian upbringing. Obviously, Canada didn't have the baggage of race relations that the U.S. did, and he didn't think twice about expressing his views. The way he intervened to reach out to John McClendon, who essentially wound up on his doorstep.

His father brought him to Kansas University during the height of the racial element in this country. Knowing full well that he would not be able to play basketball at Kansas. But his father had a better idea of where he wanted his son to go in his life. John McLendon was a young man from Kansas City who, from the first time he saw a basketball game, he wanted to be a basketball coach. His father said, I'll get a second job and put you through college so you can be a basketball coach, but with the understanding you have to go to the University of Kansas. Because Dr. Naismith, who invented the game of basketball, he wrote the rules as a professor there. So you can learn from the man that wrote the rules to the game.

The intuition of McClendon's own father was that this is a man, James Naismith, you should look up because he'll give you a fair shake.

That's a father's instinct. How did he know that? There was no advertisement about it, but from a distance he could see that Dr. Naismith was a man of conviction. He was a good man. He was a man that respected people, and therefore he dropped off his son and just left him there because Dr. Naismith at that point had not met the father. I found Robinson Gymnasium, walked in, found his office, and, and he was sitting there behind his desk. And I walked in and he asked me what he could do for me. 1933, my grandfather's 72 years old, he's sitting in his chair, first day of classes. He looks up and here's a young black kid, 18 years old, standing in the door. He said, "You're supposed to look after me." And Dr.

Naismith kind of chuckled, he said, "Well, who are you?" He said, "I'm John McClendon from Kansas City." And my daddy said to look you up because he said that you don't see color, that you would treat me right and take me under your wing.

And he said, do I know your dad? And John said, no. He said, but my dad said you're colorblind. He said, well, come on in. Father's always right. So that was my introduction to him. This was in the fall of 1933, as I said, and I was just beginning my new adventure at the University of Kansas.

Sure enough, Naismith became an angel on John McLendon's shoulder.

Coach McLendon did talk about Dr. Naismith being someone who did not have a color perspective of people. He saw people for who they are and what they were about.

Kansas is right there on the frontier of racial problems, and John McLendon wasn't the only black student on campus, but he certainly was in a in a minority, and, you know, he ran into problems on campus trying to use the swimming pool.

Part of my granddad's rules were— and my granddad had some strange rules— if you were getting a degree of any kind in the athletic department, which he was the head of, you had to be able to swim. Well, John was a good swimmer, which my granddad didn't know because he was a lifeguard at the black pool in Kansas City. So John went swimming the next day with And when he got out of the pool, he went to the showers. He came back, got dressed. The maintenance guy's draining the swimming pool. That's a big chore. And John said, "Are you draining the swimming pool because it's Wednesday, or are you draining the swimming pool because I swam in it?" And the maintenance man said, "Use your own judgment." McLendon was put in a situation where he would have to come back again and again, and he would tell them, he said, "You can drain it, but I'm going to be back every time to swim in it." And they weren't willing to give me an A. For not swimming, and we do not accept it. I went back to my grandfather. My grandfather's solution was very simple, as always. Next day, John went swimming. My grandfather put the two biggest football players on both sides of the pool, and there weren't any questions asked. There was no pool drain, was there? Then there was signs written all over the University of Kansas: "Don't swim with the N-word." John took the signs down, took them to my grandfather. My grandfather went to the chancellor of the school and the president and said, "If I ever see another one of these signs, I'm going to resign and go to a different university. Now here's a man that invented basketball, who'd been at that school at that point for over 40 years, who said, I'm going to leave and go to another school. So there was no more signs, was there? Any further incidents or anything of a personal nature like that, he included in his advisory attitude. I knew I had somebody in my corner. His first coaching job, Dr. Naismith was able to get that coaching job for Coach John McLendon. So he was there for him for all the right reasons. Again, Dr. Naismith went to the principal and got him to accept me as the head coach. So I was a head coach of basketball at Lawrence Memorial High School. We won the Kansas Athletic Conference Championship. Dr. Naismith came to see a couple of the games and told me that he thought I had a good grasp of the game and I should concentrate on basketball as a sport that I'd follow. A lot of people don't know this. Coach McLendon was the first Black coach in professional basketball. He coached the Cleveland Pipers in the old ABL. John McLendon went on to be one of the disciples of Naismith.

Of course, McLendon goes on to become a legendary basketball coach, a member of the very Hall of Fame that bears the Naismith family name.

I chose the University of Kansas because Dr. Naismith was there. Sports has always been a place that transcends color, occupation, political philosophies. So for sure, so it doesn't surprise me that the guy that created basketball was that type of guy. No matter who you're playing against, you just go out there and have fun and play the game the way it's supposed to be played. There are situations where, you know, you're going to be playing against, you know, Black, whites, Euros. You know, today's game, David Stern has done a great job of bringing some diversity into the game of basketball. So when you go out there, it's just all about having fun, and that's the most important thing. I started what I call the Naismith Sportsmanship Tour in the very first part of the year 2000. I personally have been before in excess of 1,400,000 people, spoken to each one of them individually. It's a lot of work, but it's been extremely well received. Under the bed where I'm sitting is probably 200 or 300 prints. There's prints under the couch. Very much like a traveling Smithsonian Museum for the game of basketball, for the history of my grandfather. It's a bigger challenge than I thought, and it's a bigger story than I knew. I knew the story my whole life, but I didn't know how involved it was worldwide. So I've been educated along the way also. He took two leaves of absence from the University of Kansas. When he was 57 years old, he volunteered to fight on the Mexican border at Piedras Negras against Pancho Villa with General Pershing on horseback as a chaplain. God knows it doesn't get much rougher in the United States than down there. He was 50-some-odd years old. He's riding up and down the border chasing Pancho Villa, the famous Mexican bandit. Then Neesmith volunteered for the First World War. Now he's almost 60 years old. And everybody's trying to talk him out of going to war. Everybody from his wife to his kids to the other professors are trying to talk him out of going to the First World War. They underestimated the spirit of Doc Naismith because he was going anyway. And he went to France and he was there for almost 3 years.

When James Naismith goes over to France in World War I as a chaplain, His portfolio there was hygiene, and hygiene was the word they used in those days for sex ed. He believed he could be most valuable to the Allied cause as somebody who got the troops to stay out of trouble. I mean, there were brothels that would get set up outside the soldiers' camps. That was just a fact of life over there. So it was Naismith who would talk to the troops, disseminate literature, and most tellingly, on Fridays he would set up boxing matches. And he would actually position himself outside the camp on a Friday night, and if soldiers were tempted to file out, he'd be there saying, "Hey, you may not want to go into town. We got a great boxing match right here you may want to stick around for." He knew that young men were tempted to get into fights, into drinking, and to chase women. And if you acknowledge that, you set up an alternative. You don't hector them or lecture them about the evils of that. You say, well, there's something more productive and actually more fun.

To give you an idea of his nature and why I say that the little things in his life that he did gives you so much insight to the person, he's on his way home after almost 3 years. He's coming back through the train station in France just It was just before Christmas, and the terminal was empty, the baggage area, except this one big duffel bag. They estimated it weighed 50, 60 pounds, and it said University of Kansas troop, because in those days they fought by schools a lot of times. The Kansas group were pinned down in a farmhouse on the front line. They knew where they were, but they couldn't get to them because of the weather and the enemy fire. But it was all the Christmas presents and the letters from home and whatnot. That was what was in the bag for this Smith troop. And so Naismith picked up his bag and carried it through the mud and the snow and the ice and walked his 15 kilometers with his bag over his shoulder. They said when he came through the door of this farmhouse— lucky he didn't get shot— he said he had icicles hanging off his mustache. He was muddy from the waist down. He walked in the door, said, 'How are my guys doing?' Now, can you imagine? The reason he did it is how he lived his life. I want to leave the world a better place because I was there. He lived by this. He was fearless. Even the day he died, his second wife Florence was rubbing him down with alcohol because he had a high fever. He had a stroke. And she said, you're never afraid of anything, are you? And he said, no, I'm never afraid of anything. If you want a sissy, don't marry a Scotsman. And he died within a few minutes. So he lived that all the way to the end. This is John Wayne here, so to speak. I didn't know a lot about about Doc Naismith until later in my career when I started to really pay attention and I went to the Hall of Fame and understood some more about how he invented the game and what stage of his career he was at in doing so and where this took him. It's amazing. It's an amazing story to hear of this Canadian man who invented this incredible sport for the world. You know, it's turned into a billion-dollar industry And it's given a lot of people a lot of life, so what a story. Dr. James T. Smith was born in 1861 in November in the small town of Almonte, Canada. Right outside of Ottawa. Very small town. This town of Belmont was almost all Scots had come from the old country, and the town in those days was a lumber camp area, very rough. He had a very physically hard childhood. He had very loving parents. He worshiped his mother and his father. He was raised in a Presbyterian family by a mother who was very religious, as most Scots were in those times. Strong ties were made to their faith, and so the church was an important part of, of the upbringing of most of the families of the day. And life evolved around school, working the farm, and of course church and family dedicated to Sundays. When he was a young kid, 8 years old, they had a very bad drought and they couldn't farm. They couldn't grow a crop. So his father, who was 36 at the time, took the family, which consisted of the wife who was also 36, his older sister Ann who was 12, and his younger brother Rob who was 4, and they moved to a place called Grand Calumet Island, which was 72 miles north, because his father was also an expert lumberjack and there was plenty of lumbering where there wasn't any farming. So his father invested all the time and money he had, which wasn't much money, and they built a new sawmill. The decision to purchase a sawmill on the Ottawa River just north of here at Calumet Island was a decision in 1868. It posed a great discomfort in James' life because it meant he had to leave the family and friends that were here. Bad luck really overcame him because before they could start producing lumber, lightning struck the mill and burned to the ground. At the same time, his dad caught typhoid fever, which in the 1870s was terminal. The typhoid epidemic was working its way across the Northeast, and his father was first to contract typhoid fever. The father knew he was going to die, and the mother and the kids didn't have this, but being in a small cabin, it was just a matter of time. The mother had 11 siblings, 9 of which were brothers. A call was made to bring young James Naismith's uncle up to retrieve the 3 children and bring them back before they contracted the illness as well. The oldest brother took a sleigh in an early October snowstorm and actually went the 72 miles to pick up the kids. And this was over the objections of his wife and everybody in the town where they had come from, Amante, because they were afraid that they would bring the disease back. My grandfather's mother basically committed suicide because even though she wasn't sick, she knew if she stayed, she would die. So she had to make a hard choice, didn't she, whether to stay with her husband or to whether go with her 3 kids. She opted to stay with her husband. Grandfather told my dad he was looking over his shoulder and his mother was waving from the door, and that's the last time he saw her. That was his lifelong memory of her. Word came down once they went back to the family homestead that the parents had died 3 and a half weeks later. The mother died on his 9th birthday, and it was also his sister's 12th birthday. They had a double birthday celebration, but it wasn't very good that year. They didn't go to an orphanage. There was an uncle who was 14 years older who was single and never got married. He was kind of a dapper guy around town, hard worker, and the uncle lived next door to the old Naismith home. So it was a little family unit. They were unique because they didn't have the traditional family family of mother, father, and the children as one. He was treated differently. The uncle lived with them, and he would kind of come and go. The sister Annie, who was 12, became the mother. She never got married. She was a spinster her whole life. One day she's a little girl, 12 years old, and the next day she's a mother of two little boys. Robbie was 4 years old. He actually died as a youth. He was always frail, and he required mothering, which that Sister Ann provided that. My grandfather became a breadwinner immediately. He started working on the neighborhood farm at 9 years old. The Naismith home actually became a ghost house because the word around this small community was that the parents' ghost lived in the house. The neighbors finally burned it down to kill the ghost. So not only did he lose his parents, he had to watch the neighbors burn down the house. And he told my dad it was such a horrible experience. I don't know how you would cope with that as a young kid, because he was probably— they burned that house, he was probably 10 years old. He told my dad he felt like he started a 100-yard dash 10 yards behind. That's got to be a dismal feeling. That's the reason when he got off the blocks and he got going, he never stopped. This guy, till the day he died, never stopped. This is the end of some of Nate Smith's story. This is where his mom and dad are now buried. This is their tombstone. This is where they're buried. They were 37 years old. His sister's also buried here. She's the one that was 12 when the parents died. She became the mother. This third marker here is very important to me. This is my grandfather's brother named Robert. They called him Rob or Robbie. He died of a burst appendix when he was 18 years old. It says on the bottom, "Don't forget me." That again touches me deeply because how forgotten can you be? You're only gone, you're 18 years old, you haven't really made your mark on life. It's hard to say what feelings go through you when you see things like this. It certainly is very deserving of any prayer that can be given because this is real family values. This is grassroots family values here. The big thing in the winter in northern Canada was ice skating. My grandfather's ingenuity came out as a young guy because the neighborhood kids all had ice skates. He didn't have ice skates because again, he's a neighborhood orphan. So they said the lights stayed on in the shed all night long. Being the inventive young man from an early age, he took two old files to just embed into pieces of wood and be able to strap to his winter boots and head out to the Mississippi River just behind the farm. Made his own ice skates overnight. Said it took him almost all night, but the next morning he's ice skating with the rest of the kids. Who would think about grinding down a file, but that's what he had to work with. And he kind of continued that through life. In this town of Almonton, there was a blacksmith shop, as there was in every town. And this huge boulder was almost perfectly round. It looked like a big cannonball. It hits me about, about waist high, a little bit lower maybe, but it's big. And they developed a game called Duck on a Rock. The boys would use a rock approximately the size of a fist, and it combined tag with running and throwing. The person whose turn it was would stand back about 20 feet and would put his rock on top of the big rock called the duck. Duck. The one who was throwing would then throw his rock and try to knock the duck off. The trick of the game was if they missed, they had to run and pick up their rock and run back before the other guy could get his duck off the rock and tag him. The players who hurled their duck stone like a baseball would be less accurate. So instead of throwing it hard, they lofted it like a basketball in an arc. The importance of of the game was such that when Dr. Naismith was given this task of coming up with a new game, he recalled this boyhood game and how this lobbed arcing shot was so successful in that game. And that little motion is what gave him the idea of arcing, of doing the arc, and of the level of the basket being above their heads to where people couldn't interfere with it. Without it, we may not have the same concept of shooting basketball. And of course, the arc of a shot today is still a very prevalent skill that is taught. Of all things, it came from this game called Duck on a Rock. Duck on a Rock. My grandfather was a young guy. He was a very strong individual physically. He was still helping around the family farm, but he was basically a lone lumberjack. By the time he was 15 years old, he'd been working for 5 years. And he dropped out of high school because he really couldn't afford to keep going to school and working at the same time. He started living the lumberjack ways. Well, life was certainly difficult in that harsh period in the 1870s. Of course, he had no parental guidance. He, as the oldest son, took to the opportunities to work in the lumber camps, but with that goes the perils of being a man and being put into those environments. And he did become a man, so to speak, but at the same time got into drinking and lived the rough life of the lumberjack. By the time he was 19, he was kind of a borderline alcoholic. And on this particular Saturday, he was about half drunk. It was noontime. And he walked into a small local bar. There was an old man sitting at the bar that nobody knows who it was. And the old man said, "You're Margaret Young's son, aren't you?" And he said, "Yes." That was his mother's maiden name. And he said, "She'd roll over in her grave if she saw you drinking like this." When the bartender gave him the whiskey, he set it down. He didn't drink that one. And he never took another drink. He walked out of the bar, then went back to the family farm even though the house had been burned down. And he went to the chicken coop because his mother used to crawl inside and pray, and knelt down outside the chicken coop. It was very common knowledge that he would go and speak to his mother in the silence of the barn, in the grain area, you know, and spend that quality time that he missed since her passing. And he made what what we refer to as a silent vow that she would never have to be ashamed of him again. And like I say, he quit drinking completely. He went back to high school at age 20, which is unheard of. He got a high school diploma at age 22. He was so determined not to make her ashamed again. He went to his traditional place of reflection where he could create his own little silent, quiet space and reflected on his mother and those times and made that vow. My grandfather had 3 or 4 big turning points in his life. This was a major one. This was really probably the first one. And to this day, nobody knows who the old man was and why he was there and why nobody in this small town knew him. This gets kind of overwhelming again. This is what turned his life around, right at this spot. I'm not sure if it's where I'm standing or the next level, which was where she prayed as a child, which would have been the grain bins. I'm sure in my mind It's not documented as an adult. He must come back to the same spot and told his mother he had fulfilled that vow he made when he was 20 years old. So this spot is extremely special to me, and it's the first time I've ever stood here. In 1883, with the help of his high school teacher, he was accepted at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He decided to go to school to study to be a Presbyterian minister. He wasn't involved in sports. He was too involved in studying. He was on a mission. He started in sports accidentally. One day he was at a rugby game. He was on the sidelines watching the game as a fan, and McGill was playing another team. The center got injured and they didn't have a replacement center. The captain of the team shouted over to the sidelines, "Anybody want to play center?" Naysmith never played rugby in his life. He's in his street clothes, but he goes out there and starts playing center. He did such a good job, he became the center for the McGill team. While he was playing center for the rugby team at McGill, before he invented the game of basketball, he actually invented the first football helmet. And it was made out of chamois skin and had a leather strap, not to protect his head, but to protect his ears, because in those days without helmets When the center centered the ball, the opposing line would take their ears and bulldog them down to the ground. And his ears got so painful and so cauliflowered, he feared no girl would date him. So it was called Naismith's Bonnet, and it's recognized in the Football Hall of Fame as being the first football helmet. My dad said he was prouder of the football helmet a lot of times than he was the game of basketball. Once he got started in sports, He really never quit that. He was playing center and the guard on his left was just cursing and he turned to my grandfather and said, "Oh, I'm sorry, James, I forgot you were there." That was a big impact on my granddad because he suddenly realized he could impact young men better from sports than he could from the pulpit. He found out from the headmaster that there was a big movement at that time called the Muscular Christianity Movement. Christianity was a very, very interesting movement.

The people who advocated muscular Christianity felt that through sport one could enhance their spirit, their spirituality, they could nourish their soul, and at the same time they could increase their faith while developing their character. It was the philosophy that animated the whole YMCA movement, and it's really the thing that, that I think was a guiding force in James Naismith's life.

The hub of this movement was in Springfield, Massachusetts, at Springfield College, which is a training school for the directors of YMCAs. And he got his doctorate of divinity as a Presbyterian minister from McGill University. But like the next week, he was in Springfield. It's YMCA training school. He was taking some courses still, but he was also an instructor. The day he arrived in Springfield, he met another student, Amos Alonzo Stagg. Amos Alonzo Stagg, who later became the father of coaching to many, the father of American football, came here very interested in many of the same things that James Naismith Naysmith was interested in. They both were graduate doctors and they both got there the same day.

And they were very close friends from day one. They began a friendship then that was long-lasting. They both were muscular Christians, believing in a little bit different ways. Naysmith was more of one that believed in one being self-motivated, while Steg was a great believer of coaching.

So there's a lot of fate involved here. Stagg and Naismith were friends. Stagg died at 104, Naismith died at 78, and they were friends until Naismith died. This is where it all began, right here in the corner of State and Sherman intersection right there. That's where the original YMCA was, where Dr. Naismith invented the game of basketball. We now have McDonald's on the corner. At that time, the YMCA building It was a multi-story building. Next to it on the right was a church. All long gone now. The game's still here with us and getting stronger. You know, I'm at this corner, I look at McDonald's, what I see is my grandfather and I see the building because mentally I've seen pictures of it my whole life. I kind of don't see the McDonald's. The McDonald's has almost no recognition. There's a very small plaque on the wall. Unless you're going to the restroom, you'd probably never see it. But this is where it all began, December 21st, 1891, 11:30 in the morning. I figured out that when Mason invented the game, he was a physical education major, and what he wanted to do is give you a game that will use the most parts of your body. And he figured this basketball out, and he figured out that in basketball, you got to be ambidextrous. You got to be able to jump. You got to be able to run backwards. You got to be able to run forwards. You got to have a hand-eye Coordination. There's so many things in the game of basketball that no other sport of that time and that era contained all these things. The guy who invented the game was kind of unique. His boss was a gentleman named Dr. Luther Gulick. He was the director of physical education, and Gulick gave gave this young James Naismith an assignment to come up with a game that would occupy a rather rowdy group of undergraduate students between football season and baseball season. This one particular class of 18 students was kind of incorrigible.

The way history records it, Luther Gulick was at wit's end with this particular class of PE candidates who were going to go on to become YMCA missionaries.

These, again, were not kids. These guys ranged from age 25 to 30.

They just could not be pacified by some game that you would typically play at that time indoors in a gym.

One of his quotes was, "The boys simply wouldn't play drop the handkerchief." They wanted to break something, and they were breaking the gyms, actually, what they were doing. They were destroying the gym.

The challenge was to somehow put in front of these guys something that would be perceived as being manly, that would exhaust them, and I think Naismith also wanted to add an element of finesse.

He had 14 days before his first class.

The press of that deadline, really in the last night before he had to come up with something, is what led to the inspiration.

They needed a game.

In sports, it really is a case where you advance a ball to a goal. How do you do it?

Goethe's famous quote was, "There's nothing new under the sun." And so Dr. Naismith, listening to that and believing it, tried to incorporate lacrosse and football and American baseball and rugby, tried to bring them indoors. Didn't work. It's too rough.

The single thing that he wanted to eliminate from this game he invented was tackling, because tackling led to roughness which led to the gouging of eyes and all the things that he thought were symptomatic of ruffianism and things that he was pledged to rooting out of athletics.

On the 13th night, all these ideas came together in his head.

The burning of the midnight oil, literally. Like many of us, he went back to what he was really familiar with to inspire him. Duck on a rock, the childhood game, the rugby exercise, the realities of it. They're not going to be amused or pacified by some pantywaist pastime. All that stuff got poured into the pot, stirred around, and that's where you get something that seems like a bolt out of the blue.

He actually stood up and said, "I've got it." He said, "You can't run." Simple thing. If you don't run, you don't have to tackle. So when you caught the ball, you couldn't move. You had to pass or shoot. And that took the tackle out, that took the roughness out. Well, all the rest of the ideas fell into place. He told my dad he actually played the first game of basketball in his bed the night before. He actually dreamed the game. The first game was played December 21st, 1891. He got up in the morning, he went downstairs to find goals. He had really two balls to choose from: English rugby and a soccer ball. The soccer ball being perfectly round and being lightweight, there was one each sitting on his office floor. As he went downstairs to find goals, he just picked up the soccer soccer ball. In trying to determine what to use for a goal, he tried to bring the lacrosse goal inside, which is basically a rectangular vertical goal. That didn't work. He thought about having boxes that you could throw the balls into. The janitor, Mr. Stebbins, said they didn't have any boxes, but he had two peach baskets in the basement. Naismith looked at them. They were 15 inches diameter. There was a lot of different diameters in those years. And he said, yeah, it would work fine. So Stebbins and Naismith took a ladder and nailed these peach baskets up to each end of the gym on the running track, which actually ran around the whole gym in those days. They just happened to be 10 feet tall. That's how high the running track was. He went back up to his office over the gymnasium and he handwrote all of his ideas. Ideas, starting with you can't run or walk with the ball. He took the notes downstairs, he gave them to the stenographer who was Miss Lyons. It was about 11:50 in the morning, his first class started at 11:30, so everything was in a hurry. She typed the rules, he went back, he picked them up from her, he pinned them up on the bulletin board. Just as Naismith was pinning these rules of this new game up to the board, we got him a Frank Mahon from Charlotte, North Carolina, one of the students, walked by and said, oh, another new game.

He was kind of the ringleader in this class of PE students, the one that was the bellwether, the one that Naismith knew he had to win over to have the whole class fall in line.

Naismith said, "If this doesn't work, I'm quitting." They were just laughing him out of the gym. The first game was a huge success. Nate Smith was referee. He explained the rules. He chose two captains. He split the 18 guys, actually 9 people per side. It didn't go down to 5 people until later. They played in their street shoes, long pants. They were having so much fun and they were all laughing and they would steal the ball from each other and the guy would look around like, what happened? You know, I mean, it was all new to them. The first game, Neesman said, "Stevens, would you get on a ladder and take the ball out when the guys make a goal?" Well, the first game was 30 minutes long, but the score was 1-0 because they didn't have the talent of arcing the ball yet. Stevens didn't have a real hard job. Never took the bottoms out of the peach baskets because they were very light, very light. The ball would just destroy it. People laugh and say, "Nathan was smart enough to invent the game, but he wasn't smart enough to take the bottom out of the peach basket." Not totally wrong, but there was reasons for it. And what he did do, he drilled a hole in the bottom of the peach baskets, and they took a pole and they would punch it. They didn't have a camera, but this young man, amateur artist, actually sketched the first game. And so when you look at this picture, you're looking through the eyes of this Japanese student looking at the players and looking at the weights on the wall and looking at Mr. Stebbins on the ladder and looking at the basket. To me, it's fascinating. This is through somebody else's eyes. I've always been thrilled that we had that because it told me so much about that first game. You're looking at a picture, if you can imagine, drawn during the first game, and to me that's powerful. Visualize these were typed December 21st, 1891, two pieces of paper without the cardboard. He put them on the bulletin board at the gymnasium. This is the original document. And they needed a basketball. And you notice there's two words, which it was until 1921 when the media put it together as one. You see how they were folded in his desk drawer. You see where he glued it on cardboard in 1912. 1926 to frame them and put them on his office wall at KU. Had he done that, we'd have lost them to the daylight. This down here says, "First draft of the basketball rules hung in the gym. The boys might learn the rules." He dated this actually February of 1892, which is an incorrect date. That was the date when he wrote this and when he named the game. I gotcha. My dad, as a University of Kansas freshman in 1931, asked his dad to correct the date and authenticate it. So you see he erased the February and put the December Yeah, every student puts one and signed it. And at that time, the document had no value. Today it's valued as high as $20 million. Wow.

Well, look at this, not even 2 pages.

He referred to the game as his baby. Yeah. And he told my dad, he said, you don't make money out of the sport, and we've handled that very well, but he says you're the caretaker of my baby to the next generation, and that's what we live by. Yeah. December 21st, they went away for Christmas vacation, and New Year's they came back on the 1st of February. And Naismith said, we're going to name the game.

Naismith wanted to call it the new game, and it was Mahan who said, hey, why don't you call it Naismith ball? And Naismith had the good sense to recognize that there had to be something better than that.

He said that would kill any sport. And Frank Mahon, the same guy, was scoffing about the game and said, you know, we have a basket, we have a ball, let's call it basketball. Well, Naismith liked that.

So the peach basket actually gets memorialized right there in the name of the game.

It was two words until 1921—basketball. Mahan actually took the rules off the bulletin board, the two pieces of paper, took them up to the dormitory, which was above the gymnasium, and put them in his trunk at the end of the bed for a souvenir. And the next day he came down to Naismith and he said, you know, the two pieces of paper that you had on the bulletin board, I took them as a souvenir because this game is going to be famous.

Mahan was the first person to spot these rules tacked up to the gym wall. Rules that turned out to be the original 13 rules, and he just wrote it off. He audibly said, "Ah, another new game," wrote it off. But it was Mahan who was actually won over by it, and I think that's when Doc Naismith knew that he had hit upon something special, that even the most reluctant, recalcitrant guy in the class thought there was something here.

These rules are something to go by. It's almost like it's the Bible to sports, like the Bible is to religion. To the history of the world. Obviously the game has come a long ways, but that fact that 10 rules from the original rules are still in the game today just shows how good a job James Naismith did. It's interesting historically, and it's just a terrific pillar of our sport, sort of like our Constitution. It's there, and it's really quite amazing to think that this document, which was put together sort of the night before, so to speak, the first time the game was played, has really provided a living basis for the continuation of our game. Boy, if Doc could see this here, he'd say, my goodness, was I responsible for that too? Yes, you were, because you said you couldn't kick it, you couldn't slap it, You couldn't bat it, but you can catch it. We talk about balance. If you got a basketball, to spin it on your finger, it takes balance. When we talk to kids about balance, we talk to them about balancing their lives. Balance. If you have balance, then things are equal on both sides. Balance. Balance. You have balance in your life, you have a good life. Balance. And it goes back to the original rules of basketball. Well, 13 rules isn't very many.

You know, the Constitution of the U.S. had more articles in it, I think, when it was first written than the original rules of basketball did.

You have to realize there's 13 original rules and 10 of them are still in the game today, 114 years later. So, you know, he kind of nailed it.

But for instance, there's no mention in the rules of dribbling. The only thing that's in there is you can't run with the ball. So essentially, when dribbling was invented a few years into the life of the game, somebody figured out, well, I can't run with the ball, but I can sort of drop it and pick it up.

Because when they caught the ball, they had 5 seconds to shoot or pass. If they were too heavily guarded, They dropped the ball to start the 5 seconds over, and they dropped it again. And he said within a few days they're just dribbling the ball all over.

Naismith thought this was actually kind of ingenious. It means that people aren't putting their head down and just blindly burrowing forward, and that creates the mayhem which Naismith was trying to avoid.

His comment all his life was, the dribble wasn't in the original rules, but it really was. But it took the boys' ingenuity to figure it out.

When he saw through the '20s and into the '30s that there were some players who actually became very, very good dribblers, he was completely captivated. Somebody's imagination has taken it off in this new direction. He was a great believer in the dribble.

Naismith invented basketball as a non-contact sport. Now, that's kind of a joke today. His foul system was kind of unique. Rule number 5 says no striking, holding, shoving, or pushing in any manner. If you made a foul, the ball went to the other team. If you made 2 fouls in a row, the player that made the fouls had to sit out. Until the other team made a score. If there was obvious intent to injure, the player who made the foul had to sit out the rest of the game, no substitute. They had to play one man short, kind of like hockey in a way.

There definitely are little bits of the Naismith morality and moralism marbled through the rules. I mean, things like the player that does commit a foul is supposed to raise his hand and acknowledge it.

It is very difficult to separate Christianity from the game of basketball as the rules were originally written, but I believe that has a lot to do with obviously the muscular Christianity movement at the time, with Dr.

Naismith's own background, his own beliefs.

Remember, the YMCA missionaries for the most part were the ones that spread the game.

It needed that stamp of approval from people like Naysmith or the YMCA as if it was going to prosper and catch on and not die instantly as something that was too rough for the average person.

One observation always tickled the family. He said the girls played rougher than the boys, but he was always very conscious of sportsmanship. He very much was into sportsmanship. You just follow the golden rule, and I think Dr. Naysmith, that was his idea, and I think there's nothing more important than to 'Follow the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.' And I think that's the way Dr. Naismith thought, and he wanted that to be the same in basketball. The worst rule he said he ever wrote was rule number 8 of the 13.

Essentially, the first player to get to a ball that went out of bounds would gain possession. So what did you have? Well, they were killing each other. In these tiny little gyms, you had people going headlong for a ball that had gone out of bounds, and the mayhem ensued.

And it was a number of years before they had the opposing team throw the ball in. And he said that was the worst rule he ever wrote, because obviously that didn't work.

But for the most part, those rules were really, really shrewdly designed and drafted and have stood up over time. My comments on Dr. Naismith saying that the girls actually played the game a little bit rougher or tougher than the boys, it just speaks to women want to compete and they are very competitive. All you have to do is watch women's basketball today and just how hard-fought and competitive it is and it's been that way, in my opinion, since girls first started playing basketball.

In that direction behind the red building you see there in the foreground was the Buckingham grade school. There was a group of about a dozen young girl teachers. They actually would walk by the gym every day to eat down the road, and they heard all the commotion one day. They went inside. What they viewed was the first game of basketball in the history of the game. They came in every day. They started skipping lunch, they'd come in, and one of them after 2 weeks asked my grandfather, "Why can't girls play?" And he said, "Well, I guess they can." He changed some of the rules, he got them a gym time, and the first girls' game was played on this corner in March of 1892, only 3 months after the conception of the game. So girls have been, and women have been in the game of basketball since basically the beginning of the sport. Makes it very unique in the world of sports. Women have been in this sport since basically the beginning. And this is something very important to the family, that women a lot of times, as you well know, have had to break into a sport, so to speak, and then they were there. It all happened during this first game. My grandmother was actually on the first girls' team before they were married. And in his autobiography, which he wrote much later in the late '30s, he mentioned my grandmother, who he was married to like 40 years, had 5 kids, only mentioned her one time in the whole autobiography. Maud Sherman was an excellent player. Got him in trouble again.

Well, I think it is a natural, the game of basketball, to cross gender boundaries because it's all about competing and coming together and playing together as a team and just working toward common goals. And, you know, just the opportunity to be able to commit to teamwork and togetherness and, and to have fun in the process. I mean, I think it's a natural.

The game grew really very rapidly, extremely rapidly. To give you a quick idea of the spread of the game, the game was invented December 21st, 1891. It was actually played in Mexico in 1892, played in China in 1893. It was called basketball mania, spread around the world. My grandfather said the YMCA was certainly very responsible for this because he had a lot of students from Canada, one from Mexico, some from South America. He had a student from Japan. Naismith and Alonzo Stagg left the training school to go to the University of Chicago in 1893. So the first basketball game was played at the University of Chicago in 1893 because Stagg took it there. Naismith went to the University of Kansas in 1898. The first game of basketball played in Kansas in 1898. So these people, they take the game with them. This is a simple game to take. It spread because it filled a need. It spread because you can play basketball by yourself. And it's because it's easy for people to play, and that's how he intended it. He wanted it to be a form of physical fitness, is what he wanted, and a game of fun. Here, you literally— the old man One goes out and puts a hoop up on the tree in front of the house, the garage, any place that he can get up 10 feet and put an old, you know, just as Dr. Naismith did many years ago, an old hoop up and a kid is in business and the best part of it, again in my judgment, is that one child, boy or girl, and the girls have made giant strides in basketball, one child 4 can play and practice the sport by themselves, and 2 can literally play against each other on this old hoop and develop the skills required to play in the 5-on-5 game. I have great recollections of shooting in the alley at a hoop without a net and without a backboard because I thought, number 1, if we put a net up, it would be gone overnight. It would last, but more importantly, it would make you a better shooter. I used to carry carrots in my back pocket because I thought it would help my eyes become a better shooter. You know, it's a love affair between the ball and you, and how much time you spend in that relationship will determine how successful you will be. First time I played basketball, I probably was 8, 7 or 8, and I didn't really know what I was doing. but I knew that I can put the ball in the hoop, you know. So that's all that matters, putting the ball in the hoop. Tell me, what comes to mind when you hold that ball? Put it in the hole. Uh, John, this is some of the Naismith memorabilia I've collected.

The first item is a peach basket that came out of a photo shoot with your grandfather here in Kansas City, I think in 1936.

There's some things that identify it, but basically there's a flaw in the basket that shows up in the photograph from the Kansas City Star. Correct. Yeah, he used that in a publicity shot on the campus of the University of Kansas behind Strong Hall.

Is this the picture from the Kansas City Star that you're familiar with, the basket?

Not really. The one I saw was on campus. I have not seen that picture, but it's interesting because I haven't seen it. Well, well, look at that. My head's bigger than his. We think this is an early picture of him at McGill University, or perhaps in high school. I'm going to say This is definitely him with that chin. It's definitely him with that chin. Uh, I'm going to say this would more than likely be prior to McGill, but probably high school or shortly thereafter. John, this is a first edition copy of the, of Basketball, correct?

Done by your grandfather, published about the time of his death.

Dr. Nishmit died November of 1939. The book was actually published December 7th, 1941. Pearl Harbor was bombed the same day, so nobody bought the book. This is an early athletic award that came out of the collection, and obviously— look at that— obviously to your grandfather from a tug-of-war contest at McGill University. Well, let's look at that. He was in the tug-of-war his whole life, in the early life, believe me. This is the earliest athletic award I know of, although he's involved in a number of things. Yeah, this is, this is really a piece of work here to get an award for a tug of war. That's all right. My grandfather actually came and baptized me in Dallas when I was born and spent 3 days with my parents and took the train back to Lawrence and died in 3 months. Even though I didn't know him, he knew me. It's a unique position in life. It's something you live with from the time you're a kid. I recall as a young guy, 6, 7, 8 years old, kneeling down on the basketball court at a local college game with my dad and the ball, and everybody was applauding. I thought they were applauding for me. It took me a long time to figure out what they were applauding for, but, you know, I thought, this is great. I don't know what I did. As a young kid, we lived on a ranch in Colorado. We didn't have power, we lit lanterns. And yet here's this huge sideboard in this little bitty room, and in this huge piece of furniture was this document. And we knew it was the rules to basketball, didn't mean a whole lot to us. The rules actually laid in my grandfather's desk for the first 30-some-odd years, and they were simply folded and put in his desk. When he died in 1939, And then he gave them to my dad. And my dad had them for 41 years. And they never really saw daylight. In 1968, my mother died. And that's when a gentleman who was a collector had offered $1 million for the rules. And my dad said, "We'd rather loan them to the Hall of Fame to be displayed so everybody can see them." 'Cause they'd never been seen. We took them to the Hall of Fame, and unfortunately they never got displayed there. They were there 27 years. So I went to the Hall of Fame and took the rules back in 1995, and my brother, sister, and I donated them to the foundation. November 28th, 1999, we showed them the first time in Baltimore, Maryland. We've shown them since then probably 60 or 70 times. The reason I show them is if we don't do something to try to change the sportsmanship issues and say, hold it, this is not how it's intended. Here's who Dr. Naismith was. Here's what he stood for. Here's how the game was invented. How can we expect other people to? I saw a game one day on TV and they put a player in the game to purposely hurt people. And I stood up in the living room and said, I won't say what I said, but it was over. I really said I'm going to dedicate the rest of my life into this game, to be the caretaker. As long as I live, I will do that. My grandfather, as I said, must have been a powerful man because he says you don't make money out of the sport, but you're the caretaker of it. Maker to the next generation. This is his game. He's the one that created it, not me, not my father, and I don't think we lose sight of that. This is Dr. Naismith's game. David Stern said when I first started the foundation that I was carrying the family torch. I said, David, the torch was laying in the mud and it was going out and I picked it up. Now I'm running with it. To the extent that John Naismith has picked up up the cause of reminding us about the game and its roots and about the contribution that Dr. Naismith made and the fact that these still exist. I think he's become sort of an important part of our folklore. You know, sometimes people believe folklore, sometimes they don't. In Yan's case, you really couldn't possibly believe that he exists, but then there he is. He's upon us, and so you believe it. And we have been admiring of him and supportive of his efforts for many years.

If we think of the rules being like the Constitution, it's good to have a gadfly that goes along with them, somebody with a Naismith name who knows the story cold and can tell the human tales that go with the game that we all see and goes with those two pages. Pages of yellowed parchment paper. If it's going to be in anybody's hands, it ought to be in the hands of a Naismith.

After he invented the game of basketball in 1891, he stayed in Springfield 4 years at the YMCA, but he had an ongoing concern that he didn't know how to heal his players. He really wanted to get his doctor of medicine degree, and he applied at Gross Medical School, which is now part of University of Illinois. University of Colorado in Denver. Was accepted, and the YMCA in Denver gave him an instructor's position. It was a happy time for him, but there was something happened in his life that just devastated him. In 1898, a young kid, I think was 16 years old, was tumbling and broke his neck and died instantly. I think possibly because of where he came from and his upbringing and his sympathetic nature, it almost took Doc out. They would find him at 3 o'clock in morning, kneeled down on the floor of the gym crying. He felt he was responsible because this kid was under his tutelage. He wasn't doing well. He's going negative. He was going down. A lot of things changed his life, and this is one of them. It's the University of Kansas, halfway across the country. He needed a combination athletic director, coach, and pastor. And they wired Amos Alonzo Stagg, who was Naismith's best friend, who was at the University of Chicago. The famous wire came back, said, James Naismith is a doctor of divinity, a doctor of medicine, a teetotaler, a nonsmoker, an all-around athlete, and the possessor of a vocabulary without cuss words. University of Kansas wired Denver offering Naismith the job. Naismith was praying to God to help him. Said that he can't believe there's a God if God won't give him a way to overcome what he was going through because of this boy's death. So Naismith admittedly thinks that the Lord put this in his path. He went to Kansas and stepped off the train there in 1898 and was there for 41 years. I think that's probably the final turning point that molded the rest of his life. In 1936, Dr. Naismith brought the game of basketball to the Olympics for the first time. Dr. Naismith went to Berlin and he was a guest of Adolf Hitler. He told my dad when he came back he didn't like Hitler, he was afraid of him, and he made a point to tell my dad that. I thought it was kind of a strange insight because we still weren't quite sure what was going on. Because in '36, Hitler was already doing dastardly things in Europe, but people in the United States had a tendency to shut their The reason he was going there, that was the first year that basketball was ever played in the Olympics. Over 50 nations are represented here today, to be quite exact, 51. Competition will be keen, for each country has chosen its best to compete against the rest of the world. But there wasn't enough money for Naismith to go to the Olympics, so the National Association of Basketball Coaches put all this together. Together. Fogg Allen, as his successor and really the originator of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, really thought it would be a great thing to do and important for the association to get Dr. Naismith to the '36 Olympics. Their plan at that time was that they would gather pennies at each college basketball game being played. It became known as the Naismith penny. So they actually made it possible Responsible for my grandfather and my grandmother to go to Berlin in 1936. He was the first inventor of a game to see his sport played in the Olympics. It was actually played on a clay court. I had a thrill about 3 years ago, I had a package come in the mail one day, and it's actually a picture of my grandfather throwing the first ball up, and the ball's very high for a center throw, and the two guys are just starting to jump, and Naismith has his back to the camera. Dr. Naismith said when he got back it was the proudest moment of his life to see his game played in the Olympics. Now you think about his life, and to say this is the proudest moment, that tells it in a nutshell. That he realized he had impacted the whole world, and that again is what put him back to the barn, saying he had fulfilled that silent vow. I was Dr. Naismith's student in the spring semester of 1937. He was a handsome fellow and had a little mustache, gray mustache, And he was quietly spoken, never had any discipline problem because it was so interesting to hear him talk. He talked to us about hygiene and clean living and keeping out of trouble, and it wasn't any sex education at all. It was phys ed, how to exercise and how to conduct your life as a gentleman. He emphasized good manners and he didn't mention basketball at all. Never said anything about his experience in basketball, where he had come from, and that he had been the inventor of the game. He never mentioned it at all, so we really didn't know that. It was later on, years later, that I realized I had a famous man, and I was told, and I've read about him since, that that was the last class he taught. Maud passed away in 1937. He met a younger woman named Florence. Florence was the house mother for the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, which he was a member of pretty well for life, and Doc got married roughly 6 months before he passed away. And it was a real love affair, but Doc made one thing very clear. When he died, he wanted to be buried next to Maud. Dr. Naismith died the 28th of November in the year 1939 in Lawrence, Kansas on University Drive in his home. He had found out a few months before he had cancer and he didn't tell anybody. Only my dad knew it and one of the daughters knew it. He died from a stroke. It was a big funeral because there was a lot of family and of course people from the university. After he returned from the war, Dr. Naismith finally took advantage of his Doctor of Divinity degree and he started preaching. He was a circuit preacher going from small church to small church around the Lawrence, Kansas area on the weekends because a lot of the small churches in the Lawrence, Kansas area. They couldn't afford a full-time preacher. You know, people think he's wealthy, but you got to remember something about the Naismith family. Doc said, "You don't make money out of the game." Doc actually had his house repossessed when he was 74 years old because he simply wouldn't take money for what he did. But that same year, he turned down in excess of $200,000 to endorse a cigarette. He was never much for materialistic things. He always wanted to give. He was a giving person. I have a picture of Michael Jordan myself when Michael was the only active player to receive the Naismith Sportsmanship Award. I love this. I knew you would. My kids are going to know this. This is going to be, uh, when Michael received the first Naismith Good Sportsmanship Award, which is a family award, not a Hall of Fame award, I told Michael, you're receiving this for your play on and off the court. There's never been another active player to receive this. And Michael's comment was very simple. He said, I owe my life to the game. Thank you, Michael Jordan, for bringing your best to the court and for bringing your best to the children of the world. Thank you. First of all, let me say thanks, John, for, for the opportunity that you've given me to receive this award. I mean, I'm stunned. I think that, you know, I must give thanks to Mr. Naismith for, for creating the game in 1891. I think today I live by I play the game, I enjoy the game, and it meant a lot for me to have an opportunity to play the game. And without his invention, certainly his dedication to the game of basketball, myself and other athletes who have played the game of basketball certainly wouldn't have been able to play the game. And to him and to you— the award is the largest and recognized as the most beautiful historic award in sports. We've given 37 of them. It's all levels of the game, and it's purely for sportsmanship on and off the court. Michael was the first and only active player to date to receive that. Now Steve Nash has been selected. It's incredible to be recognized by the Naismith family and to be in company with, with Michael Jordan, the greatest player ever to play the game, is beyond my wildest dreams. And basketball allowed me to really grow as a person. It allowed me to have a sense of teamwork and community. You know, in many ways, I think it definitely has impressed upon me a sense of a global community and how important it is to give back and to be a part of change. This is a hell of a crowd, bunch of kids. This was great. Dr. Naismith had been in the game. He was born in Almonte, Canada in 1861. He was orphaned when he was 9 years old. He was a high school dropout at 15. He was a borderline alcoholic at 22, went back and got his high school diploma, graduated from McGill University as a doctor, and then he was a Presbyterian minister. Invented the game of basketball. The man never quit. He never forgot his fellow man. The reason I'm telling you all this is because to win this award, you have to have those same qualities. Enough of the history lesson. The other reason I'm here— Naismith can have favorite players. I just want to let y'all know that Steve's my favorite player in the NBA. This game came from A man who just wanted to teach his students something new and incorporate different athletic values and sportsmanship. And when that's your motive, your motives are pure, great things happen. And it's a great story. Future's strong. Future is very strong. This game keeps growing. Still the fastest growing sport Sport among kids. Simple reason that a guy 30 years old wrote 13 rules 114 years ago, 10 of them are still in the game. He nailed it, as I always say. He built a good ship starting off. I think we got a good run in front of us. How many lives had you predicted because of your faith would be affected? You acted on your dream, we started playing. One in a million. Everyone wants to be a dreamer, imagining life would last forever. And even though you're gone, you're not forgotten. One in a million. What would you think if you were standing here now? Would you still shy away from glory? Pretend you're just another face in the crowd? But look around. Look around. Holding on tight to your convictions, never losing sight of your vision, creating a life that would live One in a million.