With many sports, it’s hard to trace an exact origin, while ball games are
fairly universal to cultures around the globe, and finding a specific
inventor can be difficult and nearly impossible. Basketball, on the other
hand, does not have that same problem. The game millions watch today had
its definite beginnings in the small town of Springfield, Massachusetts, in
the mind of Dr. James Naismith. The spread of basketball was made possible
primarily through two avenues; first, the YMCA gave the game an outlet that
was not only nationwide, but worldwide, in addition to spreading it among
young people, helping it grow through time. The second avenue was college.
College basketball was far more widespread and popular than any early
professional leagues. That is not to say, however, that the early
professional leagues did not matter, they were simply poorly organized. The
first pro basketball league, the National Basketball League, formed in 1898
and folded just six years later. From that point on, for a period of about
45 years, professional basketball in the U.S. was a series of loosely
organized leagues primarily in the northeast. Many of the professional
teams during this period were “barnstormers,” pro teams that
travelled to play local teams for money. None of the teams in existence
today come from those old leagues, though one team, the Original Celtics
from New York, helped inspire the naming of the Boston Celtics, while the
Harlem Globetrotters, just an exhibition team (not in a professional
league) came into existence in 1927. Still, while the teams did not last,
some of the changes they brought did. In 1908, the rule of a player being
ejected from a game after five fouls was introduced (five fouls is still
the standard in college basketball, while the pro game now uses six).
Basketball’s domestic growth was nearly equaled by its international
growth. The Christian missions that brought the game around the world
helped make basketball one of the world’s first truly global games; the
first international basketball tournament was the Inter-Allied Games,
played between the U.S., France and Italy in Paris in 1919. FIBA, the
Fédération Internationale de Basketball, the governing body of the sport
internationally, was formed in Geneva, Switzerland in 1932, almost 20 years
before the National Basketball Association, the game’s governing body in
the U.S. Just four years later, basketball became an Olympic sport, only
furthering its worldwide popularity (though its first exposure in the
Olympics came even earlier, in 1904 as an exhibition). Interestingly, the
U.S. was not one of the original members of FIBA; it joined two years
later, in 1934.