aA

JIM NAISMITH, THE MAN

By Raymond P. Kaighn
(A fellow student)

AN ORPHAN LAD stood on the frozen bank of
a Canadian river watching the other boys
skate. He was too poor to buy a pair of skates and
too proud to ask his uncle to buy them for him.
But he was out there skating the next day with a
home-fashioned pair he had constructed out of a
couple of old files firmly set in strips of hickory
wood. That resourceful mind which dealt effectively
with necessity as it arose was the same that gave
the world of sport and recreation the game of

basketball. ,

Much has been written regarding the birth of

basketball, which was conceived to meet a need .
for a game that could be played in a limited space, :

that would have the vigor and thrill of football or
lacrosse but without quite so much bodily risk,
and that would be highly interesting to spectators.
But what of the man Jim Naismith, granting that he
had an inventive mind and that he was the father
of the most popular game in the world, now enjoy-
ing its Golden Jubilee?

The writer was a student at the Y.M.C.A. Train-
ing School in Springfield, Massachusetts, at the
time Jim sprang his brain child on an expectant
group of fellow students who had little enthusiasm
for mass calisthenics after a wonderful season of
football under the leadership of Lonnie Stagg. That
same Stagg created out of a total student body of
less than forty (not more than a half dozen of
whom had ever had a football in their hands) a
team that scored on Harvard and Yale—an un-
precedented feat for a small college in those days.
It also rolled up creditable scores, ties, and vic-
tories over Amherst, Williams, Trinity, and other
schools with ten, twenty, and more times the en-
rollment of the Springfield Training School. Next
to Stagg himself, the mainstay of the team was Jim
Naismith at center. At the beginning of the nineties
lots of “beef” at center was considered orthodox
and essential. The players that Jim faced through
two strenuous seasons—and he played the whole
time in every vame—outweighed him from twenty
to fifty pounds. Any sense of superiority any one of
them entertained quickly evaporated after the first
ball was snapped. (The ball was “snapped” in
those years, not passed or thrown back from be-
tween the legs of the center.) A hundred and sixty-
odd pounds of concentrated T.N.T. was Jim Nai-

smith, with a broad strip of adhesive tape about his
head to hold back his ears from being brushed off,
the gleam of battle in his eyes, his bristling mus-
tache and determined jaw aggressively set—he was
a combination of mad bull and a bunch of wild-
cats! He never played dirty ball, always kept within
the rules of the game and -woe betide any center
opposite him who tried to do otherwise.

As a member of that football squad I came to
know Jim intimately, not only on the playing field
but also in contacts three times a day at the train-
ing table which, at the close of the football season.
was converted into an eating club with no change
in personnel. The hour about the table was often
tumultuous with arguing. Jim loved to start an argu-
ment. His eyes would snap and he would chuckle
as he got us stirred up. Usually it was something
that touched our patriotism. As a Canadian with
Scotch-Irish background he was ardently pro-Brit-
ish, and his comments about our national heroes
of Revolutionary days would always start a near
riot. Once excitement rose to the stage where taking
Jim out and rolling him in the snow was proposed.
but the idea was abandoned when Jim readily
acquiesced to our trying it.

He had had theological training in Canada, but
gave up the idea of going into the regular ministry
when he saw in physical education an opportunity
for serving his fellow men from the physical and
recreational approach. He did preach occasionally.
Once, when the day before in a football game he
had gotten a couple of beautiful black eyes, his
appearance in the pulpit was a bit startling to his
congregation! His sermons were thoughtful and
practical and delivered without much oratical effect.
Jim was a naturally good teacher and did a good
job with his subjects in the Training School. He
enjoyed his classroom work and his classes enjoyed
him. He never minded being disagreed with, and
the more that were drawn into an argument the
better he liked it. He might have made a fair lawyer,
but it would have spoiled an outstanding leader and
exponent of physical education, a professorship and
head of a department, which position he held for
many years at the University of Kansas.

In spite of Jim’s thorough “he-mannishness” there
was a tender and sentimental side to his nature
that broke through in many unaffected and simple