Eddie Dooley

(Famous Sports AUTHORITY )

The Secret of Basketball’s Popularity

OOTBALL can be traced back to ancient har-

pistan, the game played by the Greeks; hockey
owes its origin to the sport of the ancient shep-
herds who with crooked sticks drove a crude ball
over hilly country; baseball indirectly can be
traced to the old Indian game of lacrosse or pos-
sibly to cricket; but basketball, the most recent of
the popular pastimes, owes its existence to all of
these games. The fact that it has grown in popu-
larity so fast that today it surpasses all of them in
spectator and player interest, is a tribute to the
farsightedness and ingenuity of its inventor, Dr.
James Naismith.

Few sports have the appeal that basketball has.
The proximity of the spectators to the players
makes them feel that they themselves are part of
the game. Quite naturally they thrill vicariously to
the fast moving plays, the sudden passes, and the
sensational shots. The fact that almost everyone at
the game, man, woman and child, has at one time
or another participated in the sport adds to the
enthusiasm.

The game is easily played and comprehended.
While difficult to master, there is nevertheless a

great deal of satisfaction and gratification in scor-

ing goals and in preventing one’s opponent from
scoring. All over the world courts are standard
equipment whether in a big metropolis like New
York or San Francisco or in an antiquated Arabic
city like Fez in northern Africa. Backboards with a
hoop attached are found wherever boys are at play.
In the back-yards of the flower bedecked huts of
Hawaii, the sun drenched haciendas of Mexico, and
the wind swept fields of Alaska, the equipment of
the cage pastime is in evidence.

The Philippine Islands has its hundreds of teams,
and all of them play the fast, stirring game with

the fervor and intensity with which it is played in
the United States. Truly basketball today circles the
world. It is the most democratic of sports, for every
man on the team is equally important and all are
dependent on each other. Of every team it can be
said that the whole is greater than the sum of the
parts.

In the brief fifty years of its existence, basket-
ball has come a long way from the crowded and
stuffy gymnasia of the robust nineties. The game
has advanced to the point today, where it is played
in brightly illuminated palestras and magnificent
indoor amphitheaters. In recent years, the shibbo-
leths which shackled it in the form of provincial
biases and sectional rule interpretations have been
erased by the flood of intersectional games.

Today teams can travel anywhere and feel at
home. Obviously the game has grown up. Formerly
cage quintets had some misgivings about traveling
any distance from their own bailiwicks. They knew
the hazards involved. Sectional biases and strange
provincialisms often made of basketball a rowdy
enterprise instead of a gentleman’s game.

No one has ever taken count of the number of
people who attend games, but it is estimated that
basketball plays to more than 90 million people
annually. How many play it is also a mystery, but
someone has said that Dr. Naismith’s game in half
a century has grown from 18 men to 18 million.
18 men constituted the number of players on the
two teams which initiated the sport at Springfield
in 1891. Today, there is no country in the world
that does not have its basketball players. Dr.
Naismith may not have known what he was starting,
but this must be admitted—he did start something.
so let us give honor where honor is due.