ASKETBALL, born in Massachusetts, bred in

Indiana, cultivated in Kansas, remodeled in
California, and full dressed as America’s foremost
after dinner screech in Madison Square Garden, has
been translated into almost as many languages as
the Bible. And there are places in these United
States where it is taken just as seriously.

Its chief merit seems to be its adaptability. It can
make itself at home almost anywhere and that,
more than anything else, unless it be its simplicity,
is probably accountable for the game’s growth. AI-
most every game known to mankind has been
elaborated on in the course of its evolution. Basket-
ball, beginning with eighteen players, has been
cut to ten.

It seems sensible to admit that basketball filled
a spot that baseball created when winter arrived
and all kinds of weather drove people inside. It
has a little edge on our national pastime too for it
provided excellent entertainment for the spectator
in the evening when there was time for adult recre-
ation. It was not even as demanding in the matter
of equipment as baseball.

That little hall in the basement of the church
could be made into a gymnasium or perhaps the
assembly room in the high school would do. The
town hall didn’t have to undergo much remodeling
to make it fit for an evening’s game. And the neigh-
boring community was more than happy to buggy
over and have a go at the next town’s quintet. If
ever a game was born with a silver dollar in its
pocket, basketball was it.

The spirit of rivalry engendered by the playing
reached into bigger fields. One town would say the
next town’s gym wasn’t much so the next town
built a new one. Pride took charge of another
neighboring community so the aroused folks put

 

 

27

 

Ww. F. FOX, Sports Editor of the
Indianapolis News, is one of the
country’s leading basketball writers.

INDIANA-HOTBED OF BASKETBALL

up a better hall of goals in their town. Woven
into this natural growth came other accessories such
as the urge for education, the building of new
roads, the coming of the automobile, and the like.

Before talking about the state of Indiana, I
would like to say this. No one out our way claims
that Indiana produces better basketball players than
any other part of the nation. Indiana does claim
that for the size of it, it does turn out more good
basketball players than any part of the nation.
Maybe Indiana isn’t a fair locality to dwell upon
in tracing basketball’s growth, but certainly no sec-
tion of the country is more ideally suited for such
tracing than the home of Booth Tarkington, James
Whitcomb Riley, George Ade, Meredith Nicholson
and a few others who never shot a basket.

More words have been written about basketball
in Indiana and written in Indiana than the United
States Government has spent pennies for defense.
Why? Simply because, as I have contended for
years, the basketball gym is the night club of In-
diana and the supreme court out this way has a
couple of goals hanging at either end with bleach-
ers wherever there is room for them.

I know that the good citizens of one town sub-
scribed over $100,000 in three days for a new
basketball gym and they paid off that indebtedness
in no time at all without benefit of slot machines
or bingo. Another community of 4,900 population
built a basketball hall in which the seats were 28
inches wide and 28 inches deep and 5,200 could go
on a sit down strike without disturbing the play-
ers’ court. In one year that gymnasium paid $13,000.

All this was born of community spirit, and that
spirit reached over the whole state as completely
as the movies dominate Hollywood. I suppose the
game grew in that manner all over the nation.