(Continued from third page preceding) the only major
sport which is national with us. Baseball stems from
cricket and rounders; football, from rugby and soccer;
but basketball is thoroughly American.

The game was invented nearly half a century ago by
a harassed gym instructor named James A. “ Pop” Nai-
smith in Springfield, Massachusetts. Pop had an espe-
cially lively group of boys in his gymnasium one year,
and was finding it hard to keep their minds on their work
and their chins on the bars. So one day, in desperation,
he kicked the bottoms out of a couple of peach baskets
and stuck them up on facing walls. Then he chose up
sides, chucked in a soccer ball, and hoped for the best.
The result was basketball.

““T soon found,”’ Pop said the other day—he’s seventy-
six now and a Professor of Education, “ that it filled the
same place during the winter season that football and
baseball did in the autumn and summer.”

Other gym instructors found that out, too. The new
game: had a mild vogue in the East, mostly in Y’s, and
gathered strength as it rolled westward. The Springfield
start was in 1891. By 1893 the game had a firm foothold
in Detroit, with Adams Y and Detroit Athletic Club
furnishing the keenest competition.

Pop’s game had only one rule: that a player could ies
~ only one step with the ball in his hand. The present game
has a hundred and thirteen rules. And therein lies the

reason why basketball developed-so. slowly.as a national ©

game,

Coaches, teams, players made their own rules. Dif-
ferent systems of play grew up in different localities. The
game went into a polyglot era.

The first national regulatory body, the Basketball
Rules Committee, came into existence in 1934 and
promulgated the national rules which are now universally
accepted. Since then the growth of the game has been
phenomenal. Last year ninety-six per cent of all schools

and colleges were playing basketball, and leagues, both |

professional and amateur, were operating all over the
country.

Recognition of basketball by the general public, how-
ever, has been delayed until recently by the lack of seat-
ing capacity already referred to.

Butall of thisis rapidly changing. The Big Tencolleges
of the Middle West now have large arenas constructed
especially for basketball. In the East, Pennsylvania built
its Palestra; in the West, Leland Stanford built its
Cracker Box. Important games attracted important
crowds. The press gave it space. Basketballitis became
an epidemic. Personalities began to emerge.

HERE had long been successful and colorful coaches;

but until uniform rules made intersectional contests
possible their fame reached only limited areas. Finally,
at the University of Nebraska, where Pop Naismith had
gone as Professor of Physical Education, a great basket-
ball mentor of national repute, “ Phog” Allen, emerged
as a trainer not only of players but of coaches; and in

1930 one of his pupils, John Bunn, migrated to Cali--

fornia, where, as basketball coach at Stanford, he be-
came the game’s best known figure.

Bunn’s most notable contribution to basketball is the
jumpless game. Instead of bringing the ball out to the
center after each goal and tossing it up in the air for
what is known as the “ center jump,” Bunn gives the ball
at once to the team that has just been scored on for a
toss-out from under its own goal.

This change adds even more speed to the game and
between six and seven minutes of playing time. Also, it
reduces the advantage that the tall player has always
had over the short player. The jumpless game is now in
the national rules.

The big universities are at last wise to the importance
of the game from a financial standpoint. In most colleges
basketball is the only sport besides football which pays
for itself.

As the game increases in general public interest our
shrewd graduate managers appreciate more and more
the value of colorful personalities to draw a big gate.
Already they are scouting the high schools and academies
for players who are not poison at the box office.

In 1934 a new fillip was given to the intercollegiate:
game by a young New York sports writer named Ned
Irish, who began promoting intercollegiate matches in
Madison Square Garden. From the very first game, this
professional promotion of an amateur sport proved itself
a huge success.

To be sure, the game still suffers, as does football,
from the absence of a real world’s series to determine
the national championship. Such synthetic attempts as
have been made to determine the champion team have
only increased the confusion. Last year, for instance,
Duke won the Southern, Dartmouth the Eastern, Pur-
due the Western, and Stanford the Pacific Coast Con-
ference titles; yet the tentative effort at a world’s series,
staged by the Metropolitan Basketball Writers’ Associa-
tion in New York, did not bring any of these leading
teams together.

All we know for sure is that skill in the game, like
interest in it, seems to be very evenly distributed.

In our larger cities public-school athletic leagues,
Catholic Youth Organizations, the Y’s, and many Protes-.
tant churches support basketball fives and conduct tourna-
ments.

So-called commercial and industrial leagues also
flourish in the metropolitan areas. And as I write, poli-
ticians and retail liquor dealers are also going in heavily
for the basketball-sponsoring game. Popular, too; are
the ‘intercity leagues composed of teams manned by
outstanding ex-college players.

VOWEDLY professional clubs and leagues are also
springing up in increasing numbers every year. For
example, there is the American Professional Basketball
League, which embraces principal cities in the East and
Middle West.

Good players in the league sometimes earn as high
as $1,500 a month, which may not compare with the top
baseball salaries, but is not bad for a five- or six-months
season. Asa result, the pro game is attracting more and
more young college grads who are all dressed up and

have no place to go.

On the whole, however, professional basketball is still
in the barnstorming stage. Freak teams like the bewhis-
kered House of David, the Roller-Bearing Flashes (who
play the game on roller skates), and the Harlem Hotten-
tots perform to sell-out houses in competition with locally
known fives. The team captained by Jesse Owens, the
Olympic champion, has cleaned up as a sort of olio be-
tween features in the movie houses.

Professional basketball offers a longer season than
pro football does, and in the end should provide a larger
income. Also, since it is played at night, the game enables
its players to engage in business of their own during
the day.

Another great advantage which the court game has
over both baseball and football is the very general partici-.
pation in it of women. Basketball is a strenuous game.. °
But its strenuousness is of the quick-strength rather than
the brute-strength variety. Quickness and resourceful-
ness are prime requisites. Into such a picture the woman
athlete fits like a silk stocking.

In high schools the girls’ basketball teams are almost
as many and as popular as.the boys’. In co-ed colleges
the same situation prevails. And in colleges exclusively
for women basketball is the major sport.

What the basketball craze, with its high entertainment
value, its appeal to women, and its after-dark playing
schedule, will do to the movies these winter nights, no-.
body can rightly tell.

With the development of floodlighted open-air arenas,
basketball is also sure to cut into big-league baseball’s
summer take, because, although a game of vast activity,
it can be played to advantage outdoors on the hottest
evenings—and will be so played, I prophesy, within the
next two years.

Then indeed basketball will have fulfilled its destiny.
It will be a true national game, played by both men and
women, appealing to both men“and women spectators,
enjoyed North and South, East and West, indoors or
outdoors, all the year round!

THE END

LIBERTY,