The Basketball Man: James Naismith

by Bernice Larson Webb

Important book on the history of basket ball.

439 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[Raghuveer Parthasarathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this because Naismith is in Andrew Gelman’s 2023 “seminar speaker” context (see e.g https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.ed... and https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.ed... ) Surprisingly interesting. Naismith studies to be a clergyman and a doctor, and is driven to promote physical fitness and exercise. This leads to his invention of basketball in 1891 – indoor sports basically didn’t exist except for unpopular activities like gymnastics – as well as a lot of other efforts, like volunteering with the army at the Mexican border and in France during World War I, where his main focus seems to have been preventing the troops from visiting prostitutes. The book isn’t thrilling – it verges on hagiography and is more or less a chronicle of events. Nonetheless, as a window on a different age, and the sort of energetic people who were able to have more of an impact on the world than seems possible in our own over-populated era, the book is interesting and more absorbing than I expected

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