The Man Who Invented Basketball Didn’t Care About Winning
Field Note: March Madness
My parents were saints of persistence. They wanted me to play a sport. Any sport.
We tried T-Ball. Strike one.
Then Little League baseball. Strike two.
Somewhere in the fog of childhood, I even played one game of church-league basketball.
Just one.
Strike three.
The failure was not my parents’ fault; it was entirely mine. I like sports well enough. Watching them, at least. But I was born with very little coordination and a dangerous amount of enthusiasm. I was the kid whose coach encouraged me with a kind pat on the back and a very long, very permanent seat on the bench.
And yet every March I find myself drawn back to the hardwood.
Not for the brackets.
Not for the NBA draft.
I return for the quiet Canadian minister who started it all with a peach basket.
The 1–0 Revolution
You know the story. On December 21, 1891, a young teacher named James Naismith gathered eighteen restless men in a Springfield, Massachusetts, gymnasium. Winter had trapped them indoors. The school had asked him to invent something to burn energy without breaking too many bones. Naismith improvised. He nailed two peach baskets to the balcony railing, handed the students a soccer ball, and wrote thirteen simple rules on two pages of paper.
That was the birth of basketball. The final score of that very first game? 1–0.
The game has changed a great deal since that afternoon. We have shot clocks, slam dunks, and television deals worth more than some countries. College players can sign endorsement deals before they even finish their homework.
But Naismith, a Presbyterian minister who believed sport could shape the soul, saw the gymnasium very differently. He once explained that he took the job because he wanted to “win men for the Master through the gym.” He wrote something that feels almost rebellious in our modern era of “branding”: “The aim of the game is to develop the man and not to make money or even to draw a crowd.”
Character Under Pressure
Naismith understood a simple truth about human nature: pressure reveals what lives inside us. He defined character as the set of ‘reflexes’ that determine our responses to the unexpected. He believed sport was the ultimate training ground for those reflexes. What do you do when a referee makes a bad call? How do you treat a teammate who fails? What happens when the game slips away in the final seconds?
To Naismith, small moments on the court shaped character beyond the game. Fittingly, while coaching Kansas, he retired with a losing record, the only one in that program’s history. What if winning was never the point?
The Student Who Was Not Allowed to Play
In 1933, John McLendon, a Black student who couldn’t play for Kansas due to segregation, sought out Dr Naismith on his father’s advice. Naismith listened and affirmed him: “Fathers are always right.”
For four years, the inventor of the game mentored the student whom the system tried to exclude. They talked about basketball, certainly, but they also talked about life and faith. McLendon eventually became one of the most influential coaches in history, credited by many with developing the fast break. But the lesson he remembered most wasn’t tactical. He later said of his mentor, “Dr Naismith said I owed it to myself to be the best example of Jesus Christ and his teaching that I could be.” That is the game doing exactly what the minister hoped it would do.
What Is the Game For?
We love our origin stories, but Naismith’s question still lingers: What is the game actually for? In the final pages of a book published after his death, Naismith offered a closing prayer for sport. He wrote, “Let us all be able to lose gracefully and to win courteously; to accept criticism as well as praise; and last of all, to appreciate the attitude of the other fellow at all times.”
He did not say “let us be famous” or “let us be dominant.” He said, “Let us be gracious.” It sounds simple, but in a world organised around winning at all costs and securing the spotlight, it is devastatingly difficult. Naismith was asking how we become better people, not just better players.
If we watch closely this March, we will most assuredly see it.
A pass arrives before anyone calls for it. A player moves to the right spot without thinking. For a few seconds, the whole team moves like one body.
No ego. Just trust.
I think Naismith lived for those moments.
The scoreboard tells us who won.
Character tells us why they played the game in the first place.
If this Field Note stirred a memory from your own sporting days, I’d love to hear it. The wins are fun, but the stories that shape us are usually the ones we remember best.