The Ball (27 page)

Early basketball action, ca. 1910.

That first game ended 1–0 on a 25-foot set shot by future YMCA executive secretary William R. Chase. Naismith's invention was a hit with the incorrigibles, and, as he later wrote, “word soon got around that they were having fun in Naismith's gym class.” Within weeks 200 spectators were lining the gallery for lunchtime games. At Christmas break, students took the popular game back to small towns across the country. Under the understated title “A New Game,” Naismith's 13 rules were published in the January 1892 issue of
The Triangle
, a YMCA publication that went out to every U.S. branch. Within months, games were taking place at YMCAs from Brooklyn to Crawfordsville, Indiana, and in just a few years college ball was underway. From Springfield, the game spread with viral speed through the YMCA's international network to Europe, South America, Japan, China, and the rest of the world.

I
once spent three gloriously fruitless weeks on a boat in the Bahamas searching for the spot where Columbus first set foot in the New World. I had old maps, fragmentary accounts of the Genoese navigator's first voyage, diligently dull reports from archaeological digs, and a healthy supply of sunscreen. Though it's been the focus of countless expeditions, there's not much knowledge to be gained from finding the spot. It doesn't much matter which scrubby cay he and his crew first planted a cross upon, declaring it and all that lay beyond its shores property of the Spanish crown. What matters is everything that followed.

And yet there was, and always is, the romantic allure of finding
the spot
, that holy grail of discovery for any archaeologist or historian, whether they'll admit to it or not. The spot on the African savannah where humans first walked upright. The spot in the Fertile Crescent where agriculture got its start. The spot between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where blunt reed was first applied to clay tablet to carve the written word. The spot where the first baseball bat struck a ball and where the circuit of bases was first run.

For most historical events or evolutionary turning points, including that first line drive, there's either no spot to uncover or way too many to count. But that's never stopped us from searching, as baseball historians continue to do in their quest for the earliest, first appearance of baseball on American soil. Sometimes our pilgrim urge to stand on sacred ground is so compelling that we invent spots, like Plymouth Rock and Cooperstown, and persuade ourselves to believe.

That's why I experienced a rare thrill, an archaeologist's tingle of discovery, when I found myself standing on the cracked pavement at the corner of State and Sherman Streets in Springfield, Massachusetts, beneath the flickering golden arches of McDonald's, inhaling the output of frialator vents that rattled in the cold December wind. I was standing on
the spot
. Never mind that the spot was on, as I'd been warned, “the wrong side of town,” a drug-ridden neighborhood where the liquor stores offer check-cashing services and where a recent drive-by shooting in broad daylight had left a 21-year-old man dead and a 13-year-old boy with a bullet in his leg. Even such tragedy couldn't keep me away. This was, after all, the undisputed spot where Dr. James Naismith—the original Dr. J—tacked up his peach baskets to the balcony of a cramped YMCA gym long since torn down, divided 18 men into two teams, and gave the world “basket ball.”

Like most wannabe discoverers, I was of course merely retreading well-worn ground. Though largely forgotten and neglected like so much in Springfield, the site of basketball's invention has long been known. In its heyday, this western Massachusetts city was one of the most important industrial centers in the nation. Straddling the banks of the Connecticut River at the nexus of major roads leading to New York, Boston, Montreal, and other major ports, Springfield was chosen by George Washington in 1777 as the site of the fledgling nation's first armory. Here, Thomas Blanchard developed a lathe that could turn out interchangeable parts for the mass production of rifle stocks, an innovation that sparked the development of assembly line production. The armory turned out the first musket as well as the famous Springfield rifle, cranking out 200,000 a year to supply Union forces during the Civil War. “From floor to ceiling, like a huge organ, rise the burnished arms,” wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of the polished guns packed in racks. At its production peak during World War II, the armory employed 14,000 men and women to turn out M1 Garand rifles.

Aside from firearms and free throws, the “City of Firsts,” as it has been called, gave us the first American-English dictionary (Merriam-Webster), the first gasoline-powered car (Duryea Motor Wagon Co.), the first successful motorcycle (Indian), and
The Cat in the Hat
, by way of native son Theodore “Dr. Seuss” Geisel.

The city's downward spiral began in 1968 with the Pentagon's controversial decision to close the armory. As with so many other manufacturing centers, “white flight” to the suburbs drained the inner city of population and tax revenue as close to 50 percent of the industrial employment dried up. Urban blight spread and gang violence and crime peaked in the late 1990s and early part of the millennium. Beset with mismanagement and corruption, the city faced financial collapse and was taken over by a state-controlled finance board for five years to get it back on track. In 2008, even as it was showing signs of recovery, Springfield showed up on a Forbes list of America's “Fastest Dying Cities” alongside depressed Rust Belt centers like Flint, Michigan, and Youngstown, Ohio.

In 2002, as part of a major redevelopment plan, the Basketball Hall of Fame opened a gleaming new $103 million, 80,000-square-foot facility on a strip of land wedged between I-91 and the Connecticut River. The Hall of Fame, which had its humble beginnings decades earlier on the campus of Springfield College, deserves credit for sticking with the city at its low point. Today hundreds of thousands of visitors a year from all over the world circle the Hall of Fame's steel dome to pay homage to giants of the game and gawk at Michael Jordan's oversized shoe collection. But most never see Springfield. They get whisked safely from offramp to onramp without ever needing to set foot, or drop a dollar, in the city of the game's birth—and without ever seeing the spot where it all began.

Aaron Williams wanted to change that.

A lifelong resident and civic leader who lives near State and Sherman, Williams always knew the game was invented nearby, but like most people had never thought about where. When he learned that the first tip-off took place right down the street from his house in Mason Square, he formed a coalition of neighborhood groups and business leaders, enlisted the help of the Hall of Fame, and began raising money for a monument.

“People see [the Square] as one of the poorest communities in the state. I see it differently,” he told the local newspaper.

For Williams, the area's storied past could help restore pride where pride was in short supply. He also thought a monument might attract visitors and spur some economic development. Williams knows all too well his neighborhood's reputation for crime might keep some visitors away, but he exudes an unshakeable “build it and they will come” idealism that carried the project to completion.

“How do you calm fear?” he asked a reporter at the unveiling. “You show them history.”

That December day as I stood under the board announcing a special on “Sausaqe and Eqq McMuffin” (a thinly veiled plea for
g
s, no doubt), I thought how fitting it was for McDonald's—which has over the years employed the likes of Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, LeBron James, and Dwight Howard to hawk the counterintuitive levitational powers of the Big Mac—to have planted their corporate flag in this hallowed spot and claimed it as their own. Naismith, who by the 1930s was already decrying the commercialization of his game, would be pivoting in his grave. The board outside the franchise should actually read, I thought to myself, “Basketball: Billions and Billions Served.”

But no flag had been planted. There were no photos, no plaque, not even a commemorative Happy Meal toy—nothing to acknowledge the spot and its importance. I asked a young man wiping down tables if he knew of any markers. He stared at me blankly and then called over his manager, who seemed annoyed at being pulled off the McNugget line.

“Nothing here,” he said. “But they just put up a statue of some people across the street.”

I dodged four lanes of traffic and trudged through a hard crust of blackened snow to find a modest bronze sculpture of a white man and a young black boy playing ball together—the manifestation of Williams's vision. The man wears a turn-of-the-century uniform with the number 18 on his back. He's bounce-passing (somewhat anachronistically, since they didn't do that back then) the ball to the boy, who wears 91 on his back and Jordans on his feet. The game being played is not across space but across generations, cultures, and race—an assist from past to future. On the surrounding Plexiglas panels, a black-and-white photo of the first team, a cluster of tank tops and walrus mustaches, is exposed by passing headlights, then fades back into the dark.

When I spoke to Williams later about his role in making the monument a reality, he humbly played down his role. “Hey, I just didn't want another kid to walk by that spot every day dribbling a ball and not know what happened here.”

W
hen Naismith first set foot on that same spot in the fall of 1891, he was fresh from studying for the ministry at McGill University in Montreal. A devout Christian and talented athlete, he found himself as a young man torn between his desire to serve God and play ball. At McGill, he was a star football player, and while in Montreal he had picked up the Indian game of lacrosse, playing for the Montreal Shamrocks, one of the first professional teams. His friend and coach at Springfield College and the University of Chicago, Amos Alonzo Stagg, later told Naismith that he chose to play him at center because “you can do the meanest things in the most gentlemanly manner.” At the time, with controversy brewing over violence in football, playing that and other rough sports was viewed by some as inconsistent with a Christian way of life. Naismith's teachers at the seminary disapproved of his double life on the gridiron and were none too pleased when he took to the pulpit one Sunday after a rough game against Ottawa with two black eyes.

But Naismith saw things differently. To him, the lessons learned in the heat of the scrum—lessons about self-control, sportsmanship, decency—were as important as anything he could deliver from a pulpit. He was, in this regard alone perhaps, of a mind with French existentialist Albert Camus, who wrote that he owed to the soccer of his youth “all that I know most surely about morality and obligation.” It became clear to the 30-year-old Naismith “that there were other ways of influencing young people than preaching.” He figured that “if the devil was making use of [athletics] to lead young men, it must have some natural attraction, and that it might be used to lead to a good end as well as to a bad one.” Forced to choose between the ministry and athletics, he found a way to merge the two at the YMCA.

The Young Men's Christian Association got its start in London in 1844 with the first U.S. branches opening in Montreal and Boston in 1851 dedicated to “the improvement of the spiritual, mental, and social conditions of young men.” The Y movement emerged to deal with the seismic social and demographic changes that were sweeping western Europe and North America with industrialization. As men left farm and country, and often families, behind to take new factory jobs in the cities, the traditional social fabric began to unravel for many. At the same time, millions of immigrants poured into East Coast cities in search of new opportunities and new lives.

“These young guys were staying in rooming houses together, or homeless on the streets, with no families to look after them,” said Harry Rock, director of YMCA relations at Springfield College, whose campus office is in an 1894 redbrick Victorian gymnasium building. “They were getting into alcohol, prostitution, gambling, crime. So the Y formed to serve these wandering souls and keep them on the straight and narrow.”

With rented space, they opened reading rooms and meeting houses where men could come off the street to read hometown newspapers, join Bible classes, attend lectures, and get counseling.

“They quickly learned that Bible classes were a tough sell to these young guys,” said Rock. “Think about it. You don't say ‘Come to the Y to build your Christian character.' You say, ‘Come in and work out or play ball.' ”

And so in 1869 the first YMCA gyms opened in New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., with programs that dusted off Civil War military calisthenics. The whole idea of exercising indoors was still a new concept for most Americans, though the elite universities had begun building their own indoor facilities to train athletes in the winter months. Borrowing from exercise systems well established in Germany and Scandinavia, the new gyms were outfitted with dumbbells, pulleys, Indian clubs, parallel bars, running tracks, and other elaborate apparatus. Once incandescent lighting became broadly available in the 1880s the popularity of indoor recreation and sports began to find some traction.

After just a few years, there were nearly 400 YMCA gyms throughout North America. But with the expansion came serious management issues. Pay was poor and turnover high for the secretaries who ran the facilities as well as the physical education directors in charge of programs. Charged with “watching for the souls of men,” many secretaries failed to watch their budgets as well, leading to financial collapse for many branches. Clearly some training was needed. So Robert McBurney, the general secretary, turned to a colleague and Springfield minister, David Allen Reed, to set up a YMCA Training School. Reed, who was already training Christian lay workers, managed to lure the school to town with a building site ready for construction—at the corner of State and Sherman.