Practically the Olympics

In my first year of high school, the girls’ basketball coach took one look at my height and informed me I was going out for basketball. Practices happened every morning at 6:30—this teenager’s definition of insanity. I lasted four days.

Fast-forward fifty years and I finally have an answer to the age-old question, “What has basketball ever done for me?” This summer, basketball brought my daughter and her family to Manitoba for an extended visit and for the largest sporting event ever hosted in Winnipeg, the 2023 World Police and Fire Games, held July 28 through August 6. According to their website, the World Police and Fire Games is “a biennial Olympic-style competition with more than 8,500 athletes representing law enforcement, firefighters, and police officers from more than 50 countries across the world. These athletes compete in more than 60 unique sports.” My favorite son-in-law plays basketball with the Calgary Police.

We arrived early enough on the U of M campus to catch the end of a women’s game between the Philippines and Brazil. I loved the energized atmosphere of all the different languages and skin tones on the court and in the stands. At our son-in-law’s first game, against the Hong Kong Customs team, eight of the spectators’ seats were taken by our family. My kids, knowing my usual indifference to sports, seemed as entertained by my enthusiasm as by the game itself. It makes a difference when someone you love is on the court, right? Besides, it was clear from the start that our team would be the underdogs. Seven players, most of them forty or older, up against eight well-toned warriors who looked like they might be missing their college Algebra class. Our guys gave it their sweatiest best, though, and the game ended with a score of 61-39 for Hong Kong, the exchange of small gifts between players, and one mother-in-law hoarse from cheering.

If you look up the history of basketball, most sources will tell you it’s an American game invented in 1891 by James Naismith at the YMCA International Training School (now Springfield College) in Springfield, Massachusetts. What most sources don’t tell you is that Naismith was a Canadian. Dr. James Naismith, physical educator, author, inventor, chaplain, and physician was born in 1861 in Almonte, Ontario. As an instructor at the school, he responded to the need for an indoor winter recreational activity that could be easily learned. Naismith wanted to develop a game that emphasized skill instead of force. The result was a team sport in which the object was to score by throwing a large ball into a peach basket placed about ten feet above the floor. Naismith also defined 13 basic rules, including prohibitions against running with the ball. Also outlawed in basketball are shouldering, holding, pushing, tripping, or striking in any way. From Springfield, basketball spread throughout the world and it became an official Olympic men’s competition in 1936.

Naismith worked and lived in Springfield for 41 years until his death in 1939 in Lawrence, Kansas. He became the first member of the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1959 and was posthumously inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame and Canada’s Walk of Fame. In 2010, his original hand-written rules for the sport of basketball were sold at auction for $4.3 million, a sports memorabilia record. And finally, in August of 2023, basketball made it into Terrie Todd’s “Out of My Mind” blog, a world record of Olympic proportions.