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In the subsequent couple of years, Naismith had the opportunity, while at the YMCA International Training School, to coach Phog Allen, who later followed Naismith after Naismith’s tenure as head basketball coach at Kansas University. Naismith’s nascent game of basketball soon caught fire, spreading from town to town through YMCA’s, colleges, and word-of-mouth. Using the equipment available at his disposal and drawing from his childhood experience in a game called ‘duck on a rock,’ Naismith fashioned a game with a peach basket and soccer ball in which the goal of the players was to, through teamwork and finesse, lob the ball into the basket. He called the restaurant where a waitress assured him he’d left with it.It was at the YMCA International Training School that Naismith, sensing unrest in his class of young adult males who had to repeatedly endure calisthenics and children’s games in the tough Massachusetts’ winter of 1891, set out to devise a new game. He was in Lawrence and realized he could not find the briefcase in his van, thinking he’d left it on a stool in a men’s room near a pay phone. Of course, there was the time that he thought he’d left them in a Hooters in Kansas City, Kan., in a fireproof metal briefcase. Naismith said the only time the two pages had been out of the family’s possession or not in a bank vault was during the 27 years it sat undisplayed at the old Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, and the brief time he allowed it to be shown in the Hall’s new building. Sotheby’s and Naismith said that had have no doubt that it was authentic. Rob Rains, the co-author with Hellen Carpenter of “James Naismith: The Man Who Invented Basketball,” said that if the Naismith document was the original version of the rules, “it’s one of the most valuable pieces of sports memorabilia ever sold at auction.” Nearly 40 years later, he added, “James Naismith 6-28-31.” Perhaps to ensure that people in the future would know the source of the rules, he also wrote in ink in the open space below Rule 13: “First draft of Basketball rules hung in the gym that the boys might learn the rules — Dec. “There’s nothing like this in the history of sport — and it’s in two humble typewritten pages.” “This is like Athena bursting out of Naismith’s head, full-blown,” said Selby Kiffer, the senior specialist for historic American manuscripts at Sotheby’s. It caught on quickly, and spread around the world by some of the young men taught by Naismith. to keep young men engaged in an indoor sport. But basketball is one of the few invented sports that Naismith, who was born in Canada, devised to meet a challenge from his boss at the Y.M.C.A. Football is derived from soccer and rugby. Baseball has roots in cricket, rounders and early folk games. Nearly every sport evolved from something else. A few years ago, Hellen Carpenter, a cousin he said he had never met, sold some of his grandfather’s effects at another auction. Naismith said that he contacted Sotheby’s to sell the rules to replenish the fund of the Naismith International Basketball Foundation, which he said had suffered because of his wife’s death and his health problems. In a telephone interview from North Carolina last week, Ian Naismith said the family has previously had offers for the document, but had turned them down.

Sotheby’s expects it to sell for at least $2 million. Now, it is safeguarded at Sotheby’s, which will auction it in Manhattan on Dec. They have traveled from Springfield to Denver to Lawrence, Kan., to Corpus Christi, Tex., and various homes in the Plains states. The pages have survived in Naismith’s desk drawers, safe-deposit boxes and a hidden drawer in a mahogany sideboard. It was to be a gentlemanly game without “shouldering, holding, pushing or striking,” where the ball “may be batted in any direction” (but not with a fist), and a “player cannot run with the ball” but “must throw it from the spot on which he catches it.”ĭribbling had not occurred to Naismith. Training School in Springfield, Mass., in the winter of 1891. Naismith enumerated 13 rules for a game that he hoped would appeal to students at the Y.M.C.A. Traces of tape that fixed a tear are visible across the top of the other. The two typewritten pages are yellowed, creased and a bit frayed.

James Naismith, don’t look bad for age 119. The first rules of basketball, as set down by Dr.