Origin story not a slam dunk?
Some say Mohawk Valley village’s basketball claim may edge Springfield’s
With basketball fans still rehashing the outcome of this year’s NCAA season of March Madness, another basketball matchup is still unfolding and Herkimer, N.Y., is trying to upset Springfield, Mass.
Most would say the game is long over and Springfield clearly won it more than a century ago. But in this contest over the game’s origin story, some in this small village along the Mohawk River speculate the play of a local team may be evidence Herkimer beat Springfield to the game by nearly a year.
Here’s the story the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield tells: The athletic director of the YMCA in Springfield, invented basketball on Dec. 12, 1891.
“That day, a physical education instructor named James Naismith introduced a new game to his class of 18 young men in an otherwise unremarkable gymnasium at the YMCA International Training School in Springfield,” the Hall of Fame’s website notes.
But that’s not how the late basketball promoter and Herkimer resident Frank J. Basloe told it. In his 1952 book “I Grew Up With Basketball,” Basloe wrote the first game was played Feb. 7, 1891 at a YMCA in Herkimer. And, he added, that Naismith actually got the idea for the game
from Lambert Will, a 19-yearold who was an athletic director there, after Will wrote to Naismith about the new winter sport, asking him to form a team for him to play.
“We are not trying to claim that Lambert Will invented the game,” said Brion Carroll, chief operating officer of the Herkimer 9 Foundation, an organization that is investigating the history as part of a village’s revitalization plan that could include a basketball arena. “But with all due respect to those who believe otherwise, Will was a year ahead.”
Basloe, who created the Herkimer Globe Trotters, among other teams, said the first game of nine players pitted the YMCA against the Herkimer Businessmen Nine. The score was 9-3 with the Will’s YMCA team winning. Herkimer also played Albany that season, Carroll said.
“Herkimer got its ass kicked,” he said.
Certainly, back then, the game looked different, Carroll said.
Bushel baskets were placed at the ends of the court. When someone scored, a teammate would grab a chair, pull out the ball — then a medicine ball that was at first kicked, but later passed — out of the basket. Then, the action would start again.
To avoid stopping the game every time someone scored, Will got the idea to take the bottom out. But that didn’t work. Carroll said the baskets fell apart after about a quarter of play.
That’s when Will went to the Herkimer Iron Works and had a solid metal rim made. His mother, whom Carroll said is known locally as the Betsy Ross of basketball, knitted the first nets. The first referee was a town judge, Tom Murray.
“We want to give Lambert Will the credit for the influence he had in rules development that Naismith came up with,” Carroll said. “He wrote Naismith, saying, ‘this is what I think will work.’ Naismith never responded.”
Neither did the Basketball Hall of Fame, which the Times Union reached out to this week.
Adding to the mystery, Carroll said, was the Basketball Hall of Fame had an exhibition on Lambert Will in the 1994 with items donated from the Will family. ESPN wrote about it.
“A spotlight shone down on the Herkimer team photograph on a pedestal in a glass case in the center of the third floor ‘Basketball History’ room. Photos of Will were displayed,” the article noted. “Less than a decade later, a family member visited the Hall and found nothing tied to Herkimer or Lambert Will. The family was confused. They’d received no warning. To this day, they still have received neither an explanation, nor has their memorabilia been returned.”
Carroll said that was upsetting.
“No one could answer what happened,” Carroll said. “No one has been able to retrieve the stuff. It caused a lot of animosity.”
Carroll cautioned that the Herkimer 9 Foundation is still in investigative mode. He said he is searching for a tear sheet from a February 1898 article in the New York Daily Press that offers the same chronology that Basloe has in his book. He also points to the team photo, that includes Will, that shows the teammates holding a basketball dated 91-92, which he said indicates the Herkimer YMCA had a season that stretched from the fall of 1891 through the winter of 1892.
That photograph caught the eye of sports historian George Fosty, who along with his brother Darril Fosty, is putting together a documentary on the subject. George Fosty’s blog on the Society for North American Sports Historians and Researchers, wrote about the photo.
“For years the allegations of Basloe and the claim’s of Will have been dismissed on the grounds that a simple 19-yearold, small-town athlete, could not devise a sport considered by many to border on science,” Fosty wrote. “The problem with this claim, as evidenced with the photo first published in Basloe’s book, is that the evidence on the side of Lambert Will and the community of Herkimer continues to grow leaving many to wonder aloud if the true originator of basketball has yet to be officially recognized. After all, if the game of basketball was invented by Naismith in December of 1891, with the first ‘official’ game not played until early 1892, why then do the Herkimer players in this photo have a ‘91 (1891) season number inscribed on their ball?”
Carroll agreed it must be explored.
“If it didn’t happen, we are open to it,” Carroll said. “Basloe might have had his head on wrong. But all the evidence we are finding is about what the facts were at the time. Now it has become fiction in the minds of some.”