CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: James Naismith and the Invention of Basketball

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Basketball is often thought of as an American game, but the man who invented it was Canadian. James Naismith was born in 1861 near Almonte, a small town in eastern Ontario. He lost both of his parents to illness while he was still a boy and was raised largely by an uncle on the family farm. As a child he enjoyed a game called “duck on a rock,” in which players tried to knock a stone off a larger rock by throwing stones of their own. He went on to study at McGill University in Montreal, where he was a keen all-round athlete. During those years he became convinced that physical activity could build a young person’s character as well as the body, and in 1890 he moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, to work at a training school run by the YMCA.

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In December 1891, Naismith was given a difficult assignment. A class of young men, restless at being kept indoors during the long New England winter, had grown bored with marching and gymnastics, and the head of the department asked him to invent a game that could be played inside. Naismith wanted a contest that rewarded accuracy and teamwork rather than sheer strength, and one that would not leave players bruised on a hard gymnasium floor. He therefore decided that no one could run while holding the ball, and that the goal should be placed above the players’ heads so that it could only be reached with a gentle, arcing throw. Two peach baskets were fastened to a balcony railing about three metres above the floor, a height that remains the standard today. He then wrote out thirteen basic rules for the new game.

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Basketball spread with remarkable speed. Graduates of the training school took jobs at YMCAs across North America, and the organization printed the rules in its magazine, so within a few years the game was being played in many cities and in several other countries. Early games looked very different from modern ones. Because the peach baskets still had their bottoms, play stopped every time a basket was made while someone climbed up to fetch the ball. Naismith himself later trained as a doctor and spent most of his career at the University of Kansas, where he taught physical education and became the school’s first basketball coach. He showed little interest in profiting from his invention.

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Canada has also played a notable part in the sport’s later history. When basketball first appeared as an official event at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Naismith attended as an honoured guest, and the Canadian team won the silver medal after losing the final, played outdoors in heavy rain, to the United States. Ten years later, on November 1, 1946, Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto hosted the first game ever played in the Basketball Association of America, the league that later became the NBA. The home team, the Toronto Huskies, lasted only a single season, and almost fifty years passed before NBA basketball returned to the country with the arrival of the Toronto Raptors and the Vancouver Grizzlies in 1995. In 2019, the Raptors became the first Canadian team to win the NBA championship.