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Bring On the "Bruisers"
Basketball
began in Springfield, but the five-man team was a Yale invention.
Maybe.
December
2000
by Judith Ann Schiff
Judith
Ann Schiff is Chief Research Archivist at the Yale University Library.
This
year, as in years past, the men's basketball team did not appear
on any preseason list of likely contenders for the national title. But fans with long memories -- actually, very long memories -- may
recall a time when the Elis ruled the courts. They may also remember
Yale as the place where the modern version of the game was born.
Basketball itself
was invented in 1891 by James Naismith, a physical education instructor at the
YMCA Training School (now Springfield College) in Springfield, Massachusetts.
The first public contest -- students versus faculty -- took place there on March
11, 1892, and nine men played on each side. Naismith's colleague Amos Alonzo Stagg,
a member of the Class of 1888 at Yale, shot the only point scored by the losing
teachers.
The trainees took
the new game to their hometown YMCAs, and it was at the "Y" in New Britain,
Connecticut, where Henry Waterman Peck, who graduated from the Sheffield Scientific
School in 1897, and his older brother William, Class of 1898, learned to play.
Both brothers entered Yale in the fall of 1894 -- "Harrie," as he was
known, in the three-year civil engineering program, and Billy in the College -- and they brought the fledgling sport with them to New Haven.
In a 1969 interview
with the Hartford Times, Harrie, who was 92 and the last
living member of Yale's first basketball team, reminisced about
basketball's early days. He recalled that they went into the splendid
new gymnasium on Elm Street, "hung up a pair of peach baskets"
on the railing of the running track, and started playing informal
games with YMCA and National Guard teams.
In February 1895
the Alumni Weekly published an article on "A New Game at the Gymnasium -- How It Is Played" in which "basket ball" was said to deserve "great
popularity because of its excellence as a general exercise as well as for the
sport." Under the leadership of captain Robert C. Fergus, 1895ML, two teams
of nine men each were organized. After winning eight and losing five in 1895-96,
Yale began its first recorded intercollegiate season in 1896-97, with Billy Peck
as captain of the Basketball "Bruisers."
Heavily padded pants
and striped jerseys comprised the uniform for a game described by students as
"blood-thrilling," and "indoor football." Yale played 15 games
that season, winning 11 and tying one, and fan support soared as Yale played three
colleges, Wesleyan in December, Trinity in January, and the University of Pennsylvania
in March. Defeating Wesleyan 39 to 4, it seemed as if the dashing and spirited
Yale team could score at will. But the victory over Trinity was close, 16-14,
and Penn loomed as a formidable foe.
Demand to witness
the contest was so great that for the first time reserved seats were sold at 35
cents each, in addition to the general seating at 25 cents. On March 20, a crowd
of 800 filled the gym to see a new form of basketball. For the Penn game, the
size of a team was reduced to five, and the change suited Yale's style. The contest
quickly became one-sided, with Yale winning 32-10.
According to most
basketball histories, this marks the first modern game between true college teams
with five players on a team. Some accounts, however, credit a game played by the
University of Chicago and the University of Iowa in 1896 as the first five-man-team
match. If so, there is still a Yale connection because the innovation is credited
to Chicago's physical education director, Amos Alonzo Stagg. (For his contributions
to the game, Stagg was enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield.
The only other Yalie in the Hall is Maurice Podoloff '13, '15LLB, the owner of
the New Haven Arena who formed the National Basketball Association in 1949 and
presided over it for 17 years.)
With Billy Peck again
as captain for the 1897-98 campaign, the Bruisers won 11 of 15 games, scoring
318 points to the opponents' 169. The team played its only college games against
Trinity; other opponents included the Knickerbocker and Dreadnaught athletic clubs
and the Washington Light Infantry. The following year, Naismith, who was then
basketball coach at the University of Kansas, rued the fact that his team didn't
have the opportunity to "play against the best," and in 1901 when Yale
won its first game with Harvard 41 to 16, the Elis were named intercollegiate
champions.
As the 2000-01 season -- Yale's 106th -- began, the Elis had played 2,404 official games, with a record
of 1,175 wins, 1,226 losses, and 3 ties. The school that helped define the term
"starting five" still had its collective eye on the peach basket.  |
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