Tension, excitement, glamour and big bucks: basketball’s popularity is soaring around the world, with 3.3 billion people thought to be interested in the game according to one study. Strongly associated with North America, where players like LeBron James, Steph Curry and Caitlin Clark dominate the ratings, basketball is widely regarded as the creation of a Canadian, James Naismith.
But as my new research establishes, there is more to the origins of the game than most fans realise, and the story is underpinned by the influence of a very small Celtic country 3,000 miles away from Basketball’s North American home: Scotland.
Basketball was introduced by Naismith on December 21, 1891, in a game that took place at the International YMCA training school at Springfield College, Massachusetts, in the US.
