The 13 original rules of basketball, typewritten 119 years ago by Dr. James Naismith are headed for auction. Could get $2 million

Posted by Sabrina B. @gametimegirl

The first rules of basketball, as set down by Dr. James Naismith, don’t look bad for age 119. The two typewritten pages are yellowed, creased and a bit frayed. A tiny pinhole is visible on one page. Traces of tape that fixed a tear are visible across the top of the other.
But the pages are legible and intact.

Naismith enumerated 13 rules for a game that he hoped would appeal to students at the Y.M.C.A. Training School in Springfield, Mass., in the winter of 1891. 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.”

Dribbling had not occurred to Naismith. The students developed it on their own.

The pages have survived in Naismith’s desk drawers, safe-deposit boxes and a hidden drawer in a mahogany sideboard. They have traveled from Springfield to Denver to Lawrence, Kan., to Corpus Christi, Tex., and various homes in the Plains states.

The heirloom was handed by James Naismith to his son Jimmy and then to Jimmy’s son Ian and his siblings. Ian has displayed it at Final Fours and N.B.A. All-Star Games as a vehicle to promote a family foundation that preaches sportsmanship.

Now, it is safeguarded at Sotheby’s, which will auction it in Manhattan on Dec. 10. Sotheby’s expects it to sell for at least $2 million.

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. 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. A few years ago, Hellen Carpenter, a cousin he said he had never met, sold some of his grandfather’s effects at another auction.

Nearly every sport evolved from something else. Baseball has roots in cricket, rounders and early folk games. Football is derived from soccer and rugby. 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. to keep young men engaged in an indoor sport. It caught on quickly, and spread around the world by some of the young men taught by Naismith.

“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. “There’s nothing like this in the history of sport — and it’s in two humble typewritten pages.”

David N. Redden, the Sotheby’s vice chairman, added: “It came out of our culture, like the Bill of Rights. Its influence went far beyond the U.S., but it’s uniquely us.”

The rules memorialized by Naismith are both recognizable and a little bit alien.

The game was to be played with an “ordinary Association football.” Players were not permitted to run with the ball and disqualified for a second foul “until the next goal is made.” But he made a provision for a flagrant foul if “there was evident intent to injure the person.” The only handwritten words in the document read like the most significant ones in Rule 8’s definition of a field goal; in his hand, he inserted “into the basket.”

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. 1891.”

Nearly 40 years later, he added, “James Naismith 6-28-31.”

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.”

Sotheby’s and Naismith said that had have no doubt that it was authentic. 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.

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. 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. He called the restaurant where a waitress assured him he’d left with it.

Sure enough, he found it under a seat in the back of the van.

Now, the mundane-looking document will vie for a place among some of the most expensive auctioned sport items like Mark McGwire’s 70th home run ball ($3 million), a T206 Honus Wagner tobacco card ($2.35 million), the bat Babe Ruth used to hit the first home run at Yankee Stadium ($1.26 million) and the contract authorizing his sale in 1919 from the Red Sox to the Yankees ($996,000).

“When my grandfather was alive,” Ian Naismith said, “it wasn’t worth a dime.”
– NY TIMES