I saw an amusing article in the NYT which presents a "revisionist" account of the origin of basketball. The claim is that basketball was not really invented by James Naismith in 1891 but a year earlier in Herkimer, New York. There are many of these controversies over "firsts" and over inventions. You will hear similar alternative histories about the Wright brothers and the invention of the airplane. Typically the story will be that someone else supposedly did something slightly earlier. In some cases, crediting a single person as the inventor of something is an oversimplification of what is often a more drawn out evolution.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/nyre ... er-ny.html
Given the thin documentation, barring some evidence that Naismith was influenced by this Herkimer game, I am inclined to dismiss this as merely a somewhat similar game that doesn't seem to be a direct progenitor of the modern game.
While I do not find this claim convincing, I do find it useful to think about "revisionism" in "low-stakes" contexts. This is a good check to see how one's approach applies out-of-sample. Hint: if you eagerly latch on to every alternative history or reject all of them out of hand, then you probably have a bad approach. Considering such examples is also a good way to calibrate your baseline expectations. By this I mean that often the disagreements over history are over what level of evidence is to expected in a given situation. We can get a better sense of this is we have considered more examples across a wide range.
I will mention another amusing basketball-related conspiracy theory/revisionist historical claim. This is the suggestion that Wilt Chamberlain's famous 100 point game was a hoax. I am also not persuaded by this one, although I was surprised by how little documentation there is.
Basketball Revisionism
Re: Basketball Revisionism
I agree that it's not convincing, but it also doesn't sound implausible.
Since Naismith was in Springfield while Will was in the tiny town of Herkimer, it's likely that the bigger town would have made a bigger splash in the newspapers and in networking with the rest of the country. Plus it is only natural that the residents of these towns and states would feel loyalty to and pride in their own people, so both have had incentive to push their own version.
Will's claim is also fairly small, as he didn't take credit for Naismith's work codifying some of the defining rules of basketball. What Will took credit for was pioneering the concept and influencing Naismith, which is also made more plausible by Herkimer's proximity to Springfield (165 miles away) and temporal proximity (just 1 year earlier).
Neither claim is strongly evidenced, relying mostly on memory and memorabilia. Naismith's original rules list survived, but evidently the original date of 1892 was erased and rewritten as 1891. Will has an old photograph of his basketball team, but a WaPo article says the years 91-92 were added to the photo after the fact.
However, consider this passage from a 1898 newspaper article:
Since Naismith was in Springfield while Will was in the tiny town of Herkimer, it's likely that the bigger town would have made a bigger splash in the newspapers and in networking with the rest of the country. Plus it is only natural that the residents of these towns and states would feel loyalty to and pride in their own people, so both have had incentive to push their own version.
Will's claim is also fairly small, as he didn't take credit for Naismith's work codifying some of the defining rules of basketball. What Will took credit for was pioneering the concept and influencing Naismith, which is also made more plausible by Herkimer's proximity to Springfield (165 miles away) and temporal proximity (just 1 year earlier).
Neither claim is strongly evidenced, relying mostly on memory and memorabilia. Naismith's original rules list survived, but evidently the original date of 1892 was erased and rewritten as 1891. Will has an old photograph of his basketball team, but a WaPo article says the years 91-92 were added to the photo after the fact.
- Lambert Will photograph.jpg (97.5 KiB) Viewed 26 times
However, consider this passage from a 1898 newspaper article:
Darril Fosty shared this in an X post, here. This is a fairly early article that corroborates Will's claim. Exactly the kind of thing that I would look for as proof positive.In the fall of 1891 the Herkimer Y. M. C. A. organized a basket ball team, which was believed would do credit to the association, and it was not long before they were undisputed champions of Central New York. The players in 1891 were Will, captain; [...]
Right. The only explanation I can find for how the game made it from Herkimer to Springfield is something Scott Flansburg said on a podcast:
Is it possible that one YMCA asked a YMCA in a neighboring state for a game to play? I guess so. Naismith's own story of the invention has him being asked by his boss to invent the game, so it's not at all difficult to believe that he or his boss asked the same of local YMCAs. There's just no surviving documents showing this happened, from what I can see.[...] they eventually sent those rules into Springfield. They never heard back from Springfield, not just Naismith but anybody.
Rowe: Why did they send them to Springfield?
Well, at the end of 1891 Springfield solicited all the Northeast region YMCAs for a winter game. Something to be played indoors because it's too cold outside for cardio. And so that's when Lambert Will said, hey we got a game we've been playing, you know, all this year trying to figure it out. I'm going to send it in and he sent it into Springfield. Never heard back from them.
Re: Basketball Revisionism
Agree on this. Another low stakes revisionist topic is Shakespeare. I recall having a teacher who was quite enthralled by the question of Shakespeare's authorship, as he returned to the topic several times during lectures. More recently, someone by the name of Dennis McCarthy has demonstrated quite convincingly that Shakespeare's work was written by Thomas North. This despite his being (or claiming to be) very anti-conspiracy theory. He prepared a short video here:
https://dennismccarthy.substack.com/p/t ... akespeares
In short, he used plagiarism software to make the discovery. We should probably use plagiarism software too.