Basketball’s Hall: A Lively Place to Celebrate the Game

When former Green Bay halfback Paul Hornung visits the Pro Football Hall of Fame at Canton, Ohio, he blends in as a spectator with the other fans who are there to see the venerable exhibits.

By contrast, when former forward Elgin Baylor comes here to visit the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, he becomes a participant again. He has his choice of several basketball-related games.

The most popular are Pop-a-Shot and Shootout--in which Baylor, if he wishes, can play one-on-one against any fan brave enough to take on a Hall of Famer, for money, marbles or pride.

The differences between basketball and the other sports largely account for the differences that exist today in their halls of fame.

Any two people can play basketball. It takes a team to play football or baseball.

Those who have been at all three halls make these distinctions:

--At Cooperstown, N.Y., baseball’s Hall of Fame is probably the most celebrated.

--At Canton, pro football’s hall of fame, as financed by the National Football League, is possibly the most imposing.

--At Springfield, basketball’s is the most fun. It is a participatory experience, unlike the others, which are walk-through museums.

The Naismith Hall of Fame is like the game, alive and full of excitement. You enter the front door and are greeted by a fountain of basketballs tumbling from a 40-foot high ceiling.

It also, unlike the others, represents both college and pro teams, and is financed by both. Youngest of the major halls of fame, it has been at its present headquarters only since 1985.

It thrives by encouraging visitors to be basketball players for a day.

In Shootout, they get on a moving sidewalk and throw basketballs at baskets of varying heights from various distances.

In Pop-a-Shot, an electronic scoreboard keeps track of participants’ field goals scored.

In How-High-Is-Up?, vertical jumps are measured.

And in Play 52, the visitor stands in the middle of a mini-basketball floor in the midst of a filmed, life-size game that is going on all around him on separate screens on all four walls. The sounds of the game come realistically from each of the four sides on a quadraphonic sound track.

“We like to think that our visitors get a true basketball experience,” Executive Director Joe O’Brien said the other day.

This is the 20th anniversary year for the Naismith hall, which in its first 17 years was on the Springfield College campus, several miles east of the central business district. The new $11.5-million, 3-level building stands impressively in a landscaped downtown park between the Connecticut River and a freeway.

The hall is visible from the freeway, which is Interstate 91, New England’s major north-south artery. With a population of 170,000, Springfield is known as the crossroads of the state. Founded in 1636 by immigrants from Springfield, England, it was the first of 28 U.S. cities to be so named.

James Naismith, who lived here four years and invented basketball in 1891, was the first individual enshrined. There’s a statue of him in the Hall of Fame.

There are also a bust of Bill Walton and Bob Lanier’s size 22 bronzed basketball shoes. “Hoopla” a 22-minute film produced especially for the Hall of Fame, is a mosaic of what basketball is all about--Kareem and Magic, kids playing on the streets of New York, players piling into buses for the big game, referees blowing whistles, pompon girls jumping up and down, coaches exhorting players at halftime, high school games, college games, pro games.

Each year as few as 2 and as many as 11 players, coaches, contributors or officials are elected to the hall of Fame. There are 161 members to date, 38 coaches, 71 players, 42 contributors, 11 game officials and 4 teams. John Wooden is the only person enshrined twice, first as a college player at Purdue, later as coach at UCLA.

Five players were selected last May as inductees--Rick Barry, Walt Frazier, Bob Houbregs, Bob Wanzer and Pete Maravich.

In the honors court, under banners for each year listing the inductees, are long panels for each Hall of Fame member with a bronze portrait and a brief biography. A black bouquet of ribbons was placed on Maravich’s panel when he died Jan. 5.

Bob Cousy, former star and coach, heads a screening committee of seven that selects candidates. The others are Tom Gola, Oscar Robertson and Bob Kurland, all enshrined in the hall, Coach Bill Foster of Northwestern, and two writers, Larry Donald and Malcolm Moran, the president and vice president, respectively, of the Basketball Writers Assn. Committee membership changes from time to time.

The final judging is done by a committee of 24, representing every basketball constituency. The names of the voters are not disclosed. They aren’t known even to each other. Their ballots are submitted to still another committee, a Springfield banker and accountant, and 18 votes are required for election. Of last year’s 28 nominees, 5 were elected.

This is the only major sports hall of fame admitting women and there are three enshrined so far.

Senda Berenson Abbott, known as the mother of women’s basketball, is a member. She introduced basketball at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., in 1892. She wrote the rules for women’s play. No male spectators were permitted at women’s games in the early years because the players wore bloomers.

Margaret Wade is here for her outstanding career as a college coach. Her Delta State (Miss.) University team won an unprecedented three consecutive national championships in the Assn. for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women.

Bertha F. Teague is here as the winningest high school girls’ basketball coach in history. She coached Byng High School in Oklahoma for 42 years. Her teams won 1,152 and lost 115, won 98 straight games one time, won 38 conference titles.

The four teams in the Hall of Fame are Dr. Naismith’s team, the first team; the original Celtics of the 1920s; the Buffalo Germans, a barnstorming team that won 792 and lost 86, and the New York Rens, an all-black team that between 1932 and 1936 won 473 and lost 49. That team prided itself on its stamina, never calling a timeout.

Red Auerbach, Bill Russell, Abe Saperstein, John Havlicek, Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, George Mikam, Bob Kurland, Henry Iba, Wilt Chamberlain and many, many more are here. Chamberlain’s 100 point game, March 2, 1962, is duly noted.

In the years when the hall was in its beautiful lakeside setting on Alden Street at Springfield College, Naismith and the other hall of famers were honored in narrow, unique stained glass windows, each 10 feet high, which artistically accented the point that basketball is a tall man’s sport.

The new honors court is more pedestrian, although it may not matter much. Basketball fans don’t just come to look, they’re here to play, too.

O’Brien and his staff are planning a world-wide, year-long celebration of basketball’s 100th birthday to be launched in January, 1991.

“We are hoping to have representatives from the 160 nations presently playing the game come to Springfield in December, 1991, for a spectacular basketball festival culminating the year-long series of events across the nation and around the world, marking basketball’s first century,” O’Brien said.

“The final and biggest tribute to the game will be held in this city, lasting a week or more. There will be an NBA game at Springfield College where the very first basketball game was played.

“NCAA teams will play. So will foreign teams, women’s teams, championship high school teams. There will be a big parade, a black-tie dinner and a major salute to Dr. Naismith.”