As a researcher, Dr. Michael Zogry has a theoretical interest in the cross between athletics and religion. In December 2015, while writing a book on the religious beliefs of James Naismith, Zogry made national headlines when he discovered the only known audio recording of Naismith, which features him sharing how he invented the game of basketball.
“In the interview, he suggests that something different happened” from what most people understood to be the sport’s creation, says Zogry, an associate professor of religious studies and director and undergraduate advisor of indigenous studies at the University of Kansas (KU).
As a physical education instructor in December 1891, Naismith devised the game to check roughhousing among students at Springfield, Massachusetts’ International YMCA Training School, now called Springfield College. Up until now, it was believed that he wrote the game’s rules completely and then the first game was played. But as a guest on the New York radio program “We the People,” on January 31, 1939, Naismith shared challenges of the very first basketball game.
“He realized that he needed more rules, including no running with the ball, which if you look at the order of the rules is rule No. 3, and that would suggest that he had at least one test game before he played a game with the full complement of the rules,” Zogry says, adding that the audio account doesn’t necessarily refute other stories, but sheds light on Naismith’s creative process.
The recording, which was obtained from the Library of Congress’ archives, will be included in KU’s library archives and is available now online.
Zogry gained an interest in research as an undergrad at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received a bachelor’s in religious studies in 1989.
“I was really interested in religious studies, broadly speaking, and then in my senior year, I took a class on Native American religions and it was at that point that I really decided it would be one of my areas of concentration,” he says.
