Luther Gulick was known for many things: heading the nation’s first Training School to groom professional public servants, directing the New York Bureau of Municipal Research in its pioneering struggle to reform government, advising FDR, beating plowshares into swords for WWII, negotiating reparations from the defeated Germans and Japanese, and much besides.

Now we see in the files that Luther Gulick  invented basketball.

Wait! Everyone knows that basketball was invented in 1891 by Dr. James A. Naismith, a member of the staff of the Y.M.C.A. Training School in Springfield, MA.

But who asked him to?

Luther Gulick.

Okay, not exactly our Luther Halsey Gulick (1892-1993), but close — his uncle of the same name. Uncle Luther was the brother of our Luther’s father, Sidney. [See earlier post, A Missionary Dynasty.]

Uncle Luther (1865-1918) was a physician who founded the phys ed department at the Y.M.C.A. school and was looking for a way to busy the young athletes between the baseball and football seasons. Indian clubs was deemed too tame and workouts with dumbbells — well, too dumb. He asked Naismith to come up with something.

Naismith, who had grown up in Ontario, Canada, remembered a childhood game called “duck on the rock” in which players threw stones at a standing target (the duck) and ran to retrieve their missiles before being tagged. He adapted it to a game of throwing a ball into peach baskets ten feet above the floor and made up 13 rules. That was the first basketball and it quickly caught on.

Naismith got the credit. But the IPA archives contain a letter from another physician, C. Ward Crampton, who played basketball at the Harlem Y.M.C.A. in 1892 and knew something of the game’s history. He remembered that an early  chronicler of the sport published a booklet with a photo of Gulick, crediting him as “the Father of Basketball.” The ever-modest Gulick demanded it be withdrawn, and so it was. Naismaith emerged with the glory.

In any case, Dr. Crampton concluded (misstating Gulick’s middle initial), Gulick was certainly “the grandfather of basketball.”

Not our Luther Gulick, but still…