The Birth Of Basketball
On a brilliant Indian summer day in 1995, a slim, nattily-dressed black man from the United States headed out into a stiff wind to make his way across a rolling field outside Almonte, Ont. John B. McLendon Jr., then 80 years of age, did not even notice the wind as it tried to push him back toward the vehicle that had carried him from the airport to this spot in the Ottawa Valley. He had, after all, just travelled 1,700 kilometres to keep a promise he had made to himself 56 years earlier and never expected to break.
McLendon’s own name, he liked to say, rhymed with "de-pend on," just as the name of the man he had come to Canada to honor, James Naismith, always went with "basketball." McLendon had come here to see the rock that had inspired the game that had...
