Basketball was in Boston long before the Celtics.

The roots of the sport (especially among black folks) trace back to the Hemenway Gymnasium on the campus of Harvard University, and a guy named Dudley Allen Sargent.

I’d known about it but never seen the Hemenway Gym until I stumbled upon it this week while driving by on the way to Boston Garden. I couldn’t resist going inside to look around.  It’s a modernized 4-story structure inside a vintage shell.

“Is this the old Hemenway Gymnasium?,” I asked.

“Yes, but they’ve renovated it and there’s nothing left,” said the staffer.

“But, isn’t there anything historical remaining?,” I asked.

“Well, the only thing left is the original basketball court,” she said, apologetically.

“Oh, really?,” I asked. “Can I see it?”

Isn’t persistence great?

Sargent was one of the earliest advocates of of the link between “bodily vigor” (that is, athletic competition) and Christian virtues. In the mid-1800s this was known as ‘Muscular Christianity.’ It was a forerunner of the physical fitness movement.

Sargent’s way of thinking:

Some of the specific mental and physical qualities which are developed by athletics are increased powers of attention, will, concentration, accuracy, alertness, quickness of perception, perseverance, reason, judgment, forbearance, patience, obedience, self-control, loyalty to leaders, self-denial, submergence of self, grace, poise, suppleness, courage, strength and endurance. These qualities are as valuable to women as to men.

Seems like he was right, wasn’t he?

Sargent went to medical school at Yale and in 1881 became Harvard’s first professor of physical training. By 1887, he was teaching a five-week course in Physical Education at Harvard University’s Summer School of Arts and Sciences.

Sargent had some famous students, including Teddy Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington. Washington’s own wife had sent him there to “man up.” Booker T. himself once admitted, “I think I would now be a more useful man if I had had time for sports.”

Another one of Sargent’s students was a guy named Luther Gulick. Gulick became convinced about Muscular Christianity and wrote, “bodily vigor is a moral agent, it enables us to live on higher levels, to keep up to the top of our achievement.”

That seems right too, doesn’t it?

Gulick got a job at the Young Men’s Christian Association, was promoted, and was then assigned to the School for Christian Workers in Springfield, Massachusetts (later renamed the International YMCA Training School, then Springfield College) as head of the physical education department.

Soon, this new guy named Naismith shows up to join the faculty. Gulick, to show who’s the boss, orders this rookie teacher to invent a new athletic game to keep men busy for the winter season.

(Tomorrow, Part II … covers how the Hemenway Gymnasium links to the history of African Americans in basketball.)

(Photos courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.)