🏀0️⃣0️⃣1️⃣ Melvin Rideout

Meet Melvin Rideout, a basketball pioneer who introduced the game to France in 1893. 

Born in 1871, Rideout attended Springfield College (then known as the International YMCA Training School) where he learned the game of basketball from James Naismith, the sport’s inventor, in December 1891. After graduation in 1893, Rideout was dispatched to Paris to help set-up the YMCA’s brand new building at 14, rue de Trévise. There, the 22-year old Illinois native introduced the game to Parisian YMCA educators and on December 27, 1893, the first basketball game on European soil was played. 

The Context 

Basketball was invented with a specific goal in mind: to keep (male) students occupied and engaged in productive physical activity during the cold, snowy Massachusetts winter. At first Naismith tried to recreate football practice in the gymnasium. But after several players suffered broken bones from the rough play, it was clear that a new game was needed, one that was nonviolent and appropriate for indoors but still thrilled players. 

Naismith thus borrowed from different games already familiar on campus – football, rugby, soccer, lacrosse – and came up with a passing ball game whose objective was to toss a ball into a “goal” at the opponent’s end of the floor. The school’s gymnasium was encircled by a ten-foot-high balcony, and the school janitor affixed wooden peach buckets to serve as a “goal” at each end of the balcony, creating what became the raised baskets the game made famous.

The first basketball match, an innovative tool at its origin, was held on December 21 to the players’ great amusement, and rapidly spread in the United States.

But basketball is unique for also being the first sport born-global thanks to its rapid diffusion. The YMCA dispatched Rideout to France and from there the game spread across Western Europe to Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. Other YMCA educators carried the game to South America (Brazil, 1894), Chinese port cities Tianjin and Shanghai (1895), and Australia (1897) while during the early twentieth century U.S. colonial administrators and soldiers began to play basketball in the Philippines.

Basketball’s development and early diffusion occurred at a time when the United States played an increasingly larger role in international relations. Improvements in transportation made it easier and quicker to travel, while new inventions and technology facilitated fledgling global communications. The result was greater movement of people, goods, and ideas from one part of the world to another. Yet, the sport’s early popularity in France was hindered by its close association with the YMCA, a Protestant-affiliated organization, in an era of intense public discourse about the role of religion in the republic. In 1905, the French government officialized secularization of public life. Although basketball did not begin to gain greater traction in France (or some parts of the United States) until the First World War era, the important foundations were laid during this era. 

The Sports Diplomacy Connection

A video by the French Basketball Federation (FFBB) on Melvin Rideout for his 2019 induction into the Académie du Basket français.

Rideout’s work with his Parisian counterparts to introduce basketball is an example of what today is recognized as informal sports diplomacy. The 1880s and 1890s were a time of greater Franco-American interactions, perhaps best symbolized by the French gift of the Statue of Liberty to its sister republic. The YMCA’s construction of an outpost in Paris was yet another such gesture. Through the personal interactions Rideout had during his five years stationed there, he helped to impart U.S. cultural attitudes and organizational knowledge to say nothing of transmitting the game and technicalities of basketball.

Mapping the Connections

From Springfield, Massachusetts to 114, rue de Trévise in Paris, France

Further Reading

(F) Fabien Archambault, Loïc Artiaga and Gérard Bosc (eds.), Le Continent basket: L’Europe et le basket-ball au XXe siècle, Peter Lang, 2015.

(F) Fabien Archambault; Loïc Artiaga; Gérard Bosc (eds.), Double jeu. Histoire du basket-ball entre France et Amériques, Vuibert, 2007.

(E) Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff, “Joie des Hoops: The Hidden Story of Franco-American Diplomacy,” Washington Post, April 25, 2018.