You’re a Bucket
This line came out of my spirit this year as I looked at one of my top young scorers who was struggling a bit. Our team needed a basket and I needed to light his fuse. I looked him in the eye and said, “D. Your a bucket boy! Do what you do! Do what God made you to do!”
Since I am from Oklahoma, one of my favorite players is Chavano Rainer Hield, better known as Buddy Heild. Because of his gift of shooting the basketball, his nickname was expanded to “Buddy Buckets”. A strong believer in Jesus, I might add, Buddy is a walking bucket. Are you?
The inventor of the game of basketball is James Naismith. On Dec 21, 1891, he nailed a peach basket on the wall. From that day forth, people have been getting buckets, maybe it’s time you join the peach basket party.
Naismith lifted himself up from high school dropout to medical doctor, college faculty member and athletic director. He coached Phog Allen, called the Father of Basketball Coaching, who then coached Adolph Rupp, and Dean Smith. That family tree led all the way to Roy Williams — all of whom are Hall of Famers.
Born in Ontario, Canada, Naismith had it rough early. Typhoid fever killed both his parents, making him an orphan at age 9. He and two siblings moved in with their grandmother, who also died. A bachelor uncle ultimately raised the trio.
After two years of high school, Naismith considered himself a man “more in need of a man’s job than an education,” his grandson, Jim Naismith, told IBD. So he joined his Uncle Pete in the lumber industry, hauling logs over frozen ground, and became quite a fixture at a local bar. “The story in our family is he was at a bar on payday drinking too much,” Jim Naismith said. “A man asked, ‘Are you Margaret’s son?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ ‘She’d roll over in her grave if she saw you now,’ the man said.”
It was then, at age 20, Naismith rebounded. He went back to high school, where administrators accepted him on one condition: He would have to repeat his first two years and complete three years in all. He did that in two.
In 1891, with a life back on track, a love of sports and two degrees in hand, Naismith traveled to Springfield, Mass., to became a graduate student and instructor at the International YMCA Training School. Today it’s known as Springfield College, the birthplace of basketball.
The training school’s athletic director had an assignment for Naismith: Develop a winter game that would keep the young men, who were cooped up inside and bored, from tearing up the facilities and themselves.
What happened on Dec. 21, 1891, is best explained by Naismith himself. The quote comes from the only known recording of him, from an interview on a New York radio station in 1939. “It was in the winter of 1891, when I was physical instructor at Springfield College in Massachusetts. We had a real New England blizzard. For days the students couldn’t go outdoors, so they began roughhousing in the halls. We tried everything to keep them quiet. We tried playing a modified form of football in the gymnasium, but they got board with that.
“Something had to be done. One day I had an idea. I called the boys to the gym and divided them into two teams of nine and gave them an old soccer ball. I showed them two peach baskets I had nailed at each end of the gym, and I told them the idea was to throw the ball into the other team’s peach basket.”
The interviewer asked Naismith about the rules, and he replied, “Well, I didn’t have enough.” That first game devolved into a tackling, kicking, punching free-for-all, with one boy knocked out, others with black eyes and one with a dislocated shoulder. “So I made up some more rules,” Naismith said.
The spread of the sport — which Naismith called “basket ball” — is nothing short of amazing. Even more powerful is Naismith’s Faith. Many of his fellow students felt rough competition was incompatible with Christian faith. But the creator of basketball believed in a “muscular Christianity,” Jim Naismith said. “He came from a strong Scottish Presbyterian heritage. Strong mind. Strong body. Strong spirit. If you develop those, he believed, you were going to have a much better life than you would have otherwise.”
Jim Naismith has seen his grandfather’s paperwork to the YMCA Training School.
“It says on his application that he was applying to develop Christian principals in young people’s lives,” he said. “He had this strange idea that competitive sports would be more helpful to young people than talking or preaching to them.”
Basketball and competitive sports have always been about getting buckets for Jesus!
I heard an unforgettable stat the other day. 96% of self proclaimed Christians have never gotten a bucket for Jesus. What? You might ask. If you are a self proclaimed basketball player and you never get a bucket, then are you truly a basketball player?
Jesus called His followers to the great commission. Go into all the world and share the Gospel, the Good News, and His Love. Our Coach commanded us to take His Light into the darkness and get souls, His Buckets!
Jesus tells us we are more than conquerors through Him! He tells us over and over again His Word. Son, Daughter. You are a Bucket! You can and will do all things through me, through My strength in you. I came, I died, I Rose Again, and I sent My Spirit back to live in you, to empower you, and to guide you to buckets!
Look me in the eyes sons and daughters of the King! You are a bucket! Do what the King made and gifted you to do. Go get a bucket today and every day!