New statue honours McGill grad James Naismith

By Randy Boswell

The Ottawa Citizen

Postmedia News

A larger-than-life statue of Canadian-born basketball inventor James Naismith will be unveiled later this year in the eastern Ontario town of Almonte, part of a unique, two-country tribute marking the three most important sites in the life of an Ottawa Valley boy who became a global sports icon. ... It was in Almonte, about 50 kilometres west of Ottawa, where Naismith grew up in the 1860s playing a schoolyard game called "Duck on a Rock," which involved high, arcing stone tosses to knock another rock off a large boulder. In December 1891, that memory led Naismith - then a young, McGill University-educated phys-ed teacher working at Springfield College - to invent an indoor sport for the winter months based on throwing a ball toward an elevated goal.